… This is the sixth in a series of posts about how I ended up where I am today.
After a presentation on patents at IBM, I started thinking about what might be patentable. I had this fantastic idea. Spent a couple of days writing up how it would work, built a proof of concept, the whole thing. Went to one of the patent experts with real pride in what I’d done.
They turned around, tapped a couple of words into a search tool, and found a near-identical invention filed a year earlier.
I was crestfallen.
Over the next year and a half I made seven more submissions. Every single one failed to get anywhere close to being valid. Seven ideas I thought were original, seven dead ends.
Rather than keep going solo, I got a mentor. And that changed everything.
What the Mentor Taught Me
The first thing they fixed was my process. I’d been doing it backwards. Building out the whole thing, proof of concept and all, before checking whether the idea had legs. The mentor taught me to flip that around.
Write up the core pieces you believe are novel. Then search. You’re looking for two things: has someone already created this, and does it have value?
A direct hit on an existing patent doesn’t have to be the end. You look at how their idea is implemented and ask how yours improves on it.
One of my earlier rejections was around canary traps. Someone had already filed. So I looked at what they’d done and realised it would never work at enterprise scale. I resubmitted with a method that could handle hundreds of thousands of emails without performance issues.
The important thing is to not do the full work until you know you have something worth building.
The Disclosure Is a Sales Pitch
This was the second shift in thinking. When you write a disclosure, you’re not writing a patent. The lawyer writes the patent. You’re writing a sales pitch to show novelty and value.
Sure, you need an implementation. But if you can’t demonstrate novelty and value, it doesn’t matter how clever the technology is. You need to write in a way that, at minimum, someone in the field can clearly understand what sets your idea apart from everything else. If you can’t do that, you’ve lost your audience before they’ve finished reading.
How to Present
One method I saw from another inventor got their disclosures rated search-1 (the highest value rating) nearly every time. The whole thing took ten to fifteen minutes.
Start by talking about the industry or technology around your disclosure in plain language. Get the panel to understand the narrow area you’re focusing on. Then talk about the limitations of that area, or what’s missing. Then present what’s novel in your proposal.
By the time you reach the third part, they already understand the problem and why it matters. Your solution lands in context rather than in a vacuum. I found that technique useful well beyond patents.
Scaling It Up
Our department had an average of two or three patents a year with not many submissions. I’d gotten a couple by that point, and management asked me to help improve the department’s output.
It became a team effort. The people I worked with brought different strengths to the table. One could speak to upper management and get us the resources we needed, including mentors for the teams. Others were able to organise teams and inspire people to participate, even people who felt they had nothing to contribute. My core role was helping teams flesh out their ideas and present them in a way that showed novelty and value.
Within the first couple of months we had over forty disclosures. Well over half went to search, meaning IBM felt they were worth investing money to investigate further. Many of those went on to publish or file. Even after the initial push, a lot of the people on those teams continued submitting. Some went on to become Master Inventors themselves.
The Title
From that work I got invited to serve on IDT boards, the panels that help people deliver disclosures of value. That combined with meeting the minimum requirements for what a Master Inventor needs, and I finally got awarded the title.
It takes three to five years to achieve. I did it in just under four.
Even with the title, the education gap followed me. Without a PhD, I was often asked to prove my inventions by building them out, or to go beyond the requirements that others with academic credentials didn’t have to meet. It felt unfair at times. But in a strange way, it meant that everything I submitted had been tested. I wasn’t just making stuff up on paper. I’d built the thing.
After the title it turns out the reward is more work. The title is a three-year term that you have to renew with the same level of commitment. I got it renewed for my second term, but after I moved to my new role in Dubai I let it lapse to commit time fully to what I was doing there.
I don’t regret that. The patent work taught me how to think about problems clearly, how to communicate ideas to people who don’t share your context, and how to help other people see the value in what they already know. Those skills followed me into everything I did afterwards.
This is the sixth in a series of posts about how I ended up where I am today. Next: how I built a learning system that changed the way our team worked.