Business Uses for Patents

How Much Does It Cost To File A Patent?

How much does it cost to file a patent?  The US average is about $12k, but the total cost of a patent is closer to $60k. Have you been quoted much less? There are plenty of patent attorneys who quote much, much less than $12,000 to draft a patent application. But beware. One of the…

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Exclusive Licenses Can Be More Valuable Than Owning Patents Outright

Own or Rent?  Exclusive Licenses Can Be More Valuable Than Owning Patents Outright. Patents encapsulate the hopes and dreams of a company and many investors, CEOs, and inventors have a negative gut reaction about not “owning” their patents.  For some reason, “owning” their patents is a deeply emotional issue, but it should not be.  Exclusive…

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Patents Multiply Your Investment in a Company

Note: this is an excerpt from my book “Investing In Patents.” Patents Multiply Your Investment Patents are used to defend, but also to multiply an investment in technology. In the first case, companies use their patent assets to preserve an investment. In the second case – and this is the most powerful one – patents…

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Foundation of Investment Grade Patents

Foundation of investment grade patents is serious due diligence. Getting solid, investment-grade patents is less about finding the gem as much as removing the dirt so that there are more possible gems in the portfolio. We do not know which patent will ultimately be the gem, but we can dramatically increase our chances by removing…

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Patents Are Similar to Stock Options

Patents are similar to out-of-the-money stock options. Patents are an inherently risky investment and have lots of similarities to options trading. This is because they have value only when the market comes to them. At the time you purchase an option – and at the time you create a patent – you must place a…

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Patent Funding: Better Patents from BlueIron

Patent Funding: How BlueIron Gives You Better Patent Quality One of the biggest ironies is that your patent attorney cannot give you good advice. But patent funding changes that. Patent attorneys are bound by the attorney/client privilege, which is a hallmark of our legal system. But it has some unintended consequences. One of which is…

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How to Get a Good Patent

How to Get a Good Patent How to get a good patent? It is easy to get a worthless patent, but quite hard to file a good one. A good patent starts with a good invention. The invention should have a high value if the invention were to be licensed or sold to competitors in…

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Patents Need to Make Business Sense

Patents can be part of an overall business strategy, but they need to make business sense. In our business of investing and financing patent portfolios, we can only invest in patents that have real commercial value. From the startup’s perspective, there are several ways that a patent can have value. Merely having a patent pending…

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Patents As Investments

BlueIron treats patents as investments. But we don’t invest in everything. We do not invest in technologies where we don’t think there is a market for the patents alone. BlueIron treats client’s patents like collateral for loans. Our investment is protected only by the value that the patents would have on the open market, if…

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Inventions Where BlueIron Will NOT Invest

There are some inventions where BlueIron will NOT invest. I see an obnoxious number of inventions and patents from startups. Almost all of them are not good candidates for us to invest. It is heartbreaking to say “no” to inventors where the invention does not seem to be ‘big’ enough to be a saleable, stand-alone…

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