The patent industry is not simple, by any stretch of the imagination. Patents take years to process, can be make or break for a company, and, of course, are not always heeded by other companies and inventors. There is also a major problem when it comes to discoverability in the sea of 2.5 million patents (over 290,000 in 2015 alone). Let’s say an inventor begins the process of patenting her idea, then establishes her company while the patent was pending. It could be “pending” for five years before she finds out that someone applied for a patent the day before her, causing her to lose by default. After five years of pouring everything into a company, she may be forced to change her invention, starting this entire process over, pay a licensing fee or dissolve the company. This causes a massive headache not only for you, the company/inventor, but also for everyone else trying to find the ‘whitespace’ in which to develop their new ideas.

For companies and inventors, patent infringement is no joke, yet, billions of dollars are spent each year disputing patent rights. Recently, Apple was ordered to pay $506 million to University of Wisconsin-Madison in a patent case. UWM accused Apple of using a technology that was developed by one of the university’s professors and his students. Apple claims that they did not intentionally infringe on UWM’s patent, but they were working off of a patent of theirs that is similar. This unnecessarily complicated process is stifling innovation and it stands to show the current methods for patent search just aren’t fit for purpose anymore.

These are just some of the many issues with patenting and that is what inspired us to develop InnVenn. The second I learned about the immutability of blockchain technology coupled with machine learning, I knew it needed to be applied to revamp the patent process. InnVenn not only simplifies and expedites the patent research process for individual inventors, but also has tools that will benefit companies that need to generate IP (Intellectual Property) that’s actually useful.

InnVenn’s machine learning technology will be able to recognize valuable inventions mined in InnVenn, and can purchase and license it from the inventors with LOCIcoin acting as an immutably signed digital asset. Additionally, with Loci’s distributed database, we can package separate inventions to create an IP portfolio (also known as an investment pool) for a product or technology that is desired in that industry. We are going to have the ability for any user to place a bid on any IP patents or claims. That is the first step. Afterward, we will have a process of specifically marketing investment pools to our network of partner companies.

Corporations/Investment Banks, basically any form of asset trader, can then purchase IP portfolios that they are interested in, to essentially eliminate the risk of patent litigation. This can both save corporations millions of dollars a year, but can also provide inventors with a way of monetizing their ideas. When companies buy IP Pools they save themselves up to 70% of the time spent on research and development. The resources saved are then available to be put toward product development, marketing, etc.

We have been hard at work implementing the various phases of development and are happy to be one of the only ICOs going into their token sale with a market-ready product. We are currently in phase two of our four-phase development roadmap. The current phase includes exciting developments on the back end such as building training sets for machine learning and applying data mining techniques and additions to the front end such as enhancing the Venn visualization with 2D clustering.

Stay tuned for my next article’s dive into using investment pools as a potential equity vehicle through an investment bank.

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