Patents and Strategic Inventing: Nick Nissing’s New Book for Corporate Inventors and Leaders

The new intellectual property book by Nick Nssing, Patents and Strategic Inventing: The Corporate Inventor’s Guide to Creating Sustainable Competitive Advantage (McGraw-Hill, 2013) is a refreshing guide to help inventors and leaders in corporations. It is a collaborative work with a variety of contributors (myself included) providing a few chapters in addition to the excellent core material from Nick.

Nick has many years of inventing and IP strategy experience at Procter & Gamble and Monsanto, where he is currently the Biotech Strategy Lead. He is also founder of Luminosity LLC, a consulting firm focused on new product development and patent strategy for large corporations. He is also an adjunct professor at Washington University. I’ve known Nick for a number of years and have been impressed with his approach to IP strategy and his business sense when it comes to IP.

This book provides a rich variety of material to help corporate inventors. Too often corporate inventors just sit back and let the attorneys handle everything, but Nick’s book shows that much better results can be achieved when the inventors are educated in patent strategy so that they can invent more strategically and work with the attorneys more effectively.

Part 1 offers a sound introduction to patentability, patent searching, and the role of the corporate inventor, and then explores patents in light of the America Invents Act. Many highly practical nuggets are there such as Chapter 9, “Working with Your Attorney: Nine Steps to a Better Utility Patent,” which offers insights from Byron Olsen, assistant general counsel at Monsanto. This section provides very practical information including a recommendation that inventors work with the attorney to “superinvent,” adding new concepts and uses for the invention to greatly broaden and strengthen the patent.

Part 2 deals with Patent Strategy, followed by Part 3, “Strategic Inventing.” These two sections get into more advanced topics such as building portfolios, analyzing landscapes, life-cycle management of IP, disruptive innovation (that’s my chapter: “Intellectual Property and Disruptive Innovation: Strategies, Tactics, and Lessons from China”), TRIZ, and guidance on implementing patent strategy at the project level. Overall, I find the book to be fresh, original, clearly written, and a good example of how one expert author can add value by collaborating with other contributors.

For more information, see the book’s website, StrategicInventing.com.