Invention Mining Sessions that Capture Every Invention – Steve Sponseller

An invention mining session brings together team members who are working on a project or have recently completed a project.

During this meeting, team members can identify the innovative ideas that came up during the project.

And for example, trying to identify those innovative ideas, team members can identify key obstacles that came up during the product development.

Then they can discuss how that obstacle was solved or overcome.

And in many cases, those solutions to major obstacles are inventions.

So for example, when an obstacle is encountered, there may not have been any known solution.

There might've been a new problem due to new technology or new implementation detail, but there weren't any other solutions related to solving this type of a problem.

In that case, the team likely had to create a solution that didn't previously exist.

There weren't any off-the-shelf products or existing code source routines or things like that.

It's something that had to be created.

And this solution may be an invention.

It's a great place to look.

Because if an experienced team spends significant amount of time solving a problem that had no previous solution, there's a good chance that's an invention and it should at least be looked at and considered to see if that is a valuable invention that might be worthy of patent protection.

So during invention mining sessions, it's also important to discuss the most difficult or time consuming parts of the project.

Sometimes this is overcoming obstacles like I just talked about.

But other times there's just particular areas that were difficult to implement, time consuming, and not something that was just a quick and easy solution.

So these may also be inventions because there wasn't a straightforward solution or a really quick and easy solution to it.

It took the team some significant amount of time to resolve this issue or to make it work.

So that's a good area to look for inventions.

So as far as scheduling invention mining sessions, it's important to do that as a project is being completed and before there's a public disclosure of the project or an offer for sale, because that can create certain limitations on your ability to file patent applications.

So by scheduling an invention mining session, as a project is being wrapped up, it gives you time to protect any inventions before you disclose them to the public, which might forfeit your patent rights.

Now for longer projects, I usually recommend having a couple of invention mining sessions at several points during the project, just to identify the inventions as soon as possible.

And to make sure you kind of remember this, the team remembers the details of what their solution was and what the invention might be before it's too far down the road and maybe some of those details get lost.

So identifying and evaluating your inventions early by having multiple mining sessions during a longer project allows you to take steps to protect critical inventions with a patent application before any public disclosure that might eliminate your patent rights.

So as part of your process when you're scheduling activities and things, be sure to add some invention mining sessions around your major projects so that the team doesn't forget to perform this important task.