Report On Tellectual Property Course Completion
My knowledge of intellectual property
The 21st century is the era of knowledge economy, and innovation is the soul of knowledge economy. Intellectual property strategy is an important part of enterprise development strategy. Intellectual property rights mainly include patents, trademarks, Copyrights, trade secrets, integrated circuit layout design, etc. Enterprise research and development of new products (here refers to the general products, including all of the tangible and intangible products) will invest a lot of manpower and material resources and financial resources, if not effectively protect intellectual property rights, so the competition will be by imitation, reproduction, reverse engineering, commercial espionage methods such as low cost to obtain intellectual property rights, so as to produce new products to participate in market competition. Because its new products have no research and development costs, its lower pricing strategy can seriously damage innovative companies with high initial research and development costs, sometimes fatal. Here are some of my experiences after learning.
Let's take a look at Microsoft, which is the first company that let know about intellectual property rights. The protection of intellectual property has always been a vital priority for tech companies. What is Microsoft's strategy as a professional software development company? Simply, Microsoft's business model is IQ and IP. Microsoft needs to attract talented people to the company to create good products, and then protect the commercialization process of invention and creation through the intellectual property system, so as to guarantee the continuous innovation of the company. Windows. Microsoft’s strategy is to make full use of the growing power of microprocessors and continuously improve the capabilities of the operating system so that enterprise users who use the operating system can meet the changing demands and that individual users benefit most from the computing experience. Also, the continuous update of its operating systems and office software helps the company fights with IP plagiarism activities since each update make others not easy to copy its IP.
What surprised me most in IP law
Mention the most lucrative patent, and you can't get past Lipitor, the chemical name atorvastatin, a lipid-lowering drug developed by Pfizer at the end of the last century. With the continuous improvement of people's living standard and the gradual change of people's diet, the incidence of hyperlipidaemia increases significantly every year. The single product generated more than $100 billion in net profits for Pfizer during its 20-year patent protection period, of which the monopoly profits generated by patents are fundamental. Different types of patent filings are changing. For compound patents, from the first application of compound patents in 1990 to the application of compound patents in 2007, most of the patents focus on the salt of compound and its preparation method, and there are relatively few derivatives on the structure of compound. For compositions, the patent application period is mainly between 1998 and 2008, among which more patents focus on the combination of Lipitor and other drugs while the preparation method is relatively less, only one in 1993. For dosage form patents, the application began in 2000 and continued until 2006, most of which focused on the formulation itself, especially in 2003 and 2004. For utility patents, the patent application period is mainly between 1998 and 2008, among which more patents focus on the combination of Lipitor and other drugs, while there are relatively few new applications, only one was filed in 2002. For intermediates, the patent distribution is relatively small. There were only 5 patents from 1989 to 2008. Among them, the intermediate that was applied for protection in 1989 should belong to the precursor drug of Lipitor, which was not invented at that time.
Therefore, it can be seen that in order to effectively extend the patent protection of Lipitor, the applicant has conducted patent protection from multiple aspects to the technology, so as to extend the protection time of the technology as much as possible to achieve the purpose of benefiting from it. In the study on the combination of Lipitor and other drugs in the patent WO9911260A1, which was found that the combination of avastatin or its medical salt and antihypertensive drugs has a good effect on patients with angina pectoris, atherosclerosis, mixed hypertension and hyperlipidaemia, as well as those with heart risk symptoms.
Patent WO9930704A1 involving ammonia chloride and simvastatin add butyl adduct and composite material, the synergistic combination are used in the treatment of patients with angina pectoris, atherosclerosis, combined hypertension and hyperlipidaemia patients and treatment of patients with symptoms of main symptom is heart risks, this is the product is now on sale – amlodipine.
The detailed explanation of the case of Lipitor aims to remind us that there are detailed law of IP that protect the patents of a company from a number of aspects and they have different features in different industries or business sectors. And this kind of protection usually has a period for a company to sell its patented products on the market without certain competitors that can directly copy its formula and produce similar products. The outcome is that this company can rely on such components of the IP law to be easier to become successful on the market, which can be seen as a reward for its old investments on research and development activities. However, this period of protecting of IP will disappear one time since when one company dominates a company for a long time, it will have two great negative effects. On the first hand, the price of the products will be at higher levels, which is not good for the benefits of the general public. On the other hand, the patent owner will not be willing to invest more on research and development for the development of new products in order to remain its competitiveness since it can be easily achieved when it has a market monopoly power when there is no limited period for protecting its IP.
The application of what learnt from this course
The meaning of patent mining is to analyse, sort out, split and screen the technical achievements obtained from the technical and legal aspects in the process of technology research and development or product development, so as to determine the technical innovation points and technical solutions for patent application. Patent mining is to find that can be used to apply for a patent from the scientific research and production of innovative, make scientific research achievements are fully protected, thus makes possible the return of their creative work in the process of scientific research, is an extremely rich skills of creative activity, is the technology innovation in the form of a patent, become the intangible asset of the enterprise. The exploitation of patent should be based on the grasp of technological innovation, which is the follow-up work of technological innovation and can fully reflect the innovation ability of the enterprise or unit. The patent formed after patent mining is valuable intangible assets of the enterprise unit.
Under the open innovation paradigm, identification of application areas of the internally developed technologies is important to maximize the profits from them. However, many companies have failed to identify opportunity for additional applications. The fundamental reason is that companies have insufficient understanding of the potential applications of their technologies, because different industries use far different technologies and technological terminologies. However, technologies can be linked with outside industries by analyzing them from the functional perspective, because functions used in different industries are generally similar. Therefore, one implication of this course is about the proposal of a function-based patent analysis to identify the potential application areas of a technology. In general, technologies in a patent are invented for use in a specific industry, and thus a patent can be categorized into a specific industry. By identifying patents, which contain a specific function, industries that use the function can be identified. Industries in which the importance of the function is relatively high can be considered as areas in which technologies performing the function have potential to be applied, and the proposed indexes evaluate the relative importance of the function within each industry.
Finally, the practical usefulness of the proposed method was verified by identifying the potential areas in which vortex reduction technology can be applied.In addition, companies also need a keen sense of smell to pay attention to reality. In an uncertain business environment, competitive intelligence requires peripheral vision to scan and identify weak signals that can affect the future business environment. Weak signals are defined as imprecise and early indicators of impending important events or trends, which are considered key to formulating new potential business items. However, existing methods for discovering weak signals rely on the knowledge and expertise of experts, whose services are not widely available and tend to be costly. They may even provide different analysis results. Therefore, this paper presents a quantitative method that identifies weak signal topics by exploiting keyword-based text mining. The proposed method is illustrated using Web news articles related to solar cells. As a supportive tool for the expert-based approach, this method can be incorporated into long-term business planning processes to assist experts in identifying potential business items.
Simply in future business, we can start with the following steps:
h2Let technicians to talk about what they think are innovative. Technicians are most familiar with the entire research and development process and the technical field, but it's easy to "lose sight of the truth”. This requires patent excavators to record core innovations in a detailed manner and capture detailed innovations.
h2The product is divided into core parts and secondary parts, and corresponding core patents and peripheral patents are generated. The patent excavators should start from the core to the secondary, and carry out comprehensive patent mining with the innovation points explained by technicians.
h2The patentee collates all the innovation points found and discusses with the technical personnel to explore alternative and extendable solutions of the patent application. For example, if there are other solutions for one innovation that are temporarily unavailable with existing technologies or other reasons, you can also consider applying a patent for the idea separately.
Suggestions on course
With respect to what reflected above and the entire experiences of participating in this course, there are generally three suggestions can be proposed for this course in order to help it improve in future. Some of the topics introduced in the lectures are still not so clear, which makes it hard for me to understand. One of the examples is the framework for the managing of IP within an organization. Although there are figures and texts about its explanation, it is still not easy to understand. Thus, it is recommendable for future course to offer one field example on how this framework is specifically implemented in business practices.
In addition, although there are a great number of group activities on this course that can benefit our understanding of the topic taught. I think there was too many of them and thus each of them cannot be done in an in-depth level. Then, it is recommendable for the course to reduce its number of group activities but enhance its quality.
Last but not least, after learning this course, we may find that it is not easy to apply them although we may have a good understanding of the topics involved. Then, it is recommendable to provide more specific examples especially those in the contexts of Singapore that we can directly apply them when we find our first jobs upon graduation.
