Monday miscellany

Will you be joining us?  33 good folk have already signed up to attend "Christopher Rennie-Smith talks to a Kat" -- our next IPKat event, which takes place at the London office of Collyer Bristow on Thursday 4 September (doors open at 5 pm). Christopher Rennie-Smith, a battle-hardened Board of Appeal member at the European Patent Office, has now returned to his native soil. The Kat in question is patent attorney and Inquisitor-in-Chief Darren Smyth; blogmeister Jeremy will be there too, to keep good order. Admission is free, and all are welcome though space is limited so don't wait to book your place. Just click here for further information. As of today, 33 people have signed up to attend.

There are some other exciting events coming soon, even if they're not the IPKat's. One is Management Forum's "The Patent Box: tips and predictions", on Tuesday 9 September (details here), which offers a handsome 20% fee discount to readers of this weblog.  Another is MIP's European Patent Forum, which travels from Munich on 9 September to Paris on 11 September (details here) and offers a generous 25% fee discount to IPKat readers, not to mention free admission for academics and in-housers.  This Kat has long maintained that letting academics into practice-oriented events is good for all concerned and should be strongly encouraged since it helps bridge the gaps between theory, principle and practice.

"Do lean start-ups mean less IP?" asked Neil in a recent Katpost, here.  Many readers have added their own comments already, and here's another from Gergana Hadjova which Neil thought it might be a good idea to run here:

“I recently came across an interesting article discussing two major points of interest to me: "Lean Start-ups and IP". In his blogpost Neil Wilkof poses the question whether lean start-ups mean less IP. After reading the post, I realized that with IP Neil means patents as the IP which protects innovation. So the question could be rephrased as: do lean start-ups mean less innovation?. An intriguing question, isn’t it?

After presenting the basic notion of the lean start-up, pioneered by Eric Ries, Neil introduces some points of criticism towards lean start-ups -- for example that “the lean approach has a very low ceiling for innovative potential” and that “it can bias you towards the incremental rather than the transformational.” Neil concludes: 

“The suggestion that start-up activity should be aspiring to a form of assembly line for knowledge workers, engaged in constant empirical iterations in the search of “the product”, would seem to narrow the scope for the kinds of creations and inventions that are the staple of IP rights. Incrementalism has its place, but it should also have its limits, lest it have a pernicious dampening effect on the ability of knowledge workers to continue to create and invent”. 

I enjoyed reading the post and can only recommend it. Nevertheless, I do not really agree with the narrow view on lean start-ups presented in it.

Call me biased, with my excitement with the lean start-up movement, but I think that lean start-ups can be engines for innovation. After all, the most disruptive products are those where the need for them was unknown. This is actually the aim of lean start-ups: to find the product customers really need while engaging the customer at the early stage of product development. Lean start-ups validate their ideas by interviewing customers, gathering and analyzing data and always questioning their assumptions. 

Isn’t this a method similar to the scientific one? Of course, sometimes the end product of a lean start-up is just a small improvement in an existing product or just a small useful product. This is not surprising since lean start-ups are characterized by not requiring and disposing of large amounts of outside funding. It is clear that lean start-ups are not feasible in the Biotech or Pharmacy industries, where extensive and expensive R&D are essential. 

However, small improvements can also be innovative. Innovation is finding a better way of doing something (Wong, S.K.S. (2013), "Environmental Requirements, Knowledge Sharing and Green Innovation: Empirical Evidence from the Electronics Industry" in China, Business Strategy and the Environment, Vol. 22, No. 5, pp. 321–338). It is also the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, in-articulated needs, or existing market needs (Maranville, S (1992), "Entrepreneurship in the Business Curriculum", Journal of Education for Business, Vol. 68 No. 1, pp.27-31). And this is exactly what lean start-ups do. Even if their end product could not reach the high threshold of patentable subject matter, it still can constitute an innovation. And don’t forget that an IP right for incremental innovations also exists. It is called the utility model.”

Thanks, Gergana. This Kat is very fond of the concept of the utility model, though he knows that many of his readers are not -- but he hadn't been thinking of its specific role within the sphere of lean start-ups. 

Around the weblogs.  PatLit's Michael Thesen writes on the enablement-disclosure trap in the context of the European Patent Office decision T 2231/09; the same blog  announces spare places for newly-qualified UK patent attorneys on the Nottingham Trent Basic Litigation course, which was initially designed for trade mark attorneys. On IP Finance Mike Mireles writes on fraudulent trade secrets claims and a whopping US$ 147.5 million settlement in favour of the alleged misappropriator.  Of the two MARQUES weblogs, Class 46 carries the tale of interim injunctive relief ordered against Real, a German supermarket whose logo would appear to resemble that of the German Football Association, while the Class 99 design law blog notes the arithmetic of an account of profits where the infringement adds a very small degree of value to the infringing product.