Disruptive innovators leave prior art to last
- publish258
- Oct 7, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 7
Disruptive innovators don’t ask what is the difference with what went before, says Robert Klinski at Patentship. They ask what is the purpose of what is to come
Robert Klinski
You cannot adopt a conventional mindset in how you respond to edge technologies. You will be too far behind the curve in creating value from them.
Instead, take a disruptive cue from a pioneer such as Elon Musk at Tesla or from a breakthrough technology like blockchain. In both cases, the originality lies in articulating a problem that manifests itself in the market.
First, you have to grasp the size and shape of a non-technical challenge, such as autonomous mobility or a digital currency. Only then, do you pass it on to your engineering and IP teams to design a technical solution.
They may well feel uncomfortable about being asked to step outside the safe confines of their own domain. They may well tell you that you will struggle to tie down the IP.
However, if you can pair a disruptive insight with a technical solution, streaming them alongside each other, you have every chance of lining up IP that gives you an edge in accounting tech, legal tech or any other kind of tech.
Engineering teams are incremental by nature. They work on the basis of identifying improvements to existing technologies. They are typically responding to requests by their managers for more speed, less weight, more stability or better security.
Patent offices work in the same way. They look for the differences between your invention and the prior art. Like engineers, they are not responding to the market. They want a defined platform from which to start.
A breakthrough like blockchain doesn’t even try to improve the prior art. It starts with a question such as how could we go about creating a secure digital currency? The solution, which links a chain of digital signatures across blocks of data, bypasses any directly comparable technologies. As an innovation, it manages to articulate what the market requires and frames the technical challenge in a way around which developers can invent.
Essentially, we are at a bottleneck between our old system of engineering and prior art, which relies on a spirt of incremental improvement, and a new system of disruptive insights and data innovation, based on edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain.
The challenge is to build a bridge between the two. Don’t feel that you have to be a genius like Elon Musk. Invention on demand is a process that you can follow. First, find the courage to think disruptively. Then deploy the strengths of your existing engineering and IP systems to create a technical solution and secure a commercial advantage.
It matters how you manage this sequence. If you think conventionally too soon, your chances of gaining a patent with edge technologies are probably 50 percent at best. If instead, you learn to specifically invent on demand, our experience suggests that your odds rise to 90 percent.
• The full version of Robert Klinski's article, ‘Innovating with edge technologies’ appears in ‘Winning with IP: Managing intellectual property today’, third edition, Novaro Publishing, October 2022. See details here.
