Make Sure You Own the Gain of Open Innovation Efforts – Part II
Since joint inventor exists by law is something that Dr. Clever are interesting now, the patent attorneys are legally required for your company to name his as an inventor even if it is not in the best interests of IBM. On the other hand, if you do not and the patent ends up in court, the judge will either make IBM name Dr. Clever as a joint inventor or the court will make the patent invalidity. The result of either ways is IBM does not exclusively own rights to your blockbuster new product. And as you are an innovation Director you know that it is unacceptable for IBM to not be able to wholly own the rights to the fruits of your Open Innovation projects. So, to prevent this hit your company, learn how you can go forward with valuable Open Innovation projects while it can be able to avoid outside collaborators such as Dr. Clever from obtaining joint rights is critical. The way is rather easy. You just acquire a written agreement from your outside collaborator will relinquish any inventions to your company resulting from the collaboration. Remember to complete this agreement before any inventions result; otherwise the rights of Dr. Clever come into existence as of the moment the invention exists.
For some people who are experienced about an agreement associate with Innovation, they probably known that an invention assignment agreement can be achieved after the invention is made, such as when a patent application is filed. However, what will be recommended you here is it is very difficult and expensive to obtain an assignment after the invention is developed because the collaborators will likely perceive that they have the upper hand in this situation. If the collaborators accept to sign the agreement after the invention is made, it is usually that the company must pay them several $1000s to the cost of obtaining a patent.
Also, it is frequently that the patent attorneys do not know that an outsider was involved in the invention and the joint inventor is left off the patent inadvertently. This result in that inventorship must be corrected at a later date when the product covered by the patent is a blockbuster. In this case, the joint inventor (Dr. Clever in example) probably inclined to assign his rights to the highest bidder and the highest bidder may be your biggest competitor.
You may assume that your legal department will certainly take care of making sure IBM will own all rights to inventions from your Open Innovation project. The fact is many business attorneys do not understand that a collaboration agreement should ask the collaborator to relinquish all rights in any inventions resulting from the collaboration and this agreement must be placed in prior when start the Open Innovation project. If the provision does not included in the collaboration agreement, the disaster usually done and it will be the work of the patent professionals to try to fix or mitigate the damage in order to provide own exclusive rights in any patents resulting from the collaboration for the company. Therefore, to keep away from these problems, make sure you own the fruits of Open Innovation Efforts before go down to the game.
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