Patents

The full cost of obtaining and maintaining a U.S. patent over 20 years is in the range of $20,000 to $60,000. This sum is influenced by the type of technology being patented; the number of claims and drawings included in the application; the number and nature of rejections from USPTO; filing fees, etc. Of course, the cost of global protection (for the same technology) will be a multiple of the U.S. sum.

The Office of Innovation Management has experience prosecuting thousands of patent applications in dozens of “art groups.” Therefore, the Office of Innovation Management secures the services of a responsive, patent attorney with content expertise. The patent attorney, in concert with the inventors, files a written patent application at the USPTO and continues to correspond with USPTO until issuance of a patent. The Office of Innovation Management operates to ensure effective protections and to minimize the costs that will, ultimately, reduce revenues.

A provisional patent application is a United States patent application that may be filed without some of the formalities required of a non-provisional patent application. A provisional patent application is not examined by the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office, and a patent cannot issue directly from a provisional application.

A patent may be obtained on a novel, nonobvious and useful composition of matter, process, machine, article of manufacture, plant, microorganism, animal, computer software, or improvement of any of the above.

Many research projects involve collaborators from another university, company, or research laboratory, so it is not uncommon to have outside co-inventors. In such cases, each institution will have an unrestricted right to commercialize the technology without any accounting to the other–unless there is a written agreement specifying how the IP rights are to be handled.