Patents uncovered!!!

Nowadays, the product life cycle is decreasing day by day. Well, the reason could be globalisation, enhancement in communication& transportation technology, increase in disposal income and many many more. But, its a fact that today we demand more and more every day. For instance, one can compare the number of car models that were available 10 years ago to the number of car models available today. And the rate of introduction of new variants or new models is increasing day by day.

This phenomenon, leads to cut throat competition among companies in the market. The only solution they have is to come out with the better, trendier and new model as compared to present ones. But, the problem is that it requires lot of efforts in terms of money, time and training. So, it may happen that a new molecule of drug or new engine in the car has taken more than 20 years to be developed. So, the company just introduces the new model to compete. But, the technology an information in market spreads immediately, and even the small and insignificant players come up with the imitation of the new product in very short span of time at lower rates.

Now why, the small players can come in the market at lower rates. The cause is simple. The original product company spent lot of money in developing the product, and the company needs to get ROI for the development. But, these small imitators invested nothing so they can produce it cheaper.

How companies take out ROI?

The governments in the world do understand the significance of research and innovation based products. And wants to encourage them in a way, that the companies can get decent amount of ROI ( Return of Investment).

The government do consider another aspect of this. The aspect is that it wants to encourage all the people to go for innovation. So, that the whole race, country or humanity progresses. But, if somebody has worked on some particular innovation. For example, lets assume that discoverer of Fire has patented the technique to create Fire. Now, according to patent rights, this inventor only can give rights to anybody to use, sell or work further on this technology.Then, if this guy didn't give rights anybody then what would have happened of all the progress of millions of years. Secondly, what if there was another guy who had the similar idea of creating a fire, but was not knowing that this has already been patented. The second guy, according to rights of patents can't even work on this idea.

So, in a way giving rights for unlimited period or unlimited channels, can instead of encouraging can discourage humans for research and innovation.

The latest trend is that the companies around the globe outsource the Patenting Procedure and Protection of the same to KPO's (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) like Evalueserve. KPO's keep a watch on all the new developments which can affect the Patent of the Client.

Till date, best source of keeping the watch on these Patent developments is this site http://uspto.gov/

I have used this site exhaustively, to understand the patents of competitors of the products I was working upon, and will suggest you, including the budding engineers (students) to make it a habbit to go through this site, for the products one is interested in.

Regards

Prabal