Hype Innovation Alternatives You Must Try in 2023 (+ Reviews)

According to McKinsey 84% of CEOs believe innovation is essential for businesses to thrive in today’s fast-paced market. But managing innovation can be complex and challenging, especially without the right tools and resources. 

Many companies have turned to HYPE Innovation, a popular software tool for idea and innovation management, to help them navigate these challenges.

However HYPE Innovation may not be the best fit for every business due to its pricing, lack of customization, and ease of use or other factors.

Fortunately, plenty of HYPE Innovation alternatives & competitors are available that businesses can use to manage innovation more effectively. We evaluated and compiled a list of the top 5 HYPE Innovation alternatives to pick the best option to assist you in the patent mining process.

But first, we’ll start with a brief introduction of HYPE Innovation, followed by essential features to look for in an alternative and a comprehensive review of alternatives.

Overview of HYPE Innovation

Hype Innovation Homepage

HYPE Innovation is a cloud-based solution for managing the entire innovation life cycle, from trend identification to implementation. The platform provides various tools for facilitating ideation, collaboration, project tracking, front-end portfolio administration, evaluation, and implementation.

Downside of Using HYPE Innovation:

  • HYPE Innovation might be expensive if you are a small business or startup with limited budgets.
  • Some users find HYPE Innovation too complex to use and understand, leading to a steep learning curve and inefficiencies in their innovation process.
  • Certain users were dissatisfied with HYPE Innovation due to its limited internal reporting options for the metrics customers desired to monitor.
  • According to some users, HYPE Innovation may not provide sufficient customization options to meet specific customers’ requirements.

Pricing: 

Pricing is currently not provided – please inquire with HYPE.

Who Is It For:

Mid-size businesses and large enterprises

What to Look For in a HYPE Innovation Alternative?

There are several reliable HYPE Innovation alternatives worth exploring, but the initial step is determining the criteria for evaluating a replacement for HYPE Innovation.

Outlined below are five points to consider when replacing HYPE Innovation:

Hype Innovation: Alternatives to Checkout in 2023

We’re here to assist you in exploring and choosing the best innovative solution that not only enables efficient employee ideation through crowdsourcing but also reduces your dependence on external intellectual property advisors for patent-related issues, resulting in decreased expenditures on legal services from outside sources. 

Hype Innovation Alternatives #1: The TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP

Hype Innovation Alternatives - Triangle IP

The TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP is a drag-and-drop tool that simplifies complex IP management and patenting processes by providing smart data and analytics. The tool makes patent mining open and accessible to all stakeholders.

Key Benefits Offered by the TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP

#1 – Elevate the Quantity and Quality of Invention Disclosures

The TIP ToolTM provides an easy-to-use invention disclosure form that appeals to innovators across your company. The idea submission portal is accessible to all, making it more straightforward to collect various creative ideas.

Organizations can customize the invention disclosure form to meet their unique requirements by adding, editing, deleting, or hiding fields. The TIP ToolTM allows users to display only relevant fields for a specific stage, such as removing prosecutor information during the innovation capture stage.

The TIP ToolTM allows for enterprise-wide participation in innovation management while safeguarding the confidentiality of IP-related data.

Users can tag patentable ideas with specific technology-related keywords, product categories, or business functions, facilitating easy idea filtering. Furthermore, innovators can attach supplementary materials, such as documents or slide decks, to better illustrate their innovations.

#2 – Visualize Various Stages of Your Patent Pipeline  

The TIP ToolTM lets users keep track of the progress of their ideas as they move through the different stages of the IP lifecycle: idea capture, internal vetting, patent drafting, and filing. 

The tool makes sure that users always know what is going on with their ideas, whether they are being reviewed or are on their way to a patent attorney for drafting or filing.

The drag-and-drop feature of the TIP ToolTM also makes it easy for users to move their ideas through the different stages of development.

#3 – Collaborate With Stakeholders in Real-Time to Brainstorm Ideas

The TIP ToolTM enables real-time collaboration and brainstorming among inventors, prosecutors, and managers in remote locations. The tool facilitates a comprehensive vetting process that guarantees the selection of the most innovative concepts for patenting.

To capture the finest ideas within the company, collaborators can utilize the TIP ToolTM during online meetings to brainstorm patentable ideas, revise idea summaries, add tags, and examine comments. Using the tool is as simple as working with Google Docs.

Furthermore, the TIP ToolTM tracks all changes made to the idea summary, including who made them.

#4 – Optimize Your IP Budget Allocation

The TIP ToolTM offers patent analytics to help users with budget allocation for patenting. With the tool, you can calculate the likelihood that a patent will be approved and the related expenses, such as filing, legal, and maintenance fees. 

Such insights help you to allocate your IP budget based on anticipated patent expenses and only use patents to protect your most important inventions.

Moreover, the TIP ToolTM analyzes millions of applications. It uses actionable intelligence to ascertain the possibilities of success at the patent office, allowing you to concentrate on concepts more likely to be accepted.

#5 – Receive Automatic USPTO Status Updates

The TIP ToolTM automatically lets users track published and unpublished patent application status at the USPTO. So you are no longer required to consult outside legal counsel to stay current with the USPTO.

The TIP ToolTM instantly notifies users of any required action from the USPTO. Additionally, the Private PAIR scraping feature allows you to obtain patent applications submitted to the USPTO that still need to be made public. But don’t worry – all your data and Private keys are secure and confidential and no one at Triangle IP has access to it.

#6 – Accelerate Your Patent Prosecution

The TIP ToolTM offers statistics on the patent attorney and examiner working on your case. The USPTO assigns an examiner when you file a patent application to determine if your claimed invention satisfies legal requirements. 

With the help of the TIP ToolTM, you may follow and keep an eye on your patent counsel’s progress through this process.

You can use the tool to estimate the expense and complexity of the prosecution procedure by using statistics like allowance rates and the typical number of argument rounds. 

The TIP ToolTM also offers patent analytics that compare your case to others in the same art unit, under the same examiner, or represented by the same law firm. Such insights from the tip tool help you to have a more productive conversation with your patent attorney.

#7 – Visualize Your Idea and Patent Pipeline with a Holistic View

The TIP ToolTM‘s user-friendly dashboard enables you to monitor the development of your team and keep up with all submitted ideas and patent applications. 

The dashboard offers a summary of your innovation pipeline, emphasizing manager and inventor participation and any potential bottlenecks.

This summary makes it simple to see where your team can benefit from additional assistance. 

For instance, you can instantly identify the bottleneck and take appropriate action if an idea spends too much time in the brainstorming and vetting stages.

Inventors and managers can also benefit from role-specific access, which enables them to properly monitor their IP activities and keep them in line with their key performance indicators. 

Who Is This For?

The TIP ToolTM is helpful for startups, individual creators, small to medium-sized businesses, and patent attorneys.

Pricing

The TIP ToolTM provides a free tier (forever, up to 10 users). Its premium tier costs $50 per month and $495 per year. The TIP ToolTM has a custom tier as well. To learn more, visit its 

pricing page.

Customer Review

According to a review, the TIP ToolTM is a wonderful innovation capture tool.

Website: 

To explore further, check the TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP

Demo

Sign up for an interactive product demo to experience the TIP ToolTM‘s features.

Hype Innovation Alternatives #2: IdeaBridge

Hype Innovation Alternatives - IdeaBridge

Plus Innovations’ IdeaBridge is a leading software that enables businesses to effectively manage costs, innovate new products or services, and enhance employee engagement levels throughout the organization. 

Additionally, IdeaBridge assists users in utilizing Hackathons to promote collaboration among employees and diverse teams.

Key Benefits Offered by IdeaBridge 

#1 – Enhance Savings

Ideabridge predicts ROI for their customers by assessing the revenue, cost, and timeline of ideas.

#2 – Adapt with Ideabridge

Ideabridge enables users to adapt more easily to changing markets and consumer behavior.

Who Is This For?

Large businesses, MSMEs, the government, the pharmaceutical and medical industries, education, finance, creative design and digital agencies, etc.

Pricing

Pricing is unavailable-contact Ideabridge for more details.

Customer Review

Here’s a screenshot of a Capterra review, and to explore more reviews, click here.

Website

To learn more about Ideabridge, click here 

Demo

Click here to book your demo

Hype Innovation Alternatives #3: ITONICS Innovation OS

Hype Innovation Alternatives - ITONICS

ITONICS is a comprehensive innovation management SaaS platform that operates on a distinctive AI-based infrastructure, which promotes teamwork and delivers a single source of reliable information to establish and execute successful strategies. 

Key Benefits Offered by ITONICS Innovation OS

#1 – Customize Software Modules Easily

The software modules are adaptable and help users to customize it to suit their organization’s requirements and established best practices.

#2 – Connect Strategy and Innovation

The ITONICS methodology and tools, which can also be managed by a small team, connect strategy, innovation, and execution.

Who Is This For?

Automotive, Chemicals, Consumer Goods, Defense, Energy, Engineering & Manufacturing, Finance & Insurance, High-tech & Electronics, IT & Telecommunication, Life Science & Healthcare, Oil & Gas, Pharma

Pricing

Pricing is currently not provided -please inquire with ITONICS.

Customer Review

Here’s a screenshot of a Capterra review, and to explore more reviews, click here.

Website

To explore further click here

Demo

Click here to get started with a free demo

Hype Innovation Alternatives #4: Planview IdeaPlace

Hype Innovation Alternatives - Planview

Planview IdeaPlace lets users crowdsource ideas for new markets or products, streamline operations, increase employee engagement, and improve consumer experiences. 

Key Benefits Offered by Planview IdeaPlace

#1 – Planview IdeaPlace Dashboard: Forecast Outcomes and Gauge Success

Forecast potential outcomes, costs, and the worth of crowdsourced ideas with Planview’s dashboards, which also enable enterprises to gauge the success of their challenges by comparing performance to industry benchmarks.

#2 – Eliminate Bias in Concept Selection with Planview’s Algorithms

Planview offers unique algorithms that remove bias and subjectivity from selecting concepts. This is achieved by leveraging user estimations related to idea implementation costs, time, and potential revenue.

Who Is This For?

Built to scale for every enterprise. (Large Enterprises, Mid Size Businesses, and Small Businesses)

Pricing

Price is unavailable-contact Planview IdeaPlace for more details.

Customer Review: Customer Review: You can find a G2 review screenshot below, and to access additional reviews, please click here.

Website

To explore further about Planview IdeaPlace, click here.

Demo

Request a demo through this form

Hype Innovation Alternatives #5: InnovationCast

Hype Innovation Alternatives - Innovationcast

InnovationCast is a platform for collaborative innovation management that assists users in creating and implementing ideas. The platform’s cloud-based capabilities include an innovation radar, engagement and recognition, analytics, opportunities, and projects.

Key Benefits Offered by InnovationCast

#1 – Monitor Metrics in Real-Time

Innovation Cast offers an analytics module that provides real-time insights on various metrics, including adoption, engagement, collaboration, reactions to content, active demographics, projected vs actual performance, and more

#2 – Analyze Competitive Environment

InnovationCast makes it possible to monitor and analyze the environment – this provides valuable insights on various topics, including competitor behavior, industry trends, and other relevant factors. 

Who Is This For?

Large Enterprises, Mid Size Businesses, Non-Profit, Public Administrations, Small Businesses

Pricing

Price starts at $2499.00/ per month and goes up to $5999/per month

Customer Review

A screenshot of a Capterra review is shown below; if you want to read additional reviews, follow this link and scroll down.

Website

Click here to learn more about InnovationCast. 

Demo

To schedule a demo, fill up this form.

Quick Wrap Up

A patent mining process is broken without software that streamlines the journey of ideas to patents. Selecting the best patent management software isn’t simple. However, a suitable software solution must:

  • Provides an invention disclosure form that offers a streamlined process for innovators to submit their ideas, minimizing potential friction.
  • Enables seamless collaboration among subject matter experts to improve an idea by facilitating simultaneous editing of the idea summary, adding comments to the summary, and tracking modifications made to ideas.
  • Provides dashboards tailored to the needs of your inventors, managers, and patent practitioners – giving them a comprehensive view of ideas, inventor activity, management activity, filed applications, and patents. 
  • Offers patent analytics to make informed IP decisions.
  • Encourage innovation by rewarding staff for coming up with new ideas.

About Us

The TIP ToolTM from Triangle IP is an easy-to-use drag-and-drop tool that helps you manage the whole IP process, from ideas to patents. The tool uses algorithms for deep learning to assist you in fine-tuning your patent prosecution strategy for the best results – taking patent mining in your business to the next level. 

There are several dummy sets of pre-existing patents and ideas that come with the tool. These patents and ideas are made up to show how the tool works and give people a chance to see what the tool has to offer.

Additionally, with the TIP ToolTM, you can quickly and effectively check the statuses of your published and unpublished patent applications thanks to its automatic syncs with the USPTO.

The tool puts you in charge of your IP cycle by giving you a kanban view of the whole process.

Register for TIP ToolTM today to make patent handling easier, more transparent, and more efficient.

Top 3 Brightidea Alternatives You Must Know in 2023

Brightidea Alternatives Triangle IP

Brightidea is a top idea management platform with 2.5 million users that connects and manages innovation initiatives, facilitates collaboration over ideas, and allows tracking progress. 

Despite its popularity, Brightidea reviews show many customers have complained about its reporting capabilities, outdated interface, and slow performance.

Looking for Brightidea alternatives to crowdsource ideas from your entire workforce to fuel your innovation and patent pipelines? This post introduces three options with similar features and insightful reviews.

What to Look For in Brightidea Alternatives

When considering alternatives to Brightidea, it is important to make sure you know the key features of an idea management tool that’s valuable to you. 

  • Offers a holistic view of the idea and patent pipelines to identify bottlenecks
  • Provides role-specific dashboards enabling inventors and managers to stay aligned with their KPIs. 

Your reasons for considering a Brightidea alternative will vary based on your required level of sophistication. 

However, the need to protect your ideas by obtaining a patent, preventing others from stealing your concept, and bringing your product to the market will likely remain constant.

Check out what Thomas Franklin, founder of Triangle IP, has to say about the right time to patent an idea.

Source: LinkedIn

Top 3 Brightidea Alternatives to Try in 2023

We’re here to assist you in exploring and selecting the most appropriate idea management software to help you crowdsource ideas from employees more effectively, starting with the TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP.

The TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP

Triangle IP - Brightidea Alternatives

The TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP makes managing the entire intellectual property lifecycle from ideation to patenting hassle-free. This tool provides a user-friendly solution that enables anyone in the organization to submit and track innovative ideas effortlessly.

Key Benefits Offered by the TIP ToolTM 

#1 – Capture Ideas Enterprise-Wide

The root cause of empty innovation funnels is typically not a lack of ideas. Instead, organizations often need help to ensure that good ideas are acknowledged and acted upon. 

Since valuable ideas can emerge from anyone in the organization, be it front-line employees or the R&D department, the idea submission platform by the TIP ToolTM can be made available to all employees across the enterprise.

The TIP Tool™ enables the entire organization to participate in patent mining while keeping IP-related data confidential. This safeguarding feature ensures that patentable ideas can be shared without the risk of unintentional public disclosure.

#2 – Optimize Employee Engagement in the Patent Process 

The TIP ToolTM facilitates active engagement with innovators by providing a user-friendly idea capture form

The TIP ToolTM‘s versatility is apparent in its ability to download idea capture forms in both Word and Excel formats, which can be imported back into the tool after filling it. The tool also allows users to customize the forms to meet their enterprise-specific requirements.

The tool allows users to track their ideas’ progress, whether they are undergoing evaluation or awaiting drafting or filing by a patent attorney.

Idea Submission From TIP Tool - Triangle IP - Brightidea Alternatives
#3 – Categorize Ideas Related to a Product, Technology, or Campaign Using Tags

The TIP ToolTM provides a seamless way to engage with innovators through tags and comments. With tags, users can organize and filter ideas by criteria like technology, product, or function.

The TIP ToolTM also allows users to filter ideas based on information such as inventor, manager, serial number, examiner, prosecutor, firm, and others. 

The TIP ToolTM‘s tagging system is a game changer when searching for ideas belonging to a particular group. 

#4 – Drag-And-Drop Ideas with Ease Across Different Stages

The TIP ToolTM simplifies idea management throughout the IP lifecycle, from idea capture to patent filing. The tool’s drag-and-drop feature enables users to seamlessly move ideas from one stage to the next, instantly informing all stakeholders of any updates or changes.

The TIP ToolTM gives users full control of their innovation management process, promoting employee participation in the patent process and encouraging inventors to keep their innovation funnel full.

#5 – Collaborate in Real-Time for Thorough Vetting of Ideas

The TIP ToolTM lets subject matter experts collaborate and communicate in real-time, just like they would do in person. 

During online brainstorming meetings, collaborators can use the tool to update idea summaries, add tags, and read comments to capture the best ideas from your company. It’s a lot like working with Google Docs.

The TIP ToolTM also tracks who made changes to the idea summary and when they were made. By giving your team the right tools for working together, you can encourage a thorough review of ideas and select the most promising ones to patent.

Realtime Collaboration TIP Tool - Triangle IP - Brightidea Alternatives
#6 – Keep a Tab on Idea and Patent Pipelines

The TIP ToolTM provides you with a holistic view of ideas, inventor activity, manager activity, filed patent applications, and patents through informative and customized dashboards.

Stay on top of the innovations at your enterprise – Access a comprehensive list of ideas and patents submitted by your team in one central platform. Easily track which innovators are working on which projects with just a few clicks. 

Identify Promising Inventors & Managers – With the TIP ToolTM, you can monitor the IP-related activity of your inventors and managers. This includes identifying which innovator has submitted the highest number of ideas or filed the most patents. 

Give Role-Specific Access – To ensure that inventors and managers stay aligned with their KPIs, and the TIP ToolTM offers role-specific dashboards that enable them to track their IP-related activity.

Identify Bottlenecks – If an idea remains in the ideation and vetting stages for an extended period beyond expectation, it signals that it requires your attention.

Key Differentiators

The TIP ToolTM adopts a comprehensive strategy beyond merely gathering and analyzing ideas. The tool covers every step, from managing ideas to patent portfolios. It also strengthens your IP decision-making by providing patent analytics. 

The TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP was started to address the basic problems with managing a patent portfolio.  

With the help of the TIP ToolTM, innovation managers with non-IP backgrounds can also easily manage the enterprise’s innovation funnel and patent pipeline.

User’s Perspective

According to a review, the TIP ToolTM is very user-friendly and has a useful drag-and-drop capability that makes it simple to move ideas between stages. The idea form is simple and intuitive, making it easy for innovators to complete.

Who Is This For?

Startups, individual inventors, small-to-medium-sized enterprises, and patent practitioners greatly benefit from using the TIP ToolTM.

Pricing

The TIP ToolTM provides a free tier (forever, up to 10 users). Its premium tier costs $50 per month and $495 per year. The TIP ToolTM has a custom tier as well. To learn more, visit its pricing page.

Website: To explore further, check Triangle IP

Demo: Sign up for an interactive product demo to experience the TIP ToolTM‘s features.

Wazoku

Wazoku is collaborative idea management software that allows organizations to collect, evaluate, rank, and choose the best ideas from users in a structured way.

Key Differentiators & Benefits

#1 – Collaborate and Innovate

Wazoku helps you create private groups and forums within Wazoku’s platform to collect ideas from internal contributors and external audiences. The platform also allows commenting, voting, and adding suggestions to collected ideas.

#2 – Review Ideas and Execute

Wazoku’s review boards enable stakeholders to evaluate and discuss the shortlisted ideas, then decide which ones to pursue and execute.

#3 – Track and Analyze Performance

Users can visualize and assess innovators’ activities using dashboard and reports. Moreover, they can export this data for further analysis.

User’s Perspective

The latest G2 review reports that Wazoku streamlines the process of gathering ideas, making it simple and structured for anyone with a company email to participate flexibly and intuitively.

Who is this For?

Mostly large enterprises

Pricing: Users need to submit this form to know the pricing details.

Website: You can explore further by visiting Wazoku

Demo: Click here to book a demo with them

Miro

Miro enables teams of all kinds to accelerate innovation and unlock creativity by providing an online visual collaborative whiteboard platform.

Key Differentiators & Benefits

#1 – Real-Time Collaboration with Miro

Miro helps users to collaborate in real-time with its powerful visual tools. Users can communicate and discuss projects and ideas using board chats, tagged comments, and voice and video calls, perfect for remote teams.

#2 – Gain a better understanding

Gain a better understanding of the big picture with Miro. Instead of emails and text chats, users can see projects as a whole and quickly zoom in for more details, saving time on unnecessary communication.

#3 – Streamline Creative Workflows

Miro enables users to organize creative workflows with ease. The tool is perfect for design thinking and creative concepts, allowing individuals and teams to collect ideas, use post-it notes and wireframes, and share them with team members and clients.

User’s Perspective

As per the recent review on G2, Miro provides a user-friendly set of wireframing tools suitable for individuals who wish to quickly sketch their ideas without using complex design tools such as Figma or InVision.

Who is this For?

Large Enterprises, Mid Size Businesses, and Small Businesses

Pricing: Free to use. Premium price starts at $8 per user/month.

Website: You can explore further by visiting Miro

Demo: Users need to contact the sales team at Miro to book a demo.

A Quick Wrap Up

In this article, we have provided thorough information to help you choose an alternative to Brightidea tailored to your business needs. Whether you’re a startup, a Fortune 500 company, a corporate IP team, or an individual inventor without an IP background or patent expertise, there is a suitable tool available for you.

If you are a medium-sized enterprise and innovation manager without an IP background, it’s essential to look for tools that provide the following:

  • An easy-to-use, customizable idea capture form
  • Collaborative features to work with stakeholders and track idea modifications asynchronously
  • Dashboards to visualize the idea-to-protection journey and monitor IP activity within your company
  • Estimations of end-to-end patenting costs to better manage IP budgets 
  • Patent analytics to make informed patenting decisions and calibrate patent prosecution strategy

About Us

Triangle IP’s TIP ToolTM is an easy-to-use drag-and-drop tool that assists you in managing the whole IP lifecycle, from concepts to patents. The technology was developed with the intention of democratizing patents. The patenting process is often opaque, and many businesses need enterprise-wide invention capture methods and procedures. 

With the TIP tool, anyone in the company can submit and follow the development of their creative ideas. The TIP ToolTM also helps manage your patent portfolios using deep learning to calibrate your patent prosecution strategy for better results.

Take patent mining at your enterprise to the next level with the TIP ToolTM. To explore further, register on the tool now. The tool comes with a pre-loaded dummy patent portfolio to make it easy for you to explore its capabilities.

5 Top Enterprise Innovation Software to Checkout in 2023

Enterprise Innovation Software

Employers who turn to enterprise innovation software often do so because they struggle to manage patentable ideas using generic tools like Jira, Salesforce, and Asana.

Although you can configure these tools to meet the specific needs of any business, they are not built to handle patentable ideas.

So enterprises need a tool that offers the following features:

  • Enterprise-wide innovation capture
  • An inventor-friendly and customizable idea capture form to improve the quantity and quality of invention disclosures
  • Idea tracking across various stages of the patent pipeline – idea capture, internal vetting, patent drafting, patent filing
  • Real-time collaboration for thorough vetting of ideas to select only the promising ones for patenting
  • Prediction on likelihood of getting a patent
  • Automatic USPTO status updates
  • Access to patent counsel, examiner, and art unit analytics to make informed decisions while prosecuting patents
  • A holistic view of the idea and patent pipelines to identify and eliminate bottlenecks
  • Informative dashboards to track KPIs of innovators
  • One-click view of complete patent portfolio

The biggest advantage of using enterprise innovation software is that it helps you manage innovation in a way that aligns with your company’s broader strategic goals and objectives.

In this post, we run through the key benefits of using the TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP for startups, individual inventors, small-to-medium-sized enterprises, and patent practitioners, then discuss some alternative enterprise innovation software solutions. 

You can register for free to see exactly what you can do with Triangle IP.

5 Top Enterprise Innovation Software (2023): Introduction, Reviews & Pricing

The path from ideation to obtaining a patent is a multifaceted process that comprises distinct stages, such as capturing the initial idea, conducting internal evaluations, drafting the patent, and filing for it. At each stage, there are specific obstacles that you need to overcome to identify the most promising ideas and secure your patents successfully. Accessing information such as the probability of obtaining a patent, predicting the end-to-end patenting expenses, and assessing case health can significantly enhance your patent prosecution strategy.

In this post, we’ll list the 5 top enterprise innovation software solutions that help you to manage your IP lifecycle more effectively, starting with the TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP.

The TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP

The TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP is an intuitive drag-and-drop tool that helps you capture enterprise-wide innovation & manage the entire patent lifecycle. The tool also assists your IP decision-making with insightful patent data analytics.

Key Benefits Offered by the TIP ToolTM:

#1 – Improve Quantity and Quality of Invention Disclosures

The TIP ToolTM provides a user-friendly invention disclosure form to actively involve innovators. With its role-based access feature, the idea submission portal is open to everyone across the enterprise, facilitating the capture of more ideas. Valuable ideas can also emerge from front-line workers, not just the R&D department. 

The invention disclosure form can be tailored to suit the organization’s unique requirements by incorporating modified fields that can be added, edited, deleted, or hidden.

The TIP ToolTM further enables users to display only relevant fields to a particular stage. For example, prosecutor information may not be necessary during the innovation capture stage.

The tool also allows users to tag patentable ideas using specific keywords around a particular technology, product category, or business function, enabling quick filtering of ideas. 

Additionally, innovators can attach supplementary materials such as documents, slide decks, or other information that better illustrates their innovations.

#2 – Gain Visibility Into Different Stages of Your Patent Pipeline  

The TIP ToolTM allows users to effectively monitor the progress of their ideas as they move through different stages of the IP lifecycle – idea capture, internal vetting, patent drafting, and filing. 

The tool ensures that users are always informed about the status of their ideas, whether they are being evaluated or in the process of being passed on to a patent counsel for drafting or filing.

Moreover, the TIP ToolTM enables users to effortlessly move their ideas through various stages of development using their drag-and-drop feature.

#3 – Brainstorm Ideas With Stakeholders on Real-Time Basis

The TIP ToolTM allows users to brainstorm and discuss ideas with inventors, prosecutors, and managers working in remote locations and collaborate in real-time. 

The tool facilitates a comprehensive vetting process to ensure that the most promising ideas are selected for patenting.

In an online meeting for brainstorming over patentable ideas, collaborators can pull up the TIP ToolTM. They can edit idea summaries, add tags and review comments to capture the best thinking within your enterprise. It’s as easy as working with Google docs

Not to mention the TIP ToolTM keeps track of all the changes made to the idea summary and the details of the person who made the changes. 

#4 – Allocate Your IP Budget Wisely

The TIP ToolTM offers patent analytics that can help you make informed decisions while allocating a budget for patenting. 

With the TIP ToolTM you can know the probability of getting your idea patented and predict the costs associated with obtaining a patent over the years, including filing fees, attorney fees, and maintenance fees. 

Such actionable intelligence allows you to allocate your IP budget based on predicted patent costs and protect only your greatest inventions with patents.

Additionally, the TIP ToolTM can help you determine the likelihood of success at the patent office by studying millions of applications. Such data helps you make informed decisions about which inventions to patent, enabling you to focus on ideas with a higher chance of approval.

#5 – Get Automatic USPTO Status Updates

The TIP ToolTM tool automatically lets users stay updated with the status of their published and unpublished patent applications at the USPTO. So they no longer have to rely on external legal counsel to stay in sync with USPTO.

With the TIP ToolTM, users will receive instant notifications of any required action from the USPTO.

Moreover, users can also access the patent applications that have been filed at the USPTO but not yet published by initiating the Private PAIR scrape feature

#6 – Speed Up Your Patent Prosecution

The TIP ToolTM offers statistics on the patent counsel and the examiner handling your case. After filling out the application, the USPTO assigns an examiner to determine whether the invention as claimed complies with all statutory requirements.

During this process, the TIP ToolTM tracks and displays the patent counsel’s relative performance in managing your case. The statistics revolve around allowance rate, an average number of rounds of argument to help estimate the cost and the difficulty of the prosecution process.

The tool also offers patent analytics indicating how your patent case scores against other applications in the same art unit, with the same patent examiner, handled by the same patent counsel, etc.

Such insights from the TIP ToolTM help you discuss your patent applications better with your patent counsel.

#7 – Get a Holistic View of Your Idea and Patent Pipeline at a Glance

The TIP ToolTM user-friendly dashboard provides an overview of your idea and patent pipeline enabling you to monitor your team’s activity, including inventor and manager involvement, filed applications, and patents.

You can view a list of all your team’s submitted ideas and filed patents and see which innovators are leading the way. Moreover, the TIP tool provides role-specific access, allowing inventors and managers to monitor their IP activity and stay aligned with their KPIs.

With the TIP ToolTM, you can easily identify bottlenecks in your innovation pipeline. For example, if an idea remains in the ideation and vetting stage longer than expected, it needs your attention.

Pricing

The TIP ToolTM provides a free tier (forever, up to 10 users). Its premium tier costs $50 per month and $495 per year. The TIP ToolTM has a custom tier as well. To know more, visit its pricing page.

Customer Review

The TIP ToolTM has secured a 4.5 rating in G2. Here’s a review from their database.

Click here to read the full review.

QMarkets

Qmarkets is an enterprise innovation software solution that offers a scalable ecosystem of solutions covering every aspect of innovation management.

Key Benefits Offered by Qmarkets

#1 – Prioritize Customer Success

Qmarkets supercharges your project success through various supplementary services like kick-start workshops, innovation leadership workshops, organizational workshops, and data & analysis services.

#2 – Leverage Gamification 

Qmarkets allows companies to leverage gamification techniques – such as ‘token voting’ and idea tournaments – to help increase user engagement.

#3 – Improve Employee Engagement 

Qmarkets customized idea submission form encourages the submission of creative ideas.

Pros

Qmarkets product has a wide array of features and flexibility for all your innovation and idea management needs.

Cons

Sometimes it can be challenging to track the history of an idea, particularly when multiple people are responsible for evaluating it.

Pricing

Qmarkets requires you to submit the contact us form to know the pricing details.

Customer Review

You can explore the Qmarkets review on G2.

Hype Ideation

Hype ideation is an idea management software that attempts to accelerate the success of innovation with its evaluation wizard that helps businesses analyze projects based on predefined custom parameters. 

Key Benefits Offered by Hype Ideation 

#1 – Take Advantage of Insights & Trends

HYPE offers insights management and integrates with a trend database, allowing you to tie trends into your innovation process to derive strategic innovation areas from them.

#2 – Collaborate With Your Stakeholders

With HYPE, you can bring together your organization’s brightest minds to work on high-quality concepts.

#3 – Leverage HYPE’s Expertise 

HYPE’s consulting team helps organizations meet these challenges by providing the necessary tools and frameworks to succeed in the ever-changing innovation world.

Pros

HYPE’s knowledge and consultancy around the best ways to engage with the people in all areas of the organization are excellent.

Cons

The lack of clarity in the backend makes it difficult for users to find what they need.

Pricing

Pricing is currently not provided -please inquire with HYPE.

Customer Review

You can check out HYPE’s review on G2.

Planview Spigit

Planview Spigit is an online idea management platform. It accelerates the success of innovation driving employee engagement, creating a culture of innovation, and providing analytics-driven insights. 

Key Benefits Offered by Planview Spigit

#1 – Utilize the Informative Dashboard

The platform provides dashboards that allow organizations to predict potential outcomes, costs, and the value of crowdsourced ideas. Planview also helps you measure how well a project performs compared to industry benchmarks.

#2 – Maximize Employee Participation

Planview Spigit’s game mechanics, virtual currency, idea trading, and customizable incentives encourage participation and engagement from participants.

#3 – Prioritize Idea Evaluation With Built-in Algorithms 

Planview Spigit’s built-in algorithms prioritize ideas with the most potential and scalability above those submitted first or most popular in idea selection.

Pros

Planview Spigit’s team provides good training to all users to manage any innovation challenge.

Cons

It’s challenging to leverage the capabilities of the back end without specialized training and experience.

Pricing

Pricing is unavailable-contact Planview Spigit (now IdeaPlace) for more details.

Customer Review

You can explore Planview Spigit reviews here on G2.

edison365

Edison365 is an innovation and project delivery platform built on Microsoft 365. 

The software integrates with Microsoft’s ecosystem and can be used with Delve, Dynamics, Microsoft Projects, Power BI, Project Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams. 

Key Benefits Offered by edison365

#1 – Use Intuitive Innovation Management Platform Built on Microsoft 365

edison365 is built with Microsoft 365-utilizing the same tools and resources that users already know. So users can start using the platform and do not require extensive training.

#2 – Enhance Employee Engagement & Innovation

edison365 helps organizations capture, evaluate, and manage ideas while engaging the workforce through gamification features.

#3 – Access Transparent Cost-Benefit Analysis for Portfolio

edison365 helps you to evaluate and justify the value of ideas by providing a transparent view of costs, benefits, resource requirements, and ROI across the portfolio.

Pros

edison365 is easy to customize according to different business requirements, along with its capacity to integrate with Power Platform, Azure, and other Microsoft 365 services.

Cons

There are some limitations with Microsoft’s architecture, such as Yammer being the default collaboration tool and PowerBI analytics being incompatible with MacOS users.

Pricing

Pricing is unavailable-contact edison365 for more details.

Customer Review

You can check the review here in G2

Parting Thoughts

Innovation is an essential aspect of any business, no matter which industry you belong to. But it’s not easy to encourage employees to share their ideas as they often feel too shy to express new ideas.

So rewarding innovative thinking provides an excellent incentive for idea sharing. 

Leigh Buchanan, a writer for Inc.com, shares a funny story about how SurePayroll offers a periodic award for “Best New Mistake.” It’s a way to reward innovative thinking, even if the result is less desirable.

Getting ideas from your employees helps you capture innovative ideas to take action on. Check out this step-by-step guide to launching a patent incentive program to promote innovation.

The TIP ToolTM – A Promising Enterprise Innovation Software

In this piece, we have provided in-depth information on the top 5 enterprise innovative software solutions. 

So whether you run a startup, a Fortune 500 enterprise, a corporate IP team, or whether you’re an individual inventor from non-IP background or a patent practitioner, there’s a suitable tool for everyone.

We’ve built the TIP ToolTM that provides the following benefits that can significantly contribute to the success of your enterprise’s employee innovation program:

  • Utilize the TIP Tool to increase the number of invention disclosures received by using its straightforward and user-friendly idea capture form, which is easily accessible to innovators.
  • Track the progress of your patent pipeline, including whether an idea requires approval or drafting and filing by counsel, by gaining visibility into different stages.
  • Encourage real-time idea brainstorming amongst stakeholders, similar to collaborating over Google Docs, to identify the most promising ideas for patenting.
  • Evaluate the potential success of your patent application at the patent office by utilizing the TIP Tool’s patentability score.
  • Tailor your patent prosecution strategy based on analytics provided by the TIP Tool for examiners, patent counsel, and art units.
  • Effortlessly create patent family trees with a single click.
  • Make informed decisions about your IP budget by leveraging the TIP Tool’s end-to-end patenting cost predictions.
  • Automatically stay updated on the status of patents and applications with the USPTO to ensure you remain in sync.
  • Provide personalized and limited access to ideas and patent-related information with role-based dashboards.
  • Gain a comprehensive overview of your ideas and patent pipelines to identify and resolve bottlenecks, thereby accelerating the patent mining process.
  • Reduce your outside legal services fee.

The Tool offers many more capabilities to mine patents and stays on top of the patent portfolio.

To explore further, register on the tool now.

Employee Innovation Program: Best Practices to Implement it in Your Organization

Employee Innovation program

A manager instills the innovation culture in a company by saying “Thank you.” 

In a company in Japan, whenever an employee came up to the manager with an idea – whether it’s brilliant or ridiculous – he would say ‘thank you.’ The manager understood that whoever brought the innovative idea was taking a considerable risk. What if the idea fails? What if the idea gets ignored? 

By saying ‘thank you,’ the manager provides psychological safety to employees. As a result, they believe that their innovative ideas are welcomed in the company. It was the manager’s way of instilling a culture of innovation in his organization. 

To innovate, you must instill a culture that drives innovation. It includes giving your employees the freedom to share innovative ideas and empowering them with resources to execute them. 

Everyone has their ways of building an innovation culture within the company. You can also use various methods to motivate your employees to build innovation. In this blog, I will bring you tried and tested ways to enhance your company’s innovation spirit.  

5 Employee Innovation Programs from World’s Most Innovative Companies

Launching a new product may come from one big idea, but sustaining the growth is possible only with innovation. The following companies proved it:

  1. Bayers: Bayers launched a platform called ‘WeSolve.’ They hired coaches and ambassadors under the program who educated and supported employees in innovation. Bayers also launched a Catalyst fund and added 50,000 euros to support the innovation program financially. Today, Bayers have got 80 ambassadors and 700 coaches across 70 countries.  
  1. Ritz-Carlton: Ritz Carlton hosts Innovation Olympics every year, where employees compete for the best innovative idea. They implement winning ideas across the company.
  1. HCL Innovation Program: HCL has created an employee knowledge exchange portal where anybody can provide ideas to solve a complex problem. HCL has also launched a chatbot called EDNA to power the employee innovation program. An employee sitting in the US can ask a question, and EDNA connects it with anyone worldwide who knows the solution. 
  1. Adobe: Adobe has an employee innovation program called ‘Adobe Kickbox’ that provides its employees with a toolkit that helps them pitch new business ideas to the stakeholders. It’s also connected with the Adobe community, where “kickboxers” can share ideas with their peers.
  1. Nestle: The program ‘Ingenius’ by Nestle provides opportunities for its employees to bring in new challenges. Employees propose ideas, and subject matter experts evaluate them. The experts co-innovate with high-potential ideas. Six hundred prototypes are currently functioning under Nestle’s innovation program.  

9 Best Practices To Kickstart Employee Innovation Program

Many people think innovation always needs to be new and disruptive. They think they must build new products, hire genius leaders, and build brand-new startups to foster innovation. 

But you can innovate by making small changes in your regular procedures. 

It creates a Domino effect of innovation. Innovation is a habit that you need to incorporate into your organization. Below are the ways you can do that:

  • Build your execution and innovation engines
  • Master the innovation perspective
  • Launch the three processes of innovation
  • Empower coaches
  • Generate ideas from the frontline
  • Create a culture of Innovation
  • Catalyze the innovation process
  • Engage everyone in the process of innovation
  • Keep the ideas flowing

Build Your Execution and Innovation Engines

Companies run on two engines – execution and innovation. Most companies believe that execution is what they’re supposed to do. So day in and day out, they execute tasks in the pipeline. 

Now, there’s a need for innovation. Humans innovated themselves through evolution to fit the changing world. Similarly, organizations need to innovate to survive ever-changing markets and customer demands. 

Through innovation, you create an end-product that creates value for your customers. 

For example, innovation-led Apple from failed products such as Newton PDA to globally successful iPads and Macbooks. This happened when Apple shifted its efforts to customer experiences, intuitive user interface, sleek design, and iconic branding. 

An organization must balance both execution and innovation to succeed and sustain that success in the long term. 

Master the Innovation Perspective

The innovation perspective is about solving problems. Adopt a mindset that encourages creativity, experimentation, and continuous learning. You need to:

  • Stick to the culture of experimentation even when ideas fail.
  • Create a customer-centric approach to finding solutions.
  • Be willing to pivot quickly if circumstances change.
  • Invest in continuous learning.

Impossible Foods is an example of a company that has mastered the innovation perspective. The company has created vegetarian food products that taste like meat. Impossible food is sustainable, and it works to reduce the market demand for meat-based products.

Imagine the level of innovation that went into creating the product. The scientists spent years studying the molecular properties of meat and plant-based ingredients that mimic the taste. 

Its flagship product, the Impossible Burger, is very popular in the US. Due to its innovative products and strategies, Impossible Foods have built a business worth $4 billion

Launch the Three Processes of Innovation

The three processes of innovation are creation, integration, and reframing. Following these processes step-by-step leads to innovative ideas:  

  • Creation is a process of continuously generating new ideas that create value for customers. These ideas are the raw material for innovation. For example, ‘how can we create a new product for the market’ or ‘how can we solve an existing problem.’ 
  • Integration refers to ‘connecting the dots.’ The organization glues the ideas of the front-line workers, middle managers, and senior executives. The ideas take a proper shape and then move to the execution engine. 
  • The reframing process is by which the organization challenges its key strategies to find gaps. Reframing helps you break standard procedures and create new benchmarks to measure performance.

Here’s a representation of the three processes of innovation from the popular book ‘Built to Innovate by Ben M Bensaou.’

Source: Build to Innovate

Empower Coaches: 

To instill innovation into the minds of your employees, you need an agile organizational structure. Here’s how you can appoint and empower innovation coaches:

  • Select employees from different divisions to take up specific challenges within their department. Call them ‘Innovation Coaches’.
  • Train these coaches to believe that a successful product or service begins with a good idea and then you must commercialize that idea to generate profit. 
  • Appoint multiple innovation coaches and spread them across the organization. At this point, you have built an innovation network that fosters innovation within your company. 
  • Provide them with all necessary resources, tools, and R&D budget to come up with new ideas.

Innovation coaches dedicate some of their work time to educating their subordinates about the given challenge. They conduct innovation sessions where everybody discusses the challenge and shares ideas for improvement.

Generate Ideas From The Front Lines

Ideas come from challenges. To identify the challenges in your industry, interact with your front-line workers. They are customer support executives and sales and marketing people who interact with customers daily. 

They’re aware of day-to-day challenges within the workflow. But their managers often overlook their ideas and focus only on completing tasks. Their suggestions can become a gold mine if someone works on them. 

A great example is Toyota. Toyota encourages all employees, including those on the front line, to identify and suggest improvements to the production process. 

In the early 2000s, Toyota’s assembly line workers noticed that installing a particular part on the car’s dashboard was difficult. So they came up with the idea of attaching the part using magnets instead of screws. It made the installation process faster and more efficient. This idea was implemented across Toyota’s production line, resulting in significant time and cost savings.

It’s imperative to permit the front-line people to innovate. So put some incentives to motivate them to come up with innovative ideas. 

Create a Culture of Innovation

Instill an innovation culture within your company. Only then you’ll leverage the capability of everyone in the organization. 

  • Implement a non-hierarchical work culture 

Hierarchy is the killer of innovation. Flatten the hierarchy to promote the cross-pollination of ideas within your company. 

Take Elon Musk, for example. At Tesla, he worked to shorten the hierarchy by removing multiple officials. Instead, he wants employees to work with the leaders with only a few managers in between. 

  • Train middle managers to innovate 

Senior executives and front-line workers understand innovation as they deal with customers and see how competitors progress. But middle managers don’t. Their responsibility is to finish tasks. So, naturally, they don’t think about innovation during their day-to-day activities. 

Educate middle managers about innovation and explain how it benefits the company. Only then they’ll fully allow the front-line workers to innovate. 

  • Create a safety net for employees

Employees shouldn’t be afraid of giving ideas. Instead, senior management and executives should clarify that innovative ideas are “allowed” in the company. Doing this provides psychological safety in case some of their ideas fail. 

  • Include the term’ innovation’ in your training programs

Innovation should be a key element in your company’s training materials so everybody embraces it. Include it in all leadership and onboarding training to achieve long-term and sustainable effects.

Catalyze the Innovation Process

Speed of innovation can be a big challenge, especially in industries with high-security risks, such as medicines, where it takes years to approve an idea. Implement the HR lean startup methodology within the organization to catalyze the process. 

With this methodology, you find the nearest problem and create a minimum viable product to solve it. But R&D happens within the office – far from customers. They research first and develop later, which delays the process. So create a space where you narrow the distance between innovators and customers. 

For example, Fiskar, a tool-making company, conducted an experiment called “Fiskars Xperiment.” It invited 20 surgeons and 20 chefs to try their product. They gathered first-hand feedback on design and functionality and used it to improve their products. 

Engage Everyone in the Process of Innovation

Engaging everyone brings diverse perspectives and creative solutions to a project. To achieve this, allot designated roles throughout the company to involve everyone in the innovation project. 

For example, Bayer, a German multinational pharmaceutical company, decided to create an innovative engine to leverage the capabilities of their 100k employees. So they made everyone responsible for innovation. 

They appointed 80 employees as ‘innovation ambassadors’ who’d supervise and sponsor innovation. Under these ambassadors, Bayer appointed 1000′ innovation coaches’ who’d strategize and implement innovation through the company. 

They launched a digital platform called ‘We solve’ where anybody from the company can provide inputs and ideas. 

The result? At any given time, the platform has over 800 suggestions, questions, and ideas – all by employees. Moreover, ⅔ of the ideas are generally from a different department than the employee works in.

The key is understanding that everyone has a way of being involved in the process. While some participate actively, some like to stay in the outskirts. Find a way to get everyone involved, and the process will run smoothly.  

Keep The Ideas Flowing

Innovation is not a one-time task. Innovation should keep flowing within your organization. Leaders must emphasize innovation by celebrating successes and failures alike. Here are some ways to keep the ideas flowing in an organization:

  • Give employees the tools they need to innovate

Provide resources, training, and tools to innovate. This includes innovation labs, an R&D budget, digital innovation platforms, and brainstorming sessions. 

  • Embrace collaboration

A collaborative environment allows employees to share ideas and learn from each other. They work together to solve complex problems. 

  • Listen to customer feedback

Innovation must come outside. This means you first interact with the customers outside, understand their problems, and then innovate to solve them. 

Microsoft has embraced collaboration across teams and departments, and the company’s employees are encouraged to experiment and take risks. As a result, it has invested heavily in its R&D department. The company has launched several new products and services recently, including Azure, Teams, and Dynamics 365. 

Tips To Ensure the Success of the Employee Innovation Program

Motivating your employees to innovate is one part of the program. It’s time to learn how to capture and manage their ideas so you can make the best of them. 

● Select the Right Innovation Capture Tool 

The patent management process is complex, so many patents get lost, and the process lacks engagement. The right innovation capture tool, like the TIP ToolTM by TriangleIP, helps you stay on top of all your patents. 

It has a simple and intuitive Invention Disclosure Form(IDF) to capture ideas. In addition, the Idea Management dashboard provides an overview of the complete patenting process so everyone, including innovators and patent attorneys, get a bird’s eye view of the project. 

All stakeholders, including inventors, managers, patent attorneys, and business teams, can collaborate on the inventions in real time with comments and tags just as they would do over Google docs. The tool also predicts the possibility of getting a patent and associated end-to-end patenting costs, including attorney fees, government fees, annuities, etc. 

You get a holistic view of all your ideas and patent pipelines. You also always stay on top of updates from the USPTO. With the TIP ToolTM, you manage ideas and patents with ease. 

● Look for a Customizable Idea Capture Form 

Design Invention Disclosure Forms (IDFs) in a way that innovators feel comfortable engaging with them. To ensure full details, engage with innovators constantly and assist them with forms. Make them understand that the forms are crucial to the innovation process. 

An IDF can be of three different lengths:

Short: It includes the only essential details of the innovators, including the title of the innovation, email, and the innovation summary. 

Medium: It includes everything from the short form along with the problem statement, competing products, innovation alternatives, and upcoming public disclosures that can impact the innovation. 

Long: It consists of everything from short and medium forms along with the innovator’s written academic articles, future research efforts, commercial uses of the innovation, and resources used to come up with the invention. 

Customize the form depending on your organizational needs with the TIP ToolTM.

● Increase engagement with innovators 

Educate the innovators about invention disclosures. Conduct regular training to explain the patent policies. For example, inform them how an Innovation Disclosure Form works. The training increases engagement with the innovators and makes them more aware of the procedure. 

Innovators must understand that engagement and disclosure are crucial for their idea’s success. Ensure timely assistance whenever innovators get stuck. For example, provide them with sample IDFs so they better understand the process. 

The TIP ToolTM allows you to engage seamlessly with innovators through tags and comments. The forms are simple and easy to fill. Once innovators fill out the form, they can monitor the whole patenting process, including idea capture, vetting, patent drafting, and filing, and share their views inside the dashboard.

● Launch a Patent Incentive Program 

A patent incentive program motivates all employees to participate in the innovation. Create a three phase program that allows you to capture and manage ideas easily while rewarding employees for their participation in the entire patent process. 

  • Phase One – Submission of Invention Idea: Encourage employees to submit their ideas using simple idea capture forms and submit it to the company’s Patent Committee as well as other stakeholders. Set a small reward for participation.
  • Phase Two – Filing of Patent Application: To qualify for an inventor incentive in this category, an employee/inventor may need to fulfill certain requirements such as submitting a non-provisional US Patent application and completing the necessary paperwork requested by the Committee. You may slightly increase the inventor incentive for this step. 
  • Phase Three – Issuance of Patent: If an invention successfully bags a patent, you may reward employees with more significant incentives such as formal recognition or cash rewards. 

Kickstart Your Employee Innovation Program with the TIP ToolTM

With the following key benefits, the TIP ToolTM can be instrumental in the success of your employee innovation program:

#1 Get more invention disclosures using the TIP Tool’s simple & intuitive invention disclosure form that innovators easily engage with.

#2 Gain visibility into the different stages of your patent pipeline, whether the idea needs to be approved at your end or passed to your counsel for drafting and filing.


#3 Select only the most promising ideas for patenting by facilitating brainstorming of ideas amongst stakeholders in real-time just as they would have done it over Google docs.

#4 Gauge how your patent application shall perform at the patent office based on the patentability score provided by the TIP ToolTM.

#5 Calibrate your patent prosecution strategy based on examiner, patent counsel, and art unit analytics provided by the TIP ToolTM.

#6 Generate patent family trees with the click of a button 

#7 Manage IP budget wisely based on end-to-end patenting cost predictions.


#8 Stay in sync with USPTO automatically, as the tool gives you all the status updates for patents and applications.

#9 Provide customized and restricted access to ideas and patents-related information based on the persona with role-based dashboards..

#10 Get a holistic view of ideas and patent pipelines to identify bottlenecks and speed up the process of mining patents.

Get started with the TIP ToolTM to kickstart your employee innovation program today! 

6 Idea Management Tools for Innovation Driven Enterprises to Look at in 2023

Idea Management Tools

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” – Steve Jobs

While collaborating to bring innovative solutions to pressing business problems, have you ever wondered how companies at the bleeding edge of innovation approach such high-impact decisions?

I recently came across Nestlé’s InGenius. It is the company’s “Employee Innovation Accelerator.” But, here is the kicker, Nestlé paved the way to incentivize its nearly 300,000 employees working in almost 200 nations globally to help the company bring innovative solutions to the market.

This accelerator has delivered on its promise, and how! It has allowed Nestlé to fast-track innovation and provide game-changing solutions to the market in months. In addition, the company has sought to fortify its competitive advantage in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Virtual Reality, saving natural resources and increasing the incomes of its farmer partners.

6 Idea Management Tools

Just so you know, managing your intellectual property assets on an excel spreadsheet is a bad idea. So before we proceed, ensure that you heed this word of caution and avoid running a broken idea management process.

With that covered, let’s learn about the idea management tools an innovation-driven enterprise like yours can utilize.

The TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP 

The TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP is an intuitive drag-and-drop tool that helps you manage the end-to-end IP lifecycle from ideas to patents. With the TIP ToolTM, anyone in the enterprise can submit and track the progress of their innovative ideas.

Key Benefits Offered by the TIP ToolTM for Idea Management

#1- Enable Enterprise-Wide Participation

The TIP ToolTM allows role-based access to users. Enterprises using the tool can enable employee participation across the enterprise without worrying about the confidentiality of certain IP-related information. For example, did you know that PepsiCo’s low-sodium snack idea came from someone who didn’t belong to the R&D team?

#2 – Capture More Innovation by Minimizing Friction from Innovators for Idea Submission

The TIP ToolTM offers a short, simple, easy-to-fill idea capture form that innovators can fill to describe their ideas or inventions. Moreover, the TIP ToolTM offers a magic link-based login that relieves innovators from remembering one more password. There might be a situation wherein you need to decide between unfiled ideas and low-priority ideas. Users can utilize TIP ToolTM’s archive feature to focus on important ideas.

#3 – Gather Specific Information from Innovators with Customizable Idea Form

The TIP ToolTM offers a customizable idea capture form. The innovation managers can add/edit or delete fields of the form. Sometimes, there arises a possibility that an enterprise requires specific information for which there is no field in the default idea capture form. The TIP ToolTM covers this scenario as well. The TIP ToolTM makes it possible to incorporate a company’s internal nomenclature so that no additional training is required for staff.

#4 – Filter Ideas Based on Tags for Any Discussion

TIP ToolTM understands the importance of having an organized system. Therefore, it allows users to tag, group, and filter ideas. For example, for a particular business meeting, you may wish to select ideas that belong to a specific line of product, technology, or some other category. The TIP ToolTM makes it extremely easy to add tags to ideas and, consequently, filter ideas based on such tags later.

#5 – Select the Most Promising Ideas for Patenting by Enabling Thorough Vetting of Ideas

The TIP ToolTM makes it easy for inventors, managers, patent counsel, or other stakeholders working from remote locations to brainstorm ideas in real time. The TIP ToolTM achieves this by allowing users to edit idea information and add comments. In addition, the TIP ToolTM records every change made to idea-related information. Moreover, all your ideas can be scored on different parameters within the TIP ToolTM. You can utilize these scores to prioritize and rank the patentability of each idea.

#6 – Track Ideas As They Progress Through All the Stages of the IP Lifecycle

The TIP ToolTM offers a drag-and-drop interface to move ideas from one stage to another. It provides four stages to track ideas as they progress – Idea Capture, Internal Vetting, Patent Drafting, and Patent Filing.

#7 – Get USPTO Status Updates for Your Patents and Patent Applications Without the Help of a Patent Counsel

The TIP ToolTM helps you stay in sync with the USPTO by automatically fetching updates on your patents and patent applications and displaying them within the tool. In addition, you can receive notifications on any PTO rejections your idea received and promptly address each idea’s probable roadblocks within the TIP ToolTM.

#8 – Track KPIs of Innovators at Your Enterprise

The TIP ToolTM offers a super simple dashboard to see innovation-related metrics for your R&D teams quickly. For example, you can see the number of ideas submitted and the patentability of those ideas by all your innovators. In addition, you can identify the most promising innovators as well.

#9 – Get A Quick Glimpse of Your Idea Pipeline in One Click

The TIP ToolTM also offers role-specific dashboards. As a result, innovation managers can get a holistic view of the idea pipeline in seconds. Consequently, the TIP ToolTM helps you manage the workflow from idea collection to portfolio management.

Demo

Sign up for an interactive product demo of the TIP ToolTM and experience its features yourself! The TIP ToolTM offers a demo playground with pre-populated data to easily explore the tool’s functionalities.

Pricing

The TIP ToolTM provides a free tier (forever). Its premium tier costs $50 per month and $495 per year. The TIP ToolTM has a custom tier as well. Visit its pricing page.

Review

Client Interaction

We mentioned the TIP ToolTM’s features of staying in sync with the USPTO and understanding an idea’s movement along the IP lifecycle with a glance.

Triangle IP’s founder, Tom Franklin, regularly speaks to prospects and clients to gather insights on benefiting from using the TIP ToolTM.

Here’s what a prospect had to say about these features.

Their Usual Process

“At our company, we track IP progress during each quarter in the following manner:

  1. First, how many inventions are getting started?
  2. Second, how many of these inventions are getting completed (meaning that they have been sent to the Intellectual Property Committee to make a decision)?
  3. Next, how many Intellectual Property Committee decisions are being made in a quarter?
  4. In the final stage, we also consider it a success if we establish trade secrets. However, make no mistake, filing a patent would be the best success.

Understandably, we consider how many filings we have completed in the quarter. So that is our specific focus on the metrics.”

How the TIP ToolTM Helps

“I used to get emails from my boss asking, “Show me how many of these things happened this quarter.” I would previously have to generate this data manually.”

Having this information summarised in your tool is extremely handy for me.

Website

Visit Triangle IP’s website to explore the TIP ToolTM.

Brightidea Idea Box

Brightidea’s advanced software attempts to accelerate the success of innovation by facilitating and streamlining the ideation process and collaboration.

Key Benefits Offered by Brightidea Idea Box for Idea Management

#1 – Collect Ideas Using A Frictionless Platform

Brightidea’s Idea Box offers an always-on digital suggestion box for collecting ideas. This accessibility empowers the workforce to submit ideas whenever and wherever is convenient.

#2 – Scale Your Innovation Platform

If your business requires help managing and automating an increased volume of idea submissions, Idea Box can upgrade the system at no extra cost for additional modules and services.

#3 – Receive Robust Idea Analytics

To make informed idea decisions, Idea Box can track every idea’s RoI and business impact from within the tool.

Demo

You can request a demo here.

Pricing

Brightidea allows a free trial to try the product. Unfortunately, extensive pricing information is unavailable.

Review

You can explore Brightidea’s reviews on G2.

Website

Visit Brightidea’s Idea Box website to explore the product.

Ideanote

Ideanote is a next-generation innovation software that offers what users need to collect, develop, prioritize and act on more of the right ideas.

Key Benefits Offered by Ideanote for Idea Management

#1 – Collect Highly Contextual Ideas

Ideanote allows users to achieve quantity and quality while sharing ideas. For example, if users want to add images, presentation decks, or videos to give people context, Ideanote makes it possible.

#2 – Facilitate Enterprise-Wide Innovation

Ideanote allows outsiders to contribute to the internal innovation process through guest accounts. Moreover, the tool promotes community building by letting people describe their expertise.

#3 – Customize Access to Innovation Process

Ideanote allows users to organize people in groups and assign them access depending on their roles in innovation management. Therefore, a section of users can contribute ideas, while experts can manage tasks surrounding the vetting of ideas.

Demo

You can request a demo here.

Pricing

Ideanote’s free tier (limited to 10 members) is free. The business tier (for 15 to 2500 members) offers dynamic pricing, ranging from $49/month to $1249/month. The enterprise tier (unlimited members) requires booking a demo. Visit its pricing page.

Review

You can explore Ideanote’s reviews on G2.

Website

Visit Ideanote’s website to explore the product.

IdeaScale

IdeaScale is an innovation management solution that links enterprises to people with ideas. It is an intuitive space where the best ideas thrive based on merit. IdeaScale lends relevance to the most important challenges.

Key Benefits Offered by IdeaScale for Idea Management

#1 – Collect Ideas Using Intuitive Form

IdeaScale offers a simple and customizable idea submission form to add relevant details.

#2 – Integrate Social Sharing APIs

To add new ideas to your enterprise’s IdeaScale community, users can utilize in-built APIs to platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, and MS Teams.

#3 – Receive Innovation Trend Analysis and RoI

IdeaScale offers enterprise-wide innovation dashboards allowing users to gain insights into an enterprise’s innovation inputs and outputs. You can learn more about ideas’ origin, implementation, and relative value.

Demo

You can request a demo here.

Pricing

IdeaScale crafts its pricing proposal based on the program’s chosen features, scope, and more. IdeaScale requires booking a demo for this process.

Review

You can explore IdeaScale’s reviews on G2.

Website

Visit IdeaScale’s website to explore the product.

Viima

Viima is an all-in-one innovation platform that helps take ideas to innovations, helping along every step. Viima makes the journey effortless so that users can focus on making more innovation happen.

Key Benefits Offered by Viima for Idea Management

#1 – Effortlessly Process Idea Collection

Viima allows the categorization of new ideas in the right places. Moreover, it automatically ensures that the right people receive notifications about new ideas.

#2 – Promote Responsible Enterprise-Wide Engagement

In addition to mentioning specific users during idea vetting, Viima offers the feature of allocating an idea’s responsibility to particular users.

#3 – Prioritize Flexible Idea Evaluation

Viima offers a flexible evaluation system allowing users to create custom metrics to rate ideas.

Demo

You can request a demo here.

Pricing

Viima’s basic tier is available for free. The premium tier starts at  $6/user/month. The unlimited tier starts at $1999/month. Visit its pricing page.

Review

You can explore Viima’s reviews on G2.

Website

Visit Viima’s website to explore the product.

Idea Drop

Idea Drop allows leading global enterprises to put innovation at the heart of their enterprises. It packs powerful automation and intuitive intelligence to supercharge innovation programs and collaborate on strategic goals.

Key Benefits Offered by Idea Drop for Idea Management

#1 – Promote Safe Idea Collection Form

All users are not comfortable with publicly sharing their ideas. Idea Drop allows users to hit a ‘cloak’ button when dropping an idea to hide their identity.

#2 – Informs Collaborators of Idea Changes

Idea Drop alerts users in real-time about status changes to ideas and other significant interactions between users.

#3 – Avoid Duplicate Idea Generation

Idea Drop’s pattern recognition technology flags similar ideas to avoid collaborating on similar alternatives to existing ideas.

Demo

You can request a demo here.

Pricing

Extensive pricing is unavailable—contact Idea Drop for more details.

Review

You can explore Idea Drop’s reviews on G2.

Website

Visit Idea Drop’s website to explore the product.

Quick Wrap Up

There are several competing idea management tools available for innovation-driven enterprises. But the “best” idea management software is the one that matches the size and the nuanced needs of your enterprise.

If you are a small-to-medium enterprise, you will significantly benefit from using the TIP ToolTM.

About Us

The TIP ToolTM by Triangle IP is an intuitive drag-and-drop tool that helps you manage the end-to-end IP lifecycle from ideas to patents. The tool underwent creation with the vision of democratization of patents. Usually, the patent process is not transparent, and many enterprises do not have enterprise-wide innovation capture systems and processes. The TIP ToolTM is here to change that. With the TIP ToolTM, anyone in the enterprise can submit and track the progress of their innovative ideas. The TIP ToolTM also helps you manage your patent portfolios with deep learning to guide your patent strategy efficiently.

12 Essential Features of IP Management Software

Pro Tip: Patent analytics is one of the essential features of IP management software to fetch actionable intelligence!

It is no secret that to stay on top of the game, every organization needs to tap into the full potential of its innovators. Innovation management requires a systematic business process to track ideas through patents, which some term as ‘patent mining’. However, your patent mining process might be broken because of things like: 

  • Complex Invention Disclosure Forms (IDFs)
  • Ineffective collaboration among members from different departments like – engineering, business, legal, etc.
  • No set process to track ideas progress through complete IP workflow – Capturing, Vetting, Patent Drafting, Patent Filing, and Patent Portfolio Managing
  • Security risks like confidential data being leaked
  • Stale PAIR data due to dependency on a human resource to pull out the information

To make your patent mining process robust you need to provide the right training and resources to your team. As they say, well begun is half done. Identifying the right IP management software shall be instrumental to your patent mining process. Here are 12 essential features of IP management software:

  1. Intuitive idea submission form
  2. Customizable idea capture form
  3. Effective collaboration to refine the ideas
  4. Ease of thorough vetting
  5. Role-based access
  6. End-to-end tracking from ideas to patents and beyond
  7. Automatic updates – in sync with USPTO
  8. Cost estimation
  9. Tags to ease filtering
  10. Case analytics
  11. Detailed examiner analytics
  12. Dashboards for a holistic view

#1. Intuitive Idea Submission Form

Also known as the Invention Disclosure Form (IDF), an ideal idea submission form is simple, intuitive, and engaging. The IDF captures the necessary details about the invention. It requires the innovator to describe the problem, solution, and enhanced features over existing solutions. A great IDF is the one that inventors don’t feel any friction to fill.

#2. Customizable Idea Capture Form

A good IP management software allows customization of the Invention Disclosure Form (IDF) as per the needs of your organization. The software might be providing a form that has necessary fields that are commonly used by various organizations. However, there could be certain fields, one might wish to add to that existing form. An idea capture form that can be personalized as per an organisation’s internal requirements is something you should look for.  It should be possible to incorporate the company’s internal nomenclature so that no training is required for staff.

For example, The TIP idea form offers a summary field to share details about the invention. However, you might wish to have the invention details divided into sections like – 1. Problem 2. Solution and 3. Advantages. Each expected to be captured by different form fields. The software should provide an option to customize the form as per your needs.

#3. Effective Collaboration to Refine the Ideas

Imagine editing functionality just like “Google docs” – Two or more people can simultaneously edit the same document. Changes made by each person can be tracked. Version history can be maintained.  Having similar functionality in an IP management software can be extremely helpful. Example: When an inventor, an attorney and an associate are discussing an idea, each one can edit the same piece of text within the software with their thoughts and inputs. None of them need to take notes manually and edit the idea text later.

#4. Ease of Thorough Vetting

The software must provide a way for collaborators to exchange ideas over an idea or a patent draft for that matter. Ability to add comments can go a long way to facilitate this.

#5. Role-Based Access

If your organization wants to keep certain strategic patent portfolio data confidential, a key feature to look for in the IP management software is role-based access. The software will allow only that part of the information to be visible to the person accessing the software, which is required as per his/her role. The confidential information will be visible only to the key personnel.  For instance, an organization may require that an inventor should be able to see only the patent portfolios that he is a part of, not the whole company’s.

On a side note: Would you want to know how your patent application is progressing at the USPTO compared to other applications in the same domain? 

The TIP tool offers statistics of the law firm and the examiner handling your case. Once the application is filed at the USPTO, and an examiner is allotted to your case, the tool indicates the relative performance of the law firm handling your case. The statistics revolve around the number of arguments, grant rate, and grant time. The tool also indicates the case health, for instance, it can tell you if a case needs your attention. There is a whole bunch of insights that you can gather from the TIP tool for strategic patent prosecution.

Request insights for any of your cases at the patent office using the form below.

#6. End-to-End Tracking from Ideas to Patents and Beyond

A process-driven IP management software will take your organization a long way. It should ideally facilitate the tracking of the idea from its inception till patenting and beyond. For an IP workflow ideas & patents need to be tracked through the following stages:

  • Capturing of idea
  • Evaluation and vetting of the idea/invention
  • Drafting of patent application
  • Filing of the patent application
  • Managing the patent portfolio

A quick view into the patent portfolio as shown below shall be an added benefit. Taking this to the next level shall be an in-depth view of each case (See #10. Case Analytics).

Triangle IP is going to release an upgraded version soon with all the features mentioned here. Click on the image below to get exclusive access!

#7. Automatic Updates – In Sync with USPTO

Wouldn’t it be easier if the IP management software also provided the updates regarding the status of your applications from the USPTO PAIR? An intellectual property management software can have integrated tools to provide automatic updates to help track the progress of the application. It will also help in notifying about any PTO rejections received. This feature will allow you to have everything in one place instead of tracking various activities throughout the innovation process.

#8. Cost Estimation

Knowing the cost of patenting an invention and the average allowance rate in the domain can ease out your patenting decisions. Patent analytics help in predicting the cost that helps managers and business owners manage the budget accordingly. Look for an intellectual property management software that offers this functionality.

#9. Tags to Ease Filtering

Tagging the ideas/patents with keywords helps to filter out the ideas/patents around a particular technology or product or business function etc. An IP management software must be able to pull this information out for you with the click of a button.

#10. Case Analytics

Say you filed a patent application with the help of a law firm. In your intellectual property  management software dashboard, you see that the application is still pending with 4 office actions after 3 years of prosecution. You would be curious to see the general ‘health’ of your application. To know how other applications have fared in that domain. Also, what would be good to know is the performance of the law firm handling your patent application. If you see that other applications, on average, had one office action and were granted in 2 years; you would be in a better position to discuss and strategize with the patent attorney. This shall help you to find a way to speed up the prosecution. Hence, while looking for an intellectual property management software check if it provides law firm analytics as well.

#11. Detailed Examiner Analytics

Knowing more about the USPTO examiner handling your application helps you understand how you should be handling the prosecution. It helps your patent attorney take the best approach with respect to the assigned examiner. When your IP management software can provide examiner analytics, it will give you pointers to strategize patent prosecution. For instance, examiner analytics can help you understand if prioritizing the examiner  interview can fasten the prosecution process.

#12. Dashboards for a Holistic View

A key feature to look for in an IP management software is dashboards. Dashboards provide a holistic view of your idea pipeline, the filed USPTO applications as well as patents. These dashboards can help you get a pulse of the quality of the ideas submitted, probable roadblocks and your inventor activity. These help you take decisions/make changes accordingly.

Wrap Up – Essential Features of IP Management Software:

A patent mining process is broken in the absence of software that streamlines the journey of ideas to patents. An IP management software allows your organization to capture, evaluate, and further them for patenting and beyond. Hope that this list of essential features of IP management software shall be helpful to you in making an informed decision. Triangle IP is coming up with a version soon – that covers all these features and more! Register here to get early access to all these features for free for a limited time! Stay updated with the latest features of the Triangle IP tool and its subsequent releases. Sign up for the newsletter!

Note: The preceding is general business advice and not to be construed as legal advice. IP laws vary by country and retaining licensed legal counsel is advised to confirm this information. Any expressed or implied opinions are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Triangle IP or any other entity who might be associated with the presenter. We hope this content is helpful to you, but should not be relied upon without confirming the advice and accuracy with local legal counsel. Any comments or inquiries are not confidential so please discuss your issues directly with counsel.

Idea Evaluation: 6 Questions to ask while Selecting Ideas for Patents

Is your ideas to budget ratio usually skewed – in favor of ideas? Evaluating ideas for patentability becomes a brain-drain exercise in such a scenario. However, selecting the right ideas will most efficiently put your budget to work. This post lays out a framework to help you choose ideas for patenting that have the most potential.

Most enterprises choose to evaluate patents after they issue, which is much easier than at the beginning of the process where ideas are selected for patenting. The ideas that will be the most valuable as patents require speculation. The ultimate claim scope and importance of an innovation to market success requires educated guesses at the beginning of the process.  The risk factor is almost always high.

So how do you make sure to minimize the risk while evaluating ideas for patentability? Ask these 6 questions:

  1. What is the value of your idea in the marketplace?
  2. How core is it to your business and its revenue?
  3. Is it already in a product or in a roadmap for commercialization?
  4. How ‘observable’ is your idea if a competitor were to copy it?
  5. What is the likelihood of a successful patent grant on your idea?
  6. How enforceable will your patent be?

Value of your idea in the marketplace

Imagine your product on a shelf next to similar products – would the innovation get someone to buy your product? Is it easier to use, cheaper, faster, or better in a way that would motivate a purchase?

Select the idea, if you can visualize that it would make your product the preferred choice for customers. To determine this, ask if your patent is going to cover a key feature of the product? Ask if it is useful or game-changing enough to be a steady contributor to your business revenue. Will the unique product drive over the next twenty years?

Evaluating Ideas for Patentability | Q1 - Will idea make your product a preferred choice for customers?

A great way to assess how much value your idea has is by working backward from what your marketing team has to say about it. For example, the tagline for your product might be, ’It’s twice as fast as the competition!’ Work back to the innovation that enables that boast to the market. If you find that the patent if issued would protect that innovation, you know you have a winner. Having a market-driven approach is the right one to have when assessing ideas for protection. If your marketing team can’t say much about your innovation, there might be another idea more worthy of your budget. 

How core is the idea to your business?

Some ideas in your repository may be revolutionary. Some of your broadest innovation may happen in parts of the business that may have little market potential. These revolutionary ideas are not always synonymous with big profits. On the other hand, there may be ideas that don’t seem revolutionary but can protect large portions of the company’s profits. So, it becomes imperative to weigh ideas against potential profit and growth of the business that they would protect. 

Evaluating Ideas for Patentability | Q2 - Is idea revolutionary or revenue generating?

Imagine this. A leading company sells inkjet printers. But they generate the largest chunk of their revenue from ink sales, not the printers which are sold at a loss. They may have revolutionary ideas for their printers without any corresponding profit. So ideas in this space are not as valuable. However, if they were to come up with an idea to make the ink in the disposable cartridge cure quicker…knock-off replacements would smear or otherwise not have the performance of the genuine product. Not the most revolutionary idea, but definitely one that is great for the business as it protects a higher margin product.  

Apart from revenue building, there are some ideas that may be an intrinsic part of your business identity. One that is important to dominate for your brand.  Ask if this is one of them. What value, if any, will it have over the next couple of decades without that product anchoring your business?  For example, a car brand may sponsor a competitive racing team and protect their winning edge even if it may never be used in the production automobiles.  Winning races drives customers to want your cars even if they bear little resemblance.

Is the idea going to be commercialized?

There may be a ton of great ideas from your innovators, but not every idea will be an important product/addition for the next 20 years. If you cannot imagine how to put your innovation into a product, it is almost certain that there is no revenue that it will generate. Investing resources in acquiring a patent for such an idea is of no value. But an idea that contributes to a product your business currently offers or something that is just to be released automatically becomes a frontrunner. Here’s a threshold test – Are there plans to put your innovation into a product? If yes, spend your IP budget trying to protect it.

Timing is everything in the innovation to patent journey. The closer the release date of the product your idea is related to, the more valuable it is as a patent. Once your product is released in the market, the idea that it carries becomes subject to duplication and any innovation starts becoming part of the public domain. So the release of an idea into the market without patent protection could be hazardous. The bottom line is if innovation cannot go into a product, any patent would only be wall art.

Evaluating Ideas for Patentability | Q3 - Is idea related to the product about to be released?

How ‘observable’ is your idea?

Observability is a big factor as you’re thinking about ideas to choose for patent protection. Prioritizing the ones that can be observed allows ascertaining infringement should that be necessary. For instance, your company has developed a chip that goes deep into a data center used in an enterprise. Say your competitor is using this chip. How likely are you to find it out? Consequently, will you be able to assert your patent against them? The answer, highly unlikely. 

When you are looking to build your patent portfolio, look for ideas that will be readily identifiable. So if you are looking at internal processes or small innovations like the chip, it may be a better business decision to treat them as trade secrets. Unidentifiable innovation should not eat into your budget. 

Evaluating Ideas for Patentability | Q4 - Is the idea observable?

How likely is a patent granting on your idea?

It’s important to be aware of the kinds of patents being issued by patent offices. There are some technology areas in which patent offices are wary about issuing patents. For example, patent offices are reluctant to issue patents for business methods, some therapeutics and certain kinds of software. Then there are things that are not patentable at all. Genes, human-performed medical procedures, tax optimization schemes, etc. It is thus imperative to know beforehand what is patentable before investing in a patent for your idea. 

Evaluating Ideas for Patentability | Q5 - Is the Idea Patentable?

There are tools available to help you ascertain these statistics. At Triangle IP, the  TIP Tool has it on the feature roadmap! With this feature, the TIP tool predicts the Patentability Score on your innovations. This score will be based on how likely similar technology gains allowance as a patent. Knowing the patentability score shall ease out your decision-making process.

How enforceable will a patent be for your idea?

Certain technology is difficult to enforce, generally, even where a patent is issued. Courts are likely to overturn patent claims in certain cases. Software, especially abstract software concepts, business methods, and the like are difficult to enforce presently. Knowing that a patent will be difficult to enforce should be considered.

The cost of the patent should always be outweighed by the volume of profit that the patent can generate. Patenting cost includes all the resources that you will need to invest in the patent journey. Protect something valuable enough such that damages models will support enforcement of the patent.  Some innovation although great, can never overcome the cost of getting the patent.

Evaluating Ideas for Patentability | Q6 - How enforceable will your idea be as a patent?

Thinking about what damages might be enforced if it ever reaches such a stage could also be a deciding factor. The amount of damages will also be largely dependent on how your patent claims are constructed and other legal issues. A great idea that has all the potential to be a powerful patent in your arsenal can be broken if the claims are constructed improperly or if there is some other legal flaw. Read this for tips and tricks to draft a high-quality patent application

Evaluating Ideas For Patentability | Wrap Up

While this is not an exhaustive list of questions for you to consider when evaluating ideas for patentability, it’s a good place to start. More specific questions will be born from the specific needs of your business that may change from time to time. Think long term (at least 20 years) when evaluating ideas for patentability. Channel resources wisely so that money spent can result in revenue that contributes to your resource pool for the future.

At Triangle IP, we have a value field to score ideas. The value field can be 1 to 10 based on the answers to these questions.  Many of these factors can be considered and weighted according to priorities within your enterprise.

On a side note: Would you want to know how your patent application is progressing at the USPTO compared to other applications in the same domain? 

The TIP tool offers statistics of the law firm and the examiner handling your case. Once the application is filed at the USPTO, and an examiner is allotted to your case, the tool indicates the relative performance of the law firm handling your case. The statistics revolve around the number of arguments, grant rate, and grant time. The tool also indicates the case health, for instance, it can tell you if a case needs your attention. There is a whole bunch of insights that you can gather from the TIP tool for strategic patent prosecution.

Request insights for any of your cases at the patent office using the form below.

Note: The preceding is general business advice and not to be construed as legal advice. IP laws vary by country and retaining licensed legal counsel is advised to confirm this information. Any expressed or implied opinions are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Triangle IP or any other entity who might be associated with the presenter. We hope this content is helpful to you, but should not be relied upon without confirming the advice and accuracy with local legal counsel. Any comments or inquiries are not confidential so please discuss your issues directly with counsel.

5 Ways To Get Effective Invention Disclosures from Your R&D Team

Getting effective invention disclosures is a challenge if your inventors don’t engage with the innovation capture process. As an innovation manager, you need to fill the innovation funnel with potentially patentable ideas. So, what do you do?

Let’s explore what makes an effective invention disclosure and how you can get enough of those! 

Effective Invention Disclosure:

An effective invention disclosure captures the novelty, advantages, and utility of the invention. It has to be explained well enough such that those who approve patent filings can understand the invention and how it is strategic to the enterprise. To put it simply, an ideal invention disclosure clearly and precisely describes:

  • The problem that the idea solves
  • How the idea solves the problem
  • How the invention operates
  • The enhanced features in comparison to existing alternatives

How to Make Sure You Get Effective Invention Disclosures?

Here are five ways to improve the quality of the invention disclosures at your organization:

  1. Inventor-focused education 
  2. Walk it through – contextualization 
  3. Timely assistance
  4. Example invention disclosures
  5. Two-way communication between the inventor(s) and innovation manager
TIP Tool Americano Banner

#1. Training And Education

It takes training to obtain effective invention disclosures. Education should be inventor-focused. Explain the patent program and the invention disclosure form to your inventors. Provide insight into how the patent process works. Such an exercise increases engagement. 

Conduct the training at regular intervals including at new employee orientation to keep everyone updated with the patent policy of the organization. Create guidelines for filling the invention disclosure form to demystify what is needed.

An effective invention disclosure requires a summary of the invention while highlighting its unique features. Also, encourage the inventors to attach detailed documents and drawings to provide an excellent description. Graphic representation leads to better understanding. It should quickly identify the problem, solution, and enhanced features compared to the conventional solutions. The inventors need to explain how the invention works and the value of pursuing a patent.

#2. Walk It Through

Contextualization is key. Apart from training and educating the inventors on filling the invention disclosure forms, you need to explain why it is essential. The inventors need to understand that the invention disclosure is part of a larger process crucial to the success of the enterprise.

Good quality invention disclosures help to:

  • Explain the new innovation
  • Simplify the evaluation process of patentability of the invention
  • Emphasize the chances at successful commercialization
  • Speed up the process by including all essential information

When the inventors understand the motivation behind good quality disclosures, they will be keener to write them better.  The better the innovation disclosure, the more likely that their idea is approved for patenting.

Tips for Effective Invention Disclosure: Explain why Invention Disclosure is essential

#3. Timely Assistance

Ensuring quick assistance when there is any confusion will speed capture by innovators. Often the inventors struggle with completing invention disclosures as they are not used to framing their contribution in the way. Make sure the inventors know where to seek help when they need it. Your organization can either appoint in-house personnel or outsource the task to IP professionals such as the patent attorney who drafts your patents. Establishing a good working relationship between the inventor and patent attorney will give the inventors insight into the essentials requirements for the invention capture.

Tips for Effective Invention Disclosure: Ensuring quick and timely assistance

#4. Examples

Provide the inventors and R&D staff with sample invention disclosures, where patents have been obtained successfully. If the corresponding product  is well known in the enterprise, that always helps.  Keep the invention disclosure form brief and straightforward, capturing only the necessary information. Allow them to include detailed documentation for the invention and drawings separately. At Triangle IP, we have created a simple, engaging, and customizable invention disclosure form (IDF), which is downloadable in both excel and word formats. Long and complex IDFs often discourage the inventors from filing invention disclosures. A well-written sample invention disclosure can be the yardstick for future disclosures to ensure high quality. 

Tips for Effective Invention Disclosure: Providing staff with sample invention disclosures

#5. Two Way Communication

Try to understand the reasons behind low-quality invention disclosures in your enterprise. Address the issues of the inventors to tailor the process to how they are accustomed to doing things. Keep the channel of communication open between inventors and innovation managers with transparency in the process. It allows them to understand each other’s perspectives and how innovation progresses through the process. There has to be clarity about the expectations from the inventors with visibility as their ideas mature into patents. The innovation managers should also be aware of the enablers and blockers of invention disclosure to capture more innovation. The invention disclosure process has to be two-way communication.

Tips for Effective Invention Disclosure: Two Way Communication

On a side note: Would you want to know how your patent application is progressing at the USPTO compared to other applications in the same domain? 

The TIP tool offers statistics of the law firm and the examiner handling your case. Once the application is filed at the USPTO, and an examiner is allotted to your case, the tool indicates the relative performance of the law firm handling your case. The statistics revolve around the number of arguments, grant rate, and grant time. The tool also indicates the case health, for instance, it can tell you if a case needs your attention. There is a whole bunch of insights that you can gather from the TIP tool for strategic patent prosecution.

Request insights for any of your cases at the patent office using the form below.

Takeaway:

The better the invention disclosure, the easier it is for the innovation manager to push it through to a patent. The more information you can get into the process, the easier it is to evaluate and draft the patent application. The quality of the input data determines the quality of the output.

An effective invention disclosure should:

  • Provide a solid background and characteristics of the invention 
  • Contain proper technical description, which is the heart of invention disclosure
  • Explain the key terms and jargon
  • Include a list of any known relevant prior art and how the invention is different
  • Be reviewer-friendly so the value to the enterprise is clear
  • Include diagrams or other pre-existing documentation

Find out ways to encourage more invention disclosures in the organization. Don’t miss out on patent protection due to a lack of invention disclosures or poorly filled disclosures.

Note: The preceding is general business advice and not to be construed as legal advice. IP laws vary by country and retaining licensed legal counsel is advised to confirm this information. Any expressed or implied opinions are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Triangle IP or any other entity who might be associated with the presenter. We hope this content is helpful to you, but should not be relied upon without confirming the advice and accuracy with local legal counsel. Any comments or inquiries are not confidential so please discuss your issues directly with counsel.

TIP Tool is free for Your Team

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A Guide to Launching a Patent Incentive Program

guide to patent reward program

Innovation is anything but business as usual. Here’s a step-by-step guide to launching a patent incentive program to promote innovation. 

We’ve converted this entire guide in PDF form that you can download and save for later reading (or sharing with your friends). You can download it using the form below:

Here’s an effective 4 point blueprint:

  1. Capture Ideas

Patents have become an increasingly vital aspect of business. In a competitive and fast-moving industry, protecting a company’s intellectual capital and encouraging innovation is crucial to the unimpeded growth of your business.  For strategic reasons, your company should carefully document innovative business-related ideas that your employees create and consider converting those ideas into patents.

  1. Evaluate Ideas

Set up a company patent committee that evaluates ideas submitted by employees, directs the filing of patent applications and manages your patent program.  Seek help in setting one up, if you do not have an in-house patent committee. Ensure that ideas are evaluated with an objective criteria to find the ideas most likely to protect the intellectual capital of the company within budgetary confines.

  1. Ensure Company Wide Participation

Invite all employees to submit ideas, using Invention Disclosure Forms.  Set up this infrastructure to ensure all employees across the board have access to these resources. Educate your personnel about the existence, availability and instructions of use of these tools

  1. Create a Reward Structure

Design an incentive policy or inventor bonus to encourage ideation among employees in your company. Although every idea submitted will not result in the writing of a patent; documenting and developing these ideas helps your company focus on our innovation and competitive advantage.

Here are some suggestions on how you can go about doing this. 

Divide the patent process into phases with a different reward structure for each phase, for example:

Phase One : Submission of Invention Idea

Set out criteria and requirements for submission of an idea to the Patent Committee or equivalent. Later the committee can pick the most promising innovation for protection. An important requirement is that the inventor provides enough technical detail to allow a proper understanding of the invention. You can choose a suitable Invention Disclosure Form template to record invention details.

Phase Two : Filing of Patent Application

Criteria for an inventor incentive under this category could include filing of a non-provisional US Patent application along with the signing of the requisite documents requested by the Committee by the employee/inventor. 

Phase Three : Issuance of Patent

If a patent application is successful you can give larger incentives. Criteria could include the event in which the Patent Office grants a patent without the Company abandoning the application.

The company can decide the type of incentives. Incentives can include cash reward, formal recognition or other benefits, proportionately set out for each phase. Presented below is a sample table that lays out the patent incentive program. 

Phase 1 : Submission of an Invention Idea

[1] All COMPANY employees are eligible to participate in the COMPANY Patent Incentive Program.

[2] Patents may only be applied for by actual inventors, and patent laws heavily penalize patent holders where actual inventorship is misrepresented during the process of applying for the patent.

Phase 2 - Filing of Patent Application

[3] Where COMPANY determines to file a provisional patent application, the Phase B reward would be payable at such later time, if any, as COMPANY converts the provisional patent application to a non-provisional patent application.

[4] Phase B reward applies solely to filing of patent applications in the United States, and not filings in any other countries.  Continuation and Divisional applications are not eligible for an incentive.

Phase 3 - Issuance of Patent

[5] Employee inventor(s) must cooperate in prosecuting the patent in the United States and abroad as requested by the Committee to remain eligible for a Phase C incentive.

[6] Only one Phase C monetary award is possible per employee inventor per patent application filed such that any continuation or divisional of the original patent application could not result in further awards.

On a side note: Would you want to know how your patent application is progressing at the USPTO compared to other applications in the same domain? 

The TIP tool offers statistics of the law firm and the examiner handling your case. Once the application is filed at the USPTO, and an examiner is allotted to your case, the tool indicates the relative performance of the law firm handling your case. The statistics revolve around the number of arguments, grant rate, and grant time. The tool also indicates the case health, for instance, it can tell you if a case needs your attention. There is a whole bunch of insights that you can gather from the TIP tool for strategic patent prosecution.

Request insights for any of your cases at the patent office using the form below.

Let’s Sum it Up

When creating a patent incentive program, you must make all terms and conditions of the program clear to the employees. Inventors will scrutinize the rules so leave no room for confusion.

Let the company retain the sole right to delete, suspend, discontinue or revise any of all provisions in the company ‘Patent Incentive Program’ at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.  Consider posting the latest policy on the company intranet.  The company patent committee must have the sole discretion to choose the ideas for filing as patents, choose which countries to file into, and to abandon patent applications when deemed warranted.

Remind your employees about the existence of the company patent program with an orientation at hiring and follow-up training.  Patentable ideas are among the company’s most sensitive information, and everyone must treat them with the utmost confidentiality.

At TriangleIP we have designed an intuitive drag and drop innovation management software to take care of your patent mining process. Definitely give it a try!

Infographic - Structure your own patent incentive program

Note: The preceding is general business advice and not to be construed as legal advice. IP laws vary by country and retaining licensed legal counsel is advised to confirm this information. Any expressed or implied opinions are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Triangle IP or any other entity who might be associated with the presenter. We hope this content is helpful to you, but should not be relied upon without confirming the advice and accuracy with local legal counsel. Any comments or inquiries are not confidential so please discuss your issues directly with counsel.

22 Tips to Master the 5 Skills of Disruptive Innovators

Become a disruptive innovator by mastering these 5 discovery skills

History is evident that disruptive innovators have the ability to change the world for better; be it Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk…

In his farewell letter to his employees, Jeff Bezos talked about innovation being the root of Amazon’s success. “We’ve done crazy things together, he said, and then made them normal.” Steve Jobs is always remembered for his words about innovators and trailblazers about whom he says “…while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Most people say – ‘Disruptive Innovators’ are wired differently. However, I feel what we are calling as wired differently is just a capability to see things from multiple perspectives. 

Clayton has called these perspectives “Discovery Skills”, in the book “The Innovator’s DNA”. Clayton claims if you can acquire these skills, you can also think like disruptive innovators. This implies if we can teach them to our teams, we can make our organization more innovative. Let’s see what are these ‘Discovery Skills’ and how we can teach them to our people:

  • Associating
  • Questioning
  • Observing
  • Networking
  • Experimenting

Disruptive Innovators | Discovery Skill #1 Associating

Disruptive Innovators | Discovery Skill #1 Associating

Being at the cusp of different disciplines and finding ways to associate them to create ideas that are out of the box is the first discovery skill. How do you train your mind to do this?

Tip #1 – Force New Associations

Combine things that you wouldn’t usually put together. Look around your home and life and find the two most used gadgets but unlikely to be used as a single one and force your mind to make the best possible association. We are picking a refrigerator and Google Home.

Refrigerator + Google Home

Let’s of think some potential associations:

  • How about talking to the refrigerator just the way we talk to Google Home and asking – “How many cartons of milk are left in the fridge?” instead of opening the fridge and checking ourselves.
  • Or how about asking the fridge to ring a bell when your home made ice-cream is set and ready to dig into? Just the way we ask Google Home to set timers.

As a systematic approach, create a table as follows. Pick a problem(s) you are facing, identify a random item or idea. For inspiration, look around you.  Now try to come up with an association of these two. Here are some examples for your reference:

Unsolved problemUnrelated random item or ideaPotential Association
How do I get more users to download my new mobile adventure treasure hunt gaming app?Running shoesCreate a feature where the game uses the phone camera as a projector and allows the user to treat it as a VR experience. 
How do I prepare my workforce for a post covid comeback?House plantCreate a temperature controlled outdoor, socially distanced workspace where masks need not be worn. Create an atmosphere that feels safe and comfortable and makes your workforce want to be present. 
……Your turn…….………………

Tip #2 – Take on a Different Persona

Take on a different persona. Even by physically altering the way you look and dress, you can force yourself to think like someone you are not. For example, if you’re looking for design innovations with a twist of utility, dress in a black t-shirt and blue jeans for a week so you can feel like Steve Jobs. Let his association of learning calligraphy to subsequently create fonts on his computers inspire you.

Tip #3 – Generate Metaphors and Analogies

Find ways to look at things from an uncommon perspective. Use metaphors and analogies to think of products that you could revolutionize. Ever thought of an AI powered smart ceiling lamp that can watch over patients? The device being smart enough to know if the patients are sitting, standing or laying down and to call out for help if they fall down. 

List of Products (“What if” Metaphor)Possible New Features/Benefits
What if” we aren’t controlling video game characters using a remote, but with our brains? What if they just so happen to be going exactly where we want, when we wanted?Mind control gaming with increased efficiency and lesser need of hand eye coordination
Device-less, play from anywhere, unrestricted game time 
What if” 
………Your turn……..………

Tip #4 – Build Your Own Curiosity Box

Collect and put together things from your travels and explorations, things that may not be useful even. Put them together in a box to trigger your curiosity or even display them where they jump out at you everyday. When faced with a problem, look at them and allow them to let you come up with out-of-the-box solutions. 

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Tip #5 – Use SCAMPER to Generate Breakthrough Ideas

SCAMPER! Substitute. Combine. Adapt. Magnify, Minimize, Modify. Put to other uses. Eliminate. Reverse, Rearrange. An acronym to inspire innovation and generate insight, use the concepts that this acronym stands for to rethink and allow you a fresh perspective to a problem you may be facing. 

SCAMPER ChallengeInvent a new type of Vending Machine  
SubstituteSubstitute salespersons at stores with vending machines – unmanned and cashless stores
CombineSell advertisement space by installing a screen
 
AdaptInstall QR codes/screens for digital payments
Magnify, minimize, modifyModify receiving tray to be soft and padded to minimize breakage of delicate items
Put to other useTurn traditional vending machine into fresh juicer by replacing packaged food and drink with fresh fruit and juicing mechanism
EliminateEliminate the keypad to punch in codes for products. Maybe use a touchscreen for product selection.
Reverse, rearrangeInstead of taking stuff out of a vending machine, humans get inside and use it as plug and play office

You might also like to read this post on “Innovations in Aerogels With SCAMPER”.

Disruptive Innovators | Discovery Skill #2 Questioning

Disruptive Innovators | Discovery Skill #2 Questioning

Questioning is the art of learning. Questions seek and frame and expose. Answers change over time, with varying degrees of accuracy and subjectivity. But ask the right questions and you will be amazed how the doors to innovation open. 

Tip #6 – Engage in QuestionStorming

When brainstorming finds you caught in a rut, try QuestionStorming. When you sit down together as a team, ask What if, What caused, Why, Why not, What is questions. Write down every question and once listed, prioritize and discuss the most important or intriguing ones to find better solutions.

Tip #7 – Cultivate Question Thinking

When discussing products and/or innovations within your company, convert your statements into questions. By reformulating statements into questions, you will find not only do the problems you are facing become clearer and help members of your team feel responsible for solutions. Teach your team members in the orientation session about the first principle of thinking. You would love reading this one too – “7 ways to Encourage Innovative Thinking at Your Workplace”.

Tip #8 – Track your QnA Ratio

Keep tabs on your Q&A ratio. Studies have shown that disruptive innovators ask more questions than give answers. And more often than not, good questions generate greater value than good answers. 

Tip #9 – Cultivate your own Question Bank

Maintain a record of your questions as your own written question bank. Keep revisiting these questions to identify patterns and categorize the kinds of questions you are asking. When you do, question your own questions to disrupt your thought to lead to better innovation.   

The table below will help you ask the right questions. 

 Describe the TerritoryDisrupt the Territory
Innovator’s DNA SkillsWhat is? Who? What? When? Where? How?What caused it?Why? Why not?What if? How might?
Observing    
Networking    
Experimenting    

Ask more questions when you go through your question bank. Question your questioning patterns, try and understand which questions generate emotional responses, see what kind of questions lead you best into disruptive thinking patterns.   

Disruptive Innovators | Discovery Skill #3 Observing

Disruptive Innovators | Discovery Skill #3 Observing

Whether it was Einstein with his theory of Gravity or Galileo measuring time with a pendulum; all innovators, thinkers and makers had something in common. They noticed, they observed and they theorized. Observation is the bedrock of innovation. It is where innovation starts. 

Tip #10 – Observe Customers

Observe the people you are making your product for, the existing customers. Observe how these customers experience your product. Look out for what they enjoy most about your product, and look out for what is leaving them dissatisfied about it. Is there a functional connect only or is your product leaving your customer emotionally connected? 

Tip #11 – Observe Companies

Identify a company you like, or one that inspires you. It may be a blue chip company or a trailblazing start-up. Dig into its hows and whys and think of ways you could incorporate its ideas into your business or product. 

Tip #12 – Make Observation a Habit

Set time aside everyday to observe. Make it a task in your daily to do list. Set aside a few minutes each day to observe the world around you, or a part of it that catches your fancy. Note down (this may even be photographs and videos on your phone) your observations and review them every once in a while. 

Tip #13 – Observe With All your Senses

Observe with more than just your mind. Whether you are observing customers, another company or the world around you, observe with all your senses. Make it a habit to see, taste, hear, smell and feel every experience. Make notes about what responses various experiences trigger in you. You never know what explosive idea is hiding under a whiff of something!

Disruptive Innovators | Discovery Skill #4 Networking

Disruptive Innovators | Discovery Skill #4 Networking

Idea networking is about you stepping out of your comfort zone and engaging with people who have thoughts that may be different from your own. Fresh thoughts, ideas and perspectives are a powerful arsenal to carry in your toolkit. 

Tip #14 – Expand your Network Diversity

If you are the smartest person in a room, you are in the wrong room. So, like Tony Robbins says, surround yourself with people who are successful, who are forward-moving, who are positive, who are focused on producing results, who support you, it will challenge you to be more and do more and share more. If you can surround yourself with people who will never let you settle for less than you can be, you have the greatest gift that anyone can hope for. Expand the diversity of your network. Engage with people of different ages, socio-economic backgrounds, gender, profession, industry, countries. 

Tip #15 – Start a Mealtime Networking Plan

Don’t have the time to expand your network? Start doing so over a meal. Have a meal with someone in your organization or social circle you never would ordinarily. Step outside your comfort zone if you have to to engage with a person you may not always agree with. 

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Tip #16 – Plan and Attend New Events Each Year

Attend conferences and seminars as an opportunity to network and learn alongside. Choose a couple of conferences/seminars to attend in a year – one in a subject that interests you and another that is outside your comfort zone. This is a great way to meet people with different perspectives.

Tip #17 – Foster a Creative Community

Become part of, or better still, initiate a creative community and meet regularly to nurture ideas beyond your workplace. Invite outsiders to these meetings to get fresh ideas. Let the people you invite be a healthy mix of experts and novices so you can draw on both experience and raw enthusiasm. Train with the experts and let the exuberance of newness ignite your passion.

Disruptive Innovators | Discovery Skill #5 Experimenting

Disruptive Innovators | Discovery Skill #5 Experimenting

Experimentation is fundamental to get insights and new knowledge and in relation to innovation, experimentation is usually seen as a “search for new value”, a journey to innovation.

Tip #18 – Cross Physical and Intellectual Borders

Changing spaces – both physical and intellectual help you break out of routine and fixed mindset. Visit new places – museums, libraries, parks. Join new professional or recreational activities, attend lectures, take an online class or indulge in art. Subscribe to content from different contexts and different geographies. When you open yourself up to alien information, you will see yourself shift from a routine mindset to a hypothesis-testing mindset. 

Tip #19 – Invest Time in Developing a New Skill

Find something you are passionate about beyond your work. Turn it into a skill that you work to develop. It could be painting or photography or ballet or yoga. If you don’t want to go that far, identify another function in your company and explore it deeply.

Tip #20 – Disassemble a Product and Build a Prototype of an Idea

Have something old at home that is gathering dust? Turn it into a weekend repair project. Take it apart, study it and try to reassemble it. Have something at home that you think you could make better? Engage in a product improvement project and turn it into a prototype! Play-doh and Lego are great to create prototypes with your kids and to initiate them into innovation early. 

Tip #21 – Be Regular with Piloting New Ideas

Pick up ideas from the idea books you are maintaining and make a commitment to yourself to carry out a pilot test of one of those every month. If it doesn’t work the first time, experiment on it the next time with a small tweak here and there.

Tip #22 – Go Trend Spotting

Stay up to date with the happenings around you and constantly be on the lookout for emerging trends. Look into the future with the resources you have today and try and think of how you can ride the trend wave.  

Let’s Sum It Up

In sum, remember to keep moving. Remember you don’t have to be born an innovator. You can join the league of disruptive innovators. And while you’re on the innovation treadmill, let Bezos’ words ring loud – “Keep inventing and don’t despair when at first the idea looks crazy. Remember to wander. Let curiosity be your compass. It remains Day 1.” 

Read Next: “How To Seek Investment Using Patents?

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Note: The preceding is general business advice and not to be construed as legal advice. IP laws vary by country and retaining licensed legal counsel is advised to confirm this information. Any expressed or implied opinions are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Triangle IP or any other entity who might be associated with the presenter. We hope this content is helpful to you, but should not be relied upon without confirming the advice and accuracy with local legal counsel. Any comments or inquiries are not confidential so please discuss your issues directly with counsel.

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