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When The “R” Goes Missing From R&D
A Cautionary Tale About Too Much Siloing and Not Enough Trust
I had my suspicions that something was terribly wrong with how our development team was organized, but I didn’t really put it all together until the day the Patent Attorney showed up. We had been working on a new product for a couple of years, a very large beast of a program that was used to analyze simulations of computer chips and provide useful information to the people verifying their correctness. In short, fertile ground for possible patentable ideas.
The company encouraged engineers to seek patents on work we did, and would send out someone from our legal department on a regular basis to solicit ideas for patents. This time though, we were coming up blank — even though the product we all worked on was super innovative and complex. The development team had been brought together to brainstorm with the patent person on possibilities, but everyone was kind of in a bad mood about it. She encouraged us to just start throwing out ideas, even if we thought they were not patentable ones. Silence. People just sat quietly, arms crossed.
The patent attorney shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Isn’t there some unique analysis feature we had worked on that we could look into patenting? she prompted.