Do University Patents Pay off?

There has been a lot of emphasis by the Indian government on the importance of patents for educational institutions. The government’s recent reduction of patent fees by 80% for educational institutions into a rat race to file patents.

A Shift in the Mindset

The good news is that now the mindset of these educational institutions has started shifting towards patents from research publications. However, some universities may submit patent applications solely for the purpose of doing so if they do not have proper infrastructure and processes.

However, patents, by their definition, are granted to novel, non-obvious, and useful ideas. So, in this hurry, we might see Indian universities filing patent applications in bulk. But due to low quality and inefficient evaluation, there is a possibility that most of them will not get granted and be of no commercial value.

The patents are filed to gain commercial benefits from the research. Improper infrastructure and processes can lead to unnecessary wastage of time and money of the system on the filed patent applications, which don’t even recoup the value of the paper on which they were written.

Explainable AI (Artificial Intelligence) and its Impact

Interestingly, some of India’s top universities (private and public) have recognized this concern. They are now providing easy access to AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies to all researchers via libraries. Researchers are encouraged to use these AI platforms so that they can compare their research to see whether it meets the three main criteria for getting a patent. At the same time, they can get to know how their concerned technology is moving, what companies are doing in that space, and the problems of the industry so that they can streamline their research and solve the industry’s problems to create highly valuable IP.

The Advantages of the AI Platform (XLSCOUT) are:

• Easy to use platform – Anyone can access
• Gives patentability search report in 10 mins (top 10 matching documents)
• It compares with both global patents and literature in real-time
• Innovation triggers and dynamic industry focus reports to align research and innovate better

XLSCOUT’s Novelty Checker assists in conducting a novelty search to help you ensure that your innovation is unique. Additionally, it generates a novelty search report in 10 minutes with just a few clicks.

Connect with XLSCOUT to know how other Indian Universities are democratizing Innovation and fostering a patent culture in the universities.