To maintain the competitive advantage a company hopes to gain, it must protect its innovations.
In this context, what role does intellectual property play?
Specifically, is a patent a sufficient measure of protection?
How can this tool be best used and how can this strategy be implemented over the long term?
An analysis follows.

INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY: DEFINITION AND ISSUES

Industrial property aims to protect and enhance the value of industrial and commercial inventions, innovations, and creations . In this respect, it notably encompasses:

• Patents for invention;
• Utility certificates;
• The brands;
• Industrial designs and models;
• Geographical indications protecting industrial and artisanal products.

In France, the INPI (National Institute of Industrial Property) is the authority responsible for protecting industrial property rights. Therefore, applications for intellectual property titles should primarily be filed with this organization.

Industrial property aims to provide you with legal protection when you are the originator of an inventive creation and wish to retain exclusive rights to its exploitation for 20 years, which is the very purpose of the patent. Indeed, without this legal tool, your competitors would be entitled to reuse and market your invention.

Intellectual property is therefore a key tool for your competitiveness if you are an innovative player in your market. Tech startup founders preparing to raise funds are well aware of this. They will need to provide solid evidence of the barriers to entry they will be able to create against larger, established competitors.

The 3 criteria to be met for a patent to be accepted

• The invention must be novel : no prior art or invention can be found. No one (including yourself) should have publicly discussed what you wish to patent.

• To be inventive : the claimed invention must not be obvious to humans or the profession, according to the established formula. In other words, you cannot file a patent on a process that is obvious and accessible to everyone, for example, "filling a glass of water".

• To have an industrial application: it is impossible to claim a common good or a natural effect that does not result from the work of invention or ingenuity of skilled professionals. The object of the invention must have a technical effect.
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INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY: IS IT ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY TO FILE A PATENT?

When developing a new technology, filing a patent can be absolutely essential. However, there are also situations where it will be advantageous NOT to file a patent!

Filing a patent is like taking antibiotics: it's not automatic!

Filing a patent will be worthwhile if it:

• allows you to generate a real advantage over your competitors
• or contributes favorably to the image of your company or increases your chances of mobilizing funding (PIA, Fundraising, Accelerators, CIR/CII…).

Conversely, you will likely benefit from taking other forms of protection (and in particular from preserving your freedom to operate ) if, for example:

• Proving counterfeiting will be difficult (reverse engineering)
• Your demands are very specific and can easily be circumvented (by changing the ingredients or the proportions and composition of a recipe)
• The pace of innovation is so rapid that obsolescence will catch up with the invention before the end of the patent application processing cycle
• Or, when you believe it is more advantageous to offer standards to the market while leaving the technology royalty-free

AND ONCE THE PATENT IS FILED?

Filing your patent application is not the end of the journey. To make this investment truly worthwhile, you will now need to (even more so) your competitors' patent filings !

For what ?

This monitoring has several objectives:

• You must ensure over time that the expenses you will continue to incur (geographic expansions, annual maintenance of rights) remain justified and useful. Conversely, continuing to maintain an outdated patent, or one that has been circumvented a hundred times, is no longer worthwhile.

• Monitor potential infringers : keep an eye on your competitors and their future filings, and if necessary, contact the patent office. If the patent office does not issue a favorable response to a disputed competing patent, you could still challenge it later before the appropriate courts, but this will be more expensive and also riskier.

• Undermining competing patent applications : Monitoring the competition is a good way to block the granting of a patent that could be detrimental to your company. Indeed, after the publication of a pending patent application (following the 18-month confidentiality period for the initial application), you have a few months to demonstrate to the examining office that it is inconsistent, for example, due to a lack of inventiveness or the prior existence of another document already in the public domain before the filing date of the patent in question.

Hence the importance of always keeping an eye on patent applications filed in your sector of activity…but also of having a broader monitoring of scientific publications and conferences.

See also: Prior art and patent searches: the guide

Therefore, monitoring the patent activities of your competitors helps to protect your innovations, to effectively manage your own patent portfolio, but will also allow you to detect and prosecute potential infringers or to block early on requests from your competitors that could prove troublesome for you.

INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY: HOW TO MONITOR ALL NEW PATENT APPLICATIONS?

In some sectors, up to 1000 to 1500 new patent applications can be published worldwide each month.

However, experience shows that only 10 to 15% may prove relevant to monitor.

Given the sheer volume of data to process and the strategic nature of this task, this activity can require up to four to five days of one person per month. Not only is this mission time-consuming, but it is also often perceived as tedious and unrewarding by intelligence and analysis teams. Fortunately, machine learning tools that allow this work to be completed quickly and efficiently.

Read also: State of the art: how to relieve your teams of long, laborious, yet strategic work?

Designed to facilitate and accelerate the analysis of heterogeneous data, the software platform developed by TKM automates patent monitoring. Combined with the expertise of our team, it provides a global, 360° view of a given universe and enables rapid and relevant multi-source data searches and analyses.

Detection of problematic patents, mapping of competing patents, identification of counterfeiters, building a map of your strategic environment and your research and innovation ecosystem…

Thanks to TKM Platform, you are able to best protect your innovations by conducting targeted competitive intelligence and spending no more than 10 minutes per month on the tedious tasks that this activity inevitably brings.