Strategic inventing is clearly not appropriate for all mainstream developments. Ideally, the result of every research effort would be a fundamentally new and different product. When such fundamental improvements are readily made, that is clearly the better path. Strategic inventing has its niche in mature industries that have substantial existing art, minimal technical differences with competitors, or difficulty in quantifying benefits.

If the products in your industry are relatively similar in technical performance and consumer interaction, this may be a good approach to consider. Removing the traditional emphasis on functional benefits will allow for greater freedom in creating differentiating consumer experiences and valuable IP space.

Another good opportunity for this approach is in industries that have very crowded fields of prior art. As the rate of patent filings has increased and continues to increase, even less competitive industries are becoming inundated with art. While this may make it more difficult to determine freedom to practice with new products, it will also narrow the scope of patents granted based on improvements in the area. Dramatic difference afforded by this approach should lead to broader coverage and importantly, more valuable IP space.

Many industries may also have functional benefits that are difficult to quantify and therefore difficult to protect such as softness, taste, smell, or convenience. If this is the case, claims that are granted may not afford much consumer-relevant protection. Strategic inventing may help to establish a highly protected position through non-functional differentiation.

These suggestions may seem unusual for your industry – perhaps even downright unreasonable. It is true that some industries will be able to make better use of these techniques than others. Many of the examples in this article are consumer goods because consumer goods are particularly susceptible to this technique.

One generalized assessment would be that the more degrees of interaction that exist for a given product, the more opportunity there is for strategic inventing. Consumer goods typically interact with the end user on many levels beyond the basic function of the product (emotional, convenience, status, novelty, etc.) all of which create opportunities for strategic manipulation.

Conversely, the opposite end of the spectrum would be commodity goods, wherein the products are generally required to be nearly identical. Consider commodity chemicals for example – other than quality and price, what avenues of competition are there? Delivery method, perhaps. Customer relations, perhaps. Unquestionably, this is a more difficult area to apply the principles of strategic inventing. However, there may be subtle opportunities for competition that exist primarily because no one is looking for them.

For example, a chemical business providing a known dry powder chemical in standard quality and performance was being pressured on price from overseas manufacturers. The product itself had not changed in decades. The process had undergone evolutionary changes to increase productivity, reduce costs and minimize environmental impacts.

Then something unexpected happened. A competitor showed up with a product meeting the same specs, but with a slightly different aggregation. Not a difference in particle size, or composition, or any other functional quality defined by the product specification.

Primarily, the difference was in the way the product looked when being processed by their customers. For some reason, however, the difference in appearance conveyed a difference in quality – even though no differences in performance could be measured. Operators noticed the difference and mentioned it to the engineers who mentioned it to the purchasing department. The manufacturer was asked why their product wasn’t the same as the overseas competition. And then politely informed that they might be losing customers if it wasn’t.

Strange as it may sound, this is a true story. Unfortunately for the originator of the improvement, what turned out to be a barely detectable part-per-billion compositional difference was not protected and was eventually duplicated by the protagonists of this example. Most likely, this is because no one considered the appearance of a commodity chemical, without functional improvements, to be a potential avenue for competition.

Most products will fall somewhere in between the two extremes of consumer products and commodity chemicals. The degree to which strategic inventing techniques are useful may very well depend on the types of products you make. However, as with many strategic approaches, it is the knowledge of the technique that can illuminate opportunities for application.