University Commercialization: A lot of emphasis by the Indian government on the importance of patents for educational institutions and a further reduction in patent fees by 80% for educational institutions have pushed these institutions into a rat race to file patents. Thus, leading to the concept of “university commercialization.”
The good news is that now the mindset of these educational institutions has started shifting towards patenting research publications. But without proper infrastructure and processes, there might be a possibility that some universities may submit patent applications solely for the purpose of doing so.
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 their 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 by the system on the filed patent applications, which don’t even recoup the value of the paper on which they were written.
Conducting Research
Before spending resources on the patenting process, researchers who are interested in turning their current research into useful patents should perform their investigation to determine what has previously been accomplished commercially and whether there are any comparable patents out there by performing a prior art search or novelty search. They should also find ways to identify potential competitors and understand the top problems and needs of the market. They should keep in mind the scalability of their idea and monitor news from potential competitors while scouting patent databases.
It is crucial for them to have access to accurate information to do this. This helps them make an informed decision before moving to the next stage.
Interestingly, some of the top universities in India are now adopting AI technologies (XLSCOUT). These technologies will democratize innovation and provide easy access to AI technologies to all researchers via libraries. These AI tools (Novelty Checker) help researchers in two major ways:
- Researchers can use the AI platform themselves to compare their research to see if it meets the three main criteria for getting a patent: novelty, non-obviousness, and usefulness.
- The Integrated Innovation System provides researchers access to the top problems prevalent in their research area, market information like top competitors’, whitespaces, etc., so that they can improve their ideas and make them worth commercializing.
Where Novelty Checker’s Integrated Innovation helps:
- Students /Professors can assess the patentability of their ideas.
- Triggers for Innovation: Generate New Ideas
- Automated Novelty Search Report: An indicator of your idea’s uniqueness
- Research alignment to industry and market requirements
- Patenting culture and democratization of innovation
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 5 minutes with just a few clicks.
In case you have any queries on this, feel free to contact us. We can also let you know how top universities are democratizing innovation and promoting patent culture.
