I was recently approached by someone who told me about the new patent policy his company was using. “Basically, we’re supposed to write down any patentable ideas and then send them to a review panel”. Out of curiosity, I asked a simple question, “ What is a patentable idea?” He didn’t know. Such a situation is not unlike those in many corporations today.

I was amazed how many training sessions I was sent to when I worked in a large corporate product development environment. We had safety training, quality assurance training, interpersonal skills training, communication skills training, management training, sexual harassment training, diversity training, and on and on…. Presumably, the organization believed that these were important topics that were worthy of spending our time and money to learn more about.

What I found to be ironic, was that very few of the training sessions actually had anything to do with the job I was paid to perform: generating new ideas through innovative thinking.

Employees in innovative organizations are supposed to be working on solving problems, creating new ideas, developing new products and generating future revenue for the corporation. In the abundance of HR training, rarely is the training related to these core pursuits.

Furthermore, engineers, scientists, and managers generally don’t get any background in intellectual property at the university level. Many organizations assume this is OK – “that’s what lawyers are for”. Unfortunately, the legal department, whether in-house or outside counsel, is a very expensive commodity.

Many issues related to inventing, patents, and patent strategy can and should be addressed by the people doing the work. What may be a roadblock from a legal perspective might be a simple design-around for an engineer.

At least some level of training is required to implement a good patent strategy. It will also serve as a cost effective means of maximizing the value from your development efforts. If training is necessary for the myriad of other organizational topics, why not consider training for the important ones?