Open Innovation May Become The Newest Trend in Patenting

Patent rights are intended to help reward the innovative, create competitive advantages, and help spur competition and improvements to existing products and methods.  However, in certain circumstances, allowing for open innovation can be of great benefit. 

What is Open Innovation?

The concept of open innovation is that invention should be a collaborative effort with the sharing of both internal and external resources for achieving the best outcome in technological advances.  Historically, patent rights are achieved to obtain an exclusive right to the use and distribution of a new invention and protect owners through the exclusion of others, without license or royalty, or some agreement typically requiring monetary gain for the owner. 

Critics of patents and the patent system argue it creates monopolies, stifles collaboration, and in turn competition. The patent system can be disadvantageous for those unable to pay for the patenting process or those unable to pay the licensing fees to use another’s invention for keeping up with technology.  So, the idea of open innovation can potentially provide some advantages to multiple parties seeking similar goals.

How Open Innovation Can Help with COVID-19 Research

For example, with the rush to find a treatment, vaccine, or cure against COVID-19, pharmaceutical and medical supply companies, as well as governments across the globe are urgently working to discover an invention to help.  But what happens to everyone else when one company and/or one government own the rights to the discovery that can cure the world? 

With open innovation, companies, agencies, and governments alike should be able to find a medium to work together, allowing for the sharing of expertise of different people, collaborating in an effort to learn and achieve more and faster than in an isolated environment.  Such invention collaboration could be structured to provide certain incentivized benefits to all involved.  

Recent Programs Show Efforts Toward Open Innovation   

On May 1, 2020, the USPTO launched a six-month pilot program platform called Patents 4 Partnerships.  The program seeks to facilitate identification of inventions available for licensing and to assist IP owners and prospective licensees to come together.  Although this form of patent collaboration isn’t in discovery of the invention, it does provide open innovation by allowing parties with like interests to collaborate on options for pending inventions as well as issued patents requiring funding for further benefit and use. 

The Patents 4 Partnership is an easy-to-use searchable platform and has initially been populated with inventions related to “prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of, or protection from, the coronavirus disease.”  More information on the program can be found at: Patents 4 Partnerships Memo and the Patents 4 Partnerships Platform.

Another effort for open innovation is found in the Open COVID Pledge.  This is a pledge developed by the Open COVID Coalition requesting organizations to voluntarily pledge to help stop the spread of COVID-19 by making their relevant IP freely available to the public for review.  The pledge involves a 3-step process, including adoption of an Open COVID License (OCL) or other self-constructed license option matching the spirit of the pledge.

A similar effort for open innovation is found in the Open COVID-19 Declaration that was founded by Japanese companies. The companies, in essence, are declaring not to assert any worldwide IP rights on any intellectual property they own with technology for the purpose to stop the spread of the disease, until the World Health Organization (WHO) declares the end of a public health emergency of international concern.  This would allow third parties access to the IP of the declaring companies to freely use the information for further research and development without the delays that come with patent and copyright rights enforcement and licensing.  The declaration provides for patent collaboration in an open innovation structure under specific guidelines to further a common goal. 

Key Takeaways On The Advantages of Open Innovation 

As much as patent rights have important, and often detrimental, significance for rights owners, the need for invention collaboration and sharing of findings for achieving a common goal through open innovation is recently growing as inventors seek to:

• Communicate with experts in different areas to help advance research;

• Help speed up the progress in development of an invention;

• Avoid or at least cut down on the time and money associated with dealing with IP rights; and

• Help simplify licensing.

For more insights on patents, see our Patent Services Overview and Health Technology Industry Legal Solutions pages.

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