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In increasingly competitive markets, small business owners and founders must have an edge, and for many, it's their intellectual property (IP). Often considered your most valuable assets, your IP is your idea(s) and invention(s) in legally documented form.
Your IP is pivotal to your founding and growth journey, allowing you to establish your company's market position, differentiate from other product offerings and protect yourself. But the global IP landscape today is hyper-complex, with more than 15 million active patents registered and hundreds of thousands of organizations holding those patents.
For the tech-savvy entrepreneur, artificial intelligence (AI) means you can work smarter, not harder, when it comes to sharpening your edge. Leveraging AI as part of your IP strategy is an effective and affordable way to accelerate innovation, streamline processes and proactively manage your assets.
IP-specific applications of AI are increasingly common these days. Buyers must be discerning and ask themselves, is this tool secure? Is it accurate? Is it cost-effective? Solutions like Pathlytics are leading the charge of unburdening businesses from complex administrative work, accomplishing many IP workflows in minutes instead of months.
Here are five strategies for how to use AI to drive significant IP wins for your small business.
Related: Top 5 Intellectual-Property Challenges Businesses Face
1. Accelerate comprehensive patent searches with AI
Conducting a thorough prior art search is a prerequisite to the patent application process. According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), nearly half of all patent applications face rejections due to prior artBy confirming the uniqueness of your idea, you increase the chances of your application being approved.
To prove uniqueness, you must search and compare. But try this with 15 million registered patents, and you won't be done for years. Traditionally, patent searches are labor-intensive and time-consuming. AI is enabling deeper, faster and more accurate searches. Through machine learning algorithms, AI-powered patent search tools quickly sift through vast databases to identify relevant patents and highlight potential overlaps or opportunities. For small businesses, this means a faster path to securing patents and reduced risk of infringement from the start.
2. Stay ahead of the competition with AI
Always stay one step ahead of the competition. This is particularly meaningful in the IP sector, where similar products are constantly invented. It's also particularly hard to dogiven the potentially hundreds of millions of different products, patents and companies to stay ahead of.
Use AI to quickly and continuously scan for infringing products. Diligently monitor the market with an AI-powered infringement detection tool to identify potential products that may infringe on your innovation — and therefore represent a threat or opportunity — and help you find the evidence you need to take action. This intelligence enables timely, winning decisions and successful asset protection.
3. Use AI to transform patents into profit
Patent licensing offers small businesses the opportunity to monetize their inventions without shouldering the costs associated with production. But this can be a guessing game. According to many IP experts, most patents are worthless — perhaps even more than 95% never recoup their filing costs. How do you know which big bets to make compared to your competitor's products, the market landscape and your own patents' strengths?
AI introduces much-needed precision by eradicating guesswork from complex comparative decisions. It allows small businesses to pinpoint their most valuable assets and make informed decisions based on competing products, the market landscape and their own MVPs.
Related: 5 Ways To Create Value From Your Intellectual Property
4. Build a strong and diverse portfolio with AI
Consider the portfolio strategy of building strong patents around your core innovations. Holding multiple related patents can create a patent thicket, making it harder for competitors to challenge or work around your IP. Also, consider the strategy of diversifying. Diversifying your patent portfolio can protect against industry shifts and technological advancements. Having patents across sectors gives you multiple revenue streams and the ability to adapt to market changes with agility.
Both portfolio strategies assume a baseline understanding of your current portfolio. This may seem basic (shouldn't we all know our own patents?), yet once scaled to hundreds or thousands of patents, how do you surface meaningful intelligence points at a glance, such as invention sector, jurisdiction, value or expiry? An AI classification tool can auto-tag your assets and triage which patents to act on.
5. Simplify the drafting process with AI support
Proper documentation is vital. Developing detailed notes, sketches, and descriptions of how your invention works and why it's unique is required for your patent application and also serves as evidence if legal issues arise. But gathering all this information from various groups and compiling it can be painstaking and often takes over a year. That's a year when your idea is not yet fully protected, enforced or monetized. Leverage an AI patent drafting tool to help you discover and capture your inventions faster, reducing your time from idea to file and making the journey from idea to patent approval considerably easier.
Related: 5 Benefits Patent Management Software Must Deliver
The stakes and constraints of IP challenges compel small business owners and founders to adopt smart, efficient methods to maximize successful IP outcomes. Now leveraging new AI for IP tools, they can secure their place in the market better and faster than ever before. Your IP is the driver of innovation and business growth. We hope these strategies and tools will help accelerate your success.