How to identify innovative ideas with potential to win patent ?
“How to identify innovative ideas with potential to win a patent? Start by capturing all details of your idea, including its problem-solving nature, advantages, technical details, and relevant diagrams. This brain dump helps clarify your thoughts. Then consult a patent agent or attorney to determine if your invention qualifies as patentable subject matter and meets the requirements of novelty, inventive step, and industrial application. Perform a novelty search to assess its uniqueness. With a positive outcome, you can draft a patent application focusing on the novel aspects, increasing your chances of obtaining a granted patent.”
Table of Contents
You need to get clear on your innovative Idea
The way we get more clarity about our innovative ideas is when we start writing down things on paper or in a word processor document:
Start taking notes of details about the innovative idea, and get the complete idea on a paper or a soft copy document, this is a rough draft of your idea and by no means it need to be perfect or complete, just get started with this.
Action Items: Capture all details of the idea
- What is my innovative idea is about?
- What problem it solves?
- How does it solve the problem?
- What are some advantages of my innovative idea?
- Technical details about idea and how it function
- Important elements of it
- Block diagram or flow chart or any other relevant diagrams to explain the idea in a better way.
Our outcome here is to get down all of our thoughts you need not be perfect or complete initially as there may be plenty of fill-in-the-blank elements that you still don’t have clarity upon that’s pretty natural and we will be filling those elements as and when we proceed.
“we call it a brain dump !!!”
*brain-dump is a complete transfer of accessible knowledge about a particular subject from your brain to some other storage medium, such as paper or your computer’s hard drive
In the next phase, try to come up with as many diagrams or flowchart or whatever the convenient way of explaining your ideas and get more clarity on your innovative idea. again this would be only rough sketches, don’t worry about the perfection here just get everything in front of you.
As per the definition of Invention under Section 2(1)(j) “invention” means a new product or process involving an inventive step and capable of industrial application, and Patentability requirements of an invention are
- Newness or novelty
- Inventive step or non-obviousness requirement
- Capable of Industrial application
- Enabling
How to know if your invention is patentable or not?
in fact, judging
- whether your innovative idea (invention) falls under patentable subject mater (category) and
- more specifically if your invention is patentable or not
is found with the help of the Patent agent and patent attorney. the first judgment about whether your invention belongs to the patentable subject matter (category) or not can be concluded within a couple of hours when a patent attorney/agent reads your invention disclosure completely and understands the invention.
However, finding out whether your invention (specifical aspects of your invention) are novel or not is actually found out by performing a Novelty search or Patentability search
- if your innovative idea falls under the definition of the invention (refer What inventions are Patentable in India ? ) and
- it qualifies for all patentability requirements as discussed in that section,
- and if your invention does not fall under the invention categories mentioned in Section 3
then your invention falls under patentable subject matter. and if the result of the Patentability search or Novelty search is positive then your invention (some specific aspect (s) of the invention as mentioned in the patentability search report) would be considered as Novel and we stand a good chance of getting a patent granted if we draft (write) our patent application considering the novel aspect of the invention, especially while writing claims of the invention.
- Indian Patent Office, Govt. of India
- Patent Facilitator for Start-ups, Startup India Govt. of India
- Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Telecommunication engineering.
- Author of multiple books on Patents and IPR including a best-selling book on “How to patent an idea in India” which has been selected as the “Memorable Business Book of 2018” by Amazon
- Books are included in the syllabus of Educational Institutions as textbook and reference book on subject of IPR and Patents
- For over 15 years, Prasad has helped protect the intellectual property rights (IPR) of more than 1800 clients, including individuals, entrepreneurs, and educational institutes. This includes patents, trademarks, designs, and copyrights.