Reddi Kotha

Phillip H. Kim

Oliver Alexy

<article-ideainbrief class="article-ideainbrief">
 <h4 class="ideainbrief-title">Idea in Brief</h4>
 <div class="ideainbrief-contents">
  <h5>The Problem</h5>
  <p>Many inventors struggle to commercialize their inventions or discoveries successfully. All too often large companies, investors, or others walk off with the fruits of a scientist’s work.</p>
  <h5>Why It Happens</h5>
  <p>Commercial success with a new technology depends on the exclusive ownership of a critical asset or capability. But to create the technology, innovators draw on knowledge from many different sources. Inventors who mismanage that tension often fail to successfully commercialize their innovations.</p>
  <h5>The Solution</h5>
  <p>To manage the tension, inventors must successfully avoid the following traps: prematurely disclosing proprietary information; neglecting policeability; failing to demonstrate originality; overrelying on known science; failing to stake out the best territory; mismanaging attribution; and falling into funders’ clutches.</p>
 </div>
</article-ideainbrief><p>The average adult human body holds about 40 liters of water to support its metabolic processes. Burn victims can lose nearly 37 liters of water a day because of the damage to their skin. Traditional treatment of burn patients involves painful surgery and often a grueling series of follow-up operations. After witnessing a procedure on a severely burned farmer, Lynn Allen-Hoffmann vowed to find a way to help these patients. She embarked on a decade of research and conducted more than 1,000 experiments, and in 1999 she patented a skin substitute derived from normal-tissue cell lines.</p>

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<p><span class="reprint">Reprint: R1411F</span></p>
<p>Commercial success with a new technology usually depends on the exclusive ownership of a critical asset or capability. But to create the technology, an innovator draws on knowledge from many different sources. Inventors who mismanage that tension often fail to successfully commercialize their innovations.</p>
<div class="article-callout">
<div class="callout-contents">
<p>Inventors should carefully identify and protect the most profitable potential applications of an invention before competitors enter the fray.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>To understand how to manage the tension, the authors carried out a comprehensive analysis of more than 1,000 inventions from the University of Wisconsin&#8217;s Technology Transfer Office. They interviewed the TTO&#8217;s senior leadership, IP managers, licensing and contract managers, legal counsel, and other staff to get firsthand knowledge of how inventions were evaluated for commercial potential.</p>
<p>From this research they identified seven IP traps that unwary inventors (individuals and companies alike) fall into when developing scientific discoveries and inventions for the commercial market. The traps include publicly disclosing information prematurely, neglecting to enforce patent infringements, failing to demonstrate sufficient originality, overrelying on known science, failing to stake out the best territory for applications of the technology, mismanaging attribution of contributors, and ceding too much control over IP to funders.</p>
<p>Drawing on examples encountered in their research, the authors describe these traps and offer advice on how to avoid them.</p>

Turn Your Science into a Business

Reprint: R1411F Commercial success with a new technology usually depends on the exclusive ownership of a critical asset or capability. But to create the technology, an innovator draws on knowledge from many different sources. Inventors who mismanage that tension often fail to successfully commercialize their innovations. Inventors should carefully identify and protect the most profitable potential applications of an invention before competitors enter the fray. To understand how to manage the tension, the authors carried out a comprehensive analysis of more than 1,000 inventions from the University of Wisconsin’s Technology Transfer Office. They interviewed the TTO’s senior leadership, IP managers, licensing and contract managers, legal counsel, and other staff to get firsthand knowledge of how inventions were evaluated for commercial potential. From this research they identified seven IP traps that unwary inventors (individuals and companies alike) fall into when developing scientific discoveries and inventions for the commercial market. The traps include publicly disclosing information prematurely, neglecting to enforce patent infringements, failing to demonstrate sufficient originality, overrelying on known science, failing to stake out the best territory for applications of the technology, mismanaging attribution of contributors, and ceding too much control over IP to funders. Drawing on examples encountered in their research, the authors describe these traps and offer advice on how to avoid them.

Turn Your Science into a Business

Summary.

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