Should we manage the process of inventing? Designing for patentability

Intellectual property is considered to provide the infrastructure of innovation, and companies could proactively generate their intellectual assets and strengthen the business opportunities by focusing on discovery phases. This paper examines whether the invention process can be managed and finds th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc 2017, Vol.28 (4), p.457-475
Main Authors: Kokshagina, Olga, Le Masson, Pascal, Weil, Benoit
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business administration
CAE) and Design
Computer-Aided Engineering (CAD
Engineering
Engineering Design
Engineering Sciences
Humanities and Social Sciences
Innovations
Intellectual property
Inventions
Model testing
Original Paper
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Summary:Intellectual property is considered to provide the infrastructure of innovation, and companies could proactively generate their intellectual assets and strengthen the business opportunities by focusing on discovery phases. This paper examines whether the invention process can be managed and finds that patents appear not only as a result of inventive activity but as the purpose as well. By building on recent design theories such as the concept–knowledge design theory, this research introduces a general framework that enables controlling for ‘patentability’ criteria, describes a patent in a unique way using actions, effects, and associated knowledge, and defines a patentable subject matter based on the notion of the person skilled in the art. Using the introduced model, several patent design methods are compared and their performances are characterized. The model was tested within the European semiconductor manufacturer, STMicroelectronics. The results indicate that the quality of patent proposals depends on the capacity to extend existing knowledge combinations, to overcome the initial design reasoning of the person skilled in the art, and to ensure novelty and sufficient inventive step. Finally, the proposed model in this research, the ‘design-for-patentability’ model, demonstrates that there is an unexplored property of the concept–knowledge design theory—non-substitution—showing that the order within design is irreversible and influences the quality of results.
ISSN:0934-9839
1435-6066
DOI:10.1007/s00163-016-0245-0