Intellectual property (IP) is often a company’s most valuable asset to protect future success. It’s the key to gaining a competitive edge, increasing your revenue stream, encouraging investment, and reducing infringement risks. The role of tailored patent strategies for different company sizes becomes essential in leveraging these assets for maximum benefit.

A patent management program that protects, enforces and manages these assets is critical to your company’s health. Like any valuable asset, increased control and visibility into your patent portfolio is crucial to continued success.

A comprehensive patent management system can centralize information and track and record assets in a streamlined manner with visibility to all stakeholders. A collaborative approach to your patent portfolio building keeps the process streamlined and aligned with the strategic goals of your enterprise.

But managing these assets requires the proper software tools.

As a patent attorney with more than two decades of experience in IP strategic planning, I specialize in arming my clients with the insights and tools they need to successfully navigate the patent landscape while efficiently building their patent portfolio.

After years in development while building client patent portfolios, my process for protecting intellectual capital is available for all — small and large — enterprises.

As founder of Triangle IP®, I’m proud to offer a cutting-edge cloud-based solution that simplifies the patent management process and helps companies capture enterprise-wide innovation and manage each patent throughout its life cycle using deep learning and data analytics.

Triangle IP’s TIP Tool™ democratizes patent portfolio management with ease-of-use functionality and real-world analytic insights into costs and patentability. All stakeholders have access appropriate to their role in the enterprise with real-time updates and regular updates from the patent office.

The TIP Tool rescues the user from an insanely complex information environment (that makes them dependent on outside counsel) to one where they have all the information they need to make informed and thoughtful decisions. Simplified analytics make strategic decisions simple.

With the TIP Tool, anyone can strategically manage a patent portfolio, just like we have become accustomed to for any other business process.

Gaps in Existing Idea and Patent Management Software Solutions

You’ll want to watch out for these gaps in existing patent management solutions:

• Inability to engage innovators in the patent mining process
• No real way to collaborate in real-time 
• Inability to provide actionable analytics to guide your strategy
• Inability to provide a holistic view of idea capture and patent pipelines
• Lack of cost-effective and simple solutions

Inability To Engage Innovators in the Patent Mining Process

Too often, the process of filling out an Invention Disclosure Form (IDF) is so complex that inventors are intimidated and discouraged from completing the task, or they fill it out inaccurately or incompletely. To address this, understanding ways to encourage more invention disclosures is crucial for capturing valuable ideas. Unfortunately, this results in potentially patentable ideas going uncaptured and lost to the public domain.

Absence of Simultaneous Editing Functionality

The collaboration process is critical to the development of patentable ideas. Unfortunately, IDFs and spreadsheets, sometimes used for patent management, lack collaboration capability with role-based access control for securing your innovation.

Also read: 7 Reasons Why Managing your Intellectual Property Assets on Excel Spreadsheet is a Bad Idea

Inability To Predict the Likelihood of Getting a Patent

Many factors may affect the allowance of your patent application, like the examiner on the case and statistical information about other similar applications. 

Too many available management solutions can’t show the general health of an IP application. They don’t show how your application is faring against other applications in the same domain as things progress throughout the process.

You cannot make informed patenting decisions without an indication of the likelihood of getting a patent or predicted cost.

Inability To Provide a Holistic View of Idea and Patent Pipelines

Very few patent management solutions provide an independent glimpse of the patent activity at your organization. Usually, a view like this requires the assistance of a patent counsel and the expense that goes with it.

The holistic view of the TIP Tool provides information like the patentability of submitted ideas, the enterprise value, and the general health of your patent portfolio.

Without the TIP Tool, it can take many hours to gather reports manually in an actionable format for holistic decision-making.

Lack of Cost Effectiveness

Generic solutions like spreadsheets, databases and CRM tools can be manually configured to serve your patent management. Solutions require extensive customization without advanced features like automatic synching with the patent office database or insight into the likelihood of getting a patent for your idea.

Existing patent management tools are too costly for all but the largest enterprises.  Add to that the expense of personnel to assist with the setup and management of the software.

Existing tools and platforms are impractical for businesses with the largest patent portfolios.

Also read: Salesforce and Jira Alternative for IP Management

Best Patent Management Software for SMEs

Simple to use yet comprehensive, the TIP Tool has a drag-and-drop interface while delivering all the features small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need to manage every phase of their patent life cycle.

Short, Simple and Intuitive IDF

The TIP tool makes it easy for innovators to participate in the patent mining process in the following ways:

• Provides a short and straightforward Invention Disclosure Form (IDF)
• Notifies innovators as their idea progresses through various stages in the IP life cycle

The TIP Tool also provides an offline version of the IDF, in Word or Excel, for offline use. 

And it’s possible to customize the IDF so you can gather information specific to your organization and modify existing fields as needed.

Also check: Invention Disclosure Form Word/Excel Template [Downloadable]

Seamless Real-Time Collaboration

The TIP Tool allows simultaneous collaboration with teammates to refine ideas. It also provides for managers to select the most promising IDFs in a vetting stage for patenting.

The following features allow members to collaborate as they would face-to-face:

• Team members can simultaneously edit any part of the idea text in an IDF
• They can add comments on published IDFs for others to see
• The TIP Tool tracks of every change made to an idea and keeps a record of the user who made the change

Case Health Powered By Patent Data

The TIP Tool provides patent analytics so you can make informed patent decisions. 

With the TIP Tool, you can:

• Know the likelihood of getting a patent on your idea and what it will cost
• Keep your file patent application in sync with patent office status updates
• Organize ideas using tags for different criteria

All this data can be used to guide strategic decisions for your application.

Dashboards To Keep Tabs on Your Innovation Pipeline

The TIP tool’s dashboard provides a holistic view of your idea pipeline, the filed USPTO applications and existing patents. Every user receives a dashboard with status information relevant to their role.

These dashboards can help you get a pulse on the quality of the ideas submitted, probable roadblocks and your inventor activity. 

Cost Effective

The TIP Tool is an easy-to-use comprehensive patent management solution that requires no customization.

With the TIP Tool, you save money on developers since you don’t need expensive modifications to a homegrown solution. Furthermore, since it’s intuitive and easy to use, you save money on management and training — anyone can use it. 

You save money on counsel since the TIP Tool provides many of the analytic insights you would otherwise have to pay for. And you save money by making decisions based on analytics rather than just guessing costs and likelihood of sucess.

Additionally, the TIP Tool offers a highly cost-effective pricing structure that makes this state-of-the-art tool accessible to almost anyone. You can check pricing details here.

Parting Thoughts

Unfortunately, for many companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, the necessary tools to efficiently patent their ideas are unavailable.

The TIP Tool provides organization, collaboration and insights that help everyone protect their inventions without complexity, expensive customizations or high legal costs. 

Inventors, innovation managers and any stakeholder in the patent procurement process can easily use this best-in-class patent manager, which provides: 

• collaborative innovation capture
• a pipeline to organize and track progress
• progress tracking after filing with world-class analytics and insights

The TIP Tool provides strategic protection of your innovations with a solution that requires no special training or expertise with the most cost-effective pricing.

Try it out here.