25 June 2019

Research pick: How does science feed patents? - "How patent experts create patent breadth"

Science feeds into patents and thence to economic growth. However, our understanding of the details of this transformation is limited. An analysis of twelve scientific discoveries carried out using an inductive grounded theory approach aims to fill the gaps. Karin Beukel of the Unit for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Management, in the Department for Food and Resource Economics, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, explains all in the International Journal of Intellectual Property Management.

Beukel recasts the relationship between scientific discovery and patent showing that there are particular processes that affect “patent breadth”. Patenting experts can exploit the surplus patent breadth depending on the abstraction and cognitive variety within the patent. Her findings confirm that science acts as an input for technological advances, as one might expect. However, it has to be underpinned by foundations that allow the discovery to be explored and exploited.

Fundamentally, says Beukel, “the direction of how to exploit a scientific invention must be determined early in the process, immediately after scientific discovery, in order to guide the inventor and IP owner through the patent examination process.” Many years of anecdote suggests that this is indeed the case.

The research also shows that academia is not always best suited to the processing of scientific discovery to patent and that academic scientists, often through lack of awareness and knowledge of the patent process, will take a fragmented approach to sealing their intellectual property in a patent. This can mean less than great success for the invention or even failure, but also in a more esoteric sense a simple lack of patent breadth that means the potential of the discovery is not exploited to the full.

Beukel, K. (2019) ‘How patent experts create patent breadth‘, Int. J. Intellectual Property Management, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp.91-119.

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