Bringing your company's innovative ideas to market is often limited by the lack of a structured way to capture and manage ideas and collaborate effectively across the organization. This could result in missing out on opportunities with tremendous potential.
In addition, IP and R&D teams are facing fewer resources and increasing workloads. According to the Thomson Reuters 2023 Legal Department Operations Index, 70% of legal professionals report an increase in matter volume. As the pace of innovation and workload increase, finding ways to simplify and automate the process of capturing ideas and submitting invention disclosure forms is critical.
Here are five ways an inventor portal is a necessity for managing your innovation:
1. You need better processes to track and manage invention submissions.
Processing and entering inventor disclosures using manual forms, Excel spreadsheets, or PDF files is time-consuming for inventor teams and legal staff. Completing and submitting one disclosure form may be manageable, but as the portfolio grows, tracking inventor submissions becomes tedious and results in a backlog of forms.
Streamline invention submissions with an inventor portal: The newly launched Inventor Portal of PATTSY WAVE® allows any number of inventors to log in and access the portal with their own credentials. Using an easy-to-use interface, they can quickly fill out the details of an invention and then submit the disclosure to the legal team. Submitting the disclosure pushes the record into PATTSY WAVE and automatically triggers the associated workflow, ensuring the disclosure is effectively processed.
2. You want to collaborate more efficiently with inventors, other colleagues, and outside counsel.
The invention submission and approval process does not take place in isolation, as it takes many stakeholders to turn an idea into a strong patent. If you currently manage your invention submission forms manually, it becomes challenging to capture feedback, questions, and documentation related to the invention from multiple sources.
Improve collaboration with your internal and external partners: PATTSY WAVE now allows you to customize your own set of questions for invention data. This ensures that the information gathered is relevant to your organization’s technology areas and business practices and fosters better collaboration across teams.
3. You need work and tasks associated with inventions to be automated.
Multiple team members may manually submit information about their inventions through forms, emails, and Excel files. Organizing and processing this data increases the workload for your legal team. In addition, you will have multiple copies of forms and data stored on different computers, which can compromise data integrity and lengthen the invention review process.
Maintain the integrity of your invention data through automation: Using automated IP management software such as PATTSY WAVE, you can trigger an automated workflow for the legal team when you submit disclosures. This workflow ensures that all disclosures are reviewed and processed according to your team’s policies. In addition, the automated workflow includes reminders to perform patentability searches, bring before the patent review committee, and/or communicate with your inventors or outside counsel.
4. You want your inventors to have better visibility into the status of their submissions and reports.
Inventors want to keep abreast of developments related to their invention after submitting their invention form. An inventor portal creates a more engaging team environment since inventors can efficiently track innovation updates, which reduces the need to rely on the legal team for updates.
Give your inventors better visibility into the status of their inventions: Inventors can view the reports in PATTSY WAVE on an intuitive and easily accessible Inventor Portal that lists their own submitted disclosures and their current status. In addition, inventors can quickly check on how their submission is being processed, review the status of patents that resulted from their disclosure, and review their awards or incentive status. The Single Sign-On (SSO) feature of the Inventor Portal helps organizations facilitate easy logins and encourage adoption by inventors.
5. You want to improve how you track the status of inventor awards.
Your company may have an internal reward program to incentivize inventors. However, tracking this information in spreadsheets or other systems can slow you down and make it difficult to share information with the people who need to see it.
Track awards more efficiently: With an inventor reward program built into your IP management software, you can track the status of awards and quickly see which awards have been paid to which inventors. What’s more, you can track awards by the percentage of total awards per patent or by the award amount and the status of award distribution. This helps you improve inventor support, encourage inventors to submit new inventions, and drive innovation in your organization.
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Can you relate to any of these challenges? The Inventor Portal in PATTSY WAVE is a collaborative solution that streamlines the process of submitting and managing new inventions. Recognized as a leader in IP management software, PATTSY WAVE continues to evolve in close collaboration with our customers and product leaders to help you increase efficiency throughout the IP lifecycle from idea submission to granted patent.
For eight consecutive quarters, PATTSY WAVE has been recognized as a leader in Intellectual Property Management Software from G2, the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace.