It is hard to determine that Patents are result of innovation or innovation and advancement is a result of patenting. Well! There is nothing wrong with both the concepts. Sometimes innovation are substantial and exciting, and sometimes they are dull and just a derived alternative of a previous issue. Strong patents are the ones whose patent claims and patent specifications have been written in an outstanding manner within the patent application, and have been supported by a large number of people. Once a patent is granted, it proofs that the innovation is correct and has been accepted by the council as a true invention, making it available for public disclosure. Another fact to enlighten up your thinking is that public disclosure makes it open for the consumers or the customers to determine the success and utility of any innovation.

Strong Patents: Pathway for future innovation

In this article, we will understand how strong patents act as the source of incremental innovation. It is the basic concept, style of presentation, writing style, obligeance to patent laws, and timely prosecution of a patent application that makes it a strong patent. After receiving grant, what makes it an actual public hero, is its popularity among the crowd of people in support.

Consider the following points for further understanding:

• Strong Patents makes way to gain market share: Supportive public acts as barriers or hurdles to other competitors, preventing the usage of already illustrated patent. It can be understood like when a brand grows popularity and have a huge fan following, it becomes difficult for brand’s competitors to copy or infringe the products or services. Or even if they try to copy, then due to huge popularity, the probability of getting caught in case of infringement still exists. Once the competitors are blocked, they cannot purely copy and reveal the copied products in the market and expect a good score. Thus, when strong patents exist they secure huge portion of market share in its favor, thus preventing others to produce same or similar products.

This will open a very specific option for competitors, to leave the older idea which is already so popular, and start working on something else from the scratch. Thus, in this way strong patents opens a path that supports incremental innovation.

• Strong Patents challenge for efficient infringement: Efficient patent infringement means to do infringement on the already stated patent by whatever it takes to acquire the patent in question.  Efficient infringement actually comes into action when large corporations with limitless resources decide to infringe upon the patent holder. Since we are talking about large corporations that hold a pool of resources, that don’t care if some of the money will be wasted by failing in this case. Such companies don’t even bother to pay if they lose the overwhelming likelihood and pay modest royalty as penalty, indeed they mostly succeed in entangling the patent owner for his own rights.

Thus, it opens a possibility for the patent holder to either protect his invention or just to look for new options. Not only for the patent holder, but even for patent aspirants looking for innovations, strong patents accelerates the idea of inventing something totally off-the-track and not one specific domain oriented, making way for incremental innovation.

When the market gets blocked by strong patents and others choose not to openly and willfully infringe, then innovation leaps forward. This leads to reduction in copy-cats available in the market, and innovations from a number of domains. The IP industry is an open shell for opportunities, and it must always be promoted to follow innovations in incremental manner.