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…
If your technology transfer office (TTO) has a large tech portfolio, you certainly don’t have time to actively market every innovation. Even if your portfolio is on the smaller side, doing so is probably not the most efficient use of your time and resources. Let’s face it, some technologies have greater market potential than others. That’s why Fuentek finds our technology screening process to be critical to efficiently weeding out technologies that are not ready for licensing, helping you get to the best—fast.
Our most recent poll asked the question: What does your TTO do with a technology once the patenting process has started: wait for the patent to issue, assess the tech’s fit in the market, or begin marketing? Results are in and, as you can see below, th …
Laura Schoppe and I had a great time yesterday presenting our “Putting Your Interns to Work: A Step-by-Step Process for Technology Screenings” webinar. If you followed Fuentek’s tweets with the #techscreen hashtag, you have a reasonable sense of what w …
Ask anyone who works in intellectual property management and they’ll tell you: Patents ain’t cheap. (Well, some would use better grammar, but the sentiment is the same.) We’re talking $20K for a U.S. filing alone, and that doesn’t include the ongoing m …
Having obtained some interesting information in our social media survey last month, Fuentek has started conducting online polls. And the results for our first poll are in! The question was: How long does it take from the time you receive an invention d …
Last week, I was talking with a tech transfer professional about our webinar to train interns on performing technology screenings. And the question came up: Why interns? Shouldn’t technology managers screen technologies? I can understand why he asked.
The cost of a screening is comparable regardless of whether it is performed by a professional or a student intern. (Remember that there are costs associated with mentoring and managing interns.) And a screening does not have to be time consuming. In our IP management services, we take only a few hours to perform a screening.
Effectively managing intellectual property (IP) requires being selective about where to direct your limited resources. Not every technology can (or should) go to market. So how do you determine which innovations are poised for commercialization success and which have low-potential and should be released/abandoned? For the most efficient use of resources, the best practice is to start with a technology screening. Today we’ll consider what that involves. Triage First to Check for Red Flags When a technology first comes into the office — usually in the form of an invention disclosure — there is the preliminary step of confirming that the technology doesn’t have any major show-stoppers. Before investing any resources in screening the technology…
As one of the most important discoveries in the field of applied mathematics in NASA history, HHT is a revolutionary, adaptive set of signal-analysis algorithms. This innovation had great commercialization success with multiple licenses and more than 400 Software Usage Agreements. Fuentek played a major role in the successful commercialization of NASA’s HHT technology.
