During my time as a mechanic, crew chief, data engineer and team manager in the auto racing industry, I witnessed inventions that were not only difficult to ideate but even more difficult to patent. I participated in brainstorming sessions with some of the most talented auto engineers in the world, working out aerodynamics, maximum speeds and efficiency. Oddly enough, that was often the least challenging part of the process in securing a patent for our ideas.
Once we were ready to move forward with discovering whether a patent already existed, I realized there were two major hurdles blocking the path to the finish line. First, when using a tool like Google Patents, the time to search for an existing patent requires sifting through hundreds of thousands of drawings and patents. Once you’ve done that, it’s absolutely imperative that you remember to document the entire process since you’ll need to prove to the patent office that you’ve completed a thorough search.
If you don’t have the time or you are not comfortable with performing your own search, many inventors and companies opt to pay an experienced patent attorney upwards of $3,000 to perform it for them, which may produce the undesirable result of having your patent application rejected by the U.S. Patent Office after years of work and hefty financial investment.
In fact, over $1 trillion is wasted globally in R&D spending each year, largely because of global intellectual property laws and processes. This wasted productivity accounts for nearly 80% of the global R&D budget. For companies that need to innovate and apply for patents frequently, the cost can represent a disproportionately large part of their overall budget before tools like InnVenn became available.
On the other hand, for the inventors that are moonlighting, they commonly lack capital initially, making a thorough patent search and filing a financially insurmountable task. So much so, that many inventors are forced to go straight to market or never follow through with their invention. These scenarios perfectly describe how the idea for Loci was born.
In 2008, I devised InnVenn, a concept for a patent searching protocol that saves time and money, both of which many inventors would rather spend on research and development or marketing. InnVenn, a visual searching tool for patents, was designed to reduce the cost and simplify the process of identifying patents and more importantly, identifying ideas that have not yet been patented. I applied for a patent in 2012 once my team and I had worked out the product, which is now used by the everyday inventor and patent attorneys to conduct a less expensive and time consuming patent search.
By organizing the data in a venn diagram of keywords for easy searching. Each patent is logged as a ‘dot’ in the appropriate section; once clicked, a summary of the patent appears. Within seconds, you will be able to decide whether or not that patent is relevant to your research. If it is, you can click on an external link to view the full patent.
With the addition of blockchain technology, InnVenn enables for the first time a court-admissible, immutable ledger to determine who searched their invention first. If you have entered keywords for an invention that has yet to be patented, the next time someone searches your keywords, a dot will appear. The minute they click that dot, you will have the exclusive right to patent that idea for a year. You will also receive an opportunity to join a patent pool, where you can get a nice payout if someone decides to purchase the entire pool.
We are excited to be democratizing the patent process for everyone and look forward to offering an opportunity for anyone to participate in our token sale in October of 2017. In the meantime, we are continuing with the SAFT to US accredited investors only as a pre-sale through August 31st at a 10% discount. By focusing on the cyber-security, penetration testing, and moving InnVenn onto the blockchain, we will have a fully-integrated product by the time our token sale launches this fall.
