Screening Techs Before Patenting Pays Off: Running the Numbers

Danielle McCulloch formerly served as a Fuentek vice president. She transitioned to our client and is now Deputy Program Manager for NASA’s Flight Opportunities program.

I was chatting with a Fuentek colleague last week who had recently run some numbers related to the technology screening work we have been doing for a client. Two facts came up that I wanted to share.

The first related to saved patenting costs. We have screened lots of invention disclosures for this client, and over time we’ve rated a total of 134 techs as having low or medium-low commercial potential, recommending that the client not patent them. Cost savings: $3.355 million (assuming $25K/patent). Great news, though not surprising when you do the math on the value of technology screenings.

My colleague also showed me the graph below, which charts year-by-year patent application filings (blue) and patents issued (green) from before we started screening the client’s technologies to date. Of course, there is a lag between when an application is filed and when the patent issues, but let’s set aside the actual yearly numbers (dashed lines) and look at the trends (solid lines). The convergence of the applications-filed and the patents-issued trends depicts that, armed with the findings of our screenings, the client is applying for protection for technologies that have a high likelihood of receiving a patent. A higher “hit rate” means less money is being spent filing applications for unpatentable technologies.

Fuentek screenings helped our client make better decisions about which techs warrant filing for patent protection, resulting in a better “hit rate” in terms of issued patents.If you still need convincing regarding the value of screenings, download our free webcast on why it’s important to screen invention disclosures before patenting. It was excerpted from our webinar “A Step-by-Step Process for Technology Screenings,” which provides exactly that. The recorded webinar is available for purchase, and the video comes with a free live Q&A session with yours truly. (You might like this post about the last Q&A we did for our screening webinar.)

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Technology Evaluation & Strategy Development