Patents and Strategic Inventing: The Corporate Inventor's Guide to Creating Sustainable Competitive Advantage

CHAPTER 22STRATEGIC INVENTING TECHNIQUES

Clearly, strategic inventing is not the only source of new products or for developing a patent strategy. However, this approach has advantages in some situations. The greatest opportunities for strategic inventing usually occur in highly competitive industries with significant prior art. The prior art makes achieving broad protection for each successive product cycle relatively difficult. As a result, more deliberate strategic techniques are required to create a sustainable competitive advantage. If your latest breakthrough creates a tremendous new paradigm, far outside any previous claims, these techniques are likely to offer less benefit, if only because the claims you are likely to be granted will probably ...