Innovation Capture

The research and development (R&D) process can require considerable investment in both time and money. But, in the rush to market, it can be difficult for R&D teams to identify those innovations that are of most value for protection as patents. Novagraaf’s Innovation Capture service and our new dedicated portal ‘Novaneo’ have been designed to help companies to achieve this goal.

How does a busy R&D team focus its efforts in order to methodically extract innovations for protection as patents, while avoiding those areas where little gain is to be found? While all businesses want to find ‘nuggets’ of value for the future, in the rush to deliver, it is all too easy to overlook potentially valuable, but non-core, innovations – or to focus R&D in the wrong areas. 

The ability of a business to deliver on its goals of building a strong and defensible patent portfolio will often depend on the guidelines and processes it puts in place at the very beginning of the R&D cycle.

An independent view

To successfully capture innovation, in-house patent teams or their external advisers need to have mechanisms in place to identify, extract and analyse inventions. Ideally, this is achieved via an organised dialogue between patent experts and the R&D teams (and/or inventors) in line with a pre-agreed and structured methodology. To be effective, this methodology needs to guide technical teams, enabling them to detect and/or improve innovation within the company.

Novagraaf has created such a methodology in ‘Innovation Capture’, a service that we deliver in association with innovation specialist Neo Factory, a company that focuses on the creation and industrialisation of innovative products.