As Prevayl gets closer to the revealing of their product line, we sat down with our in-house patent attorney and IP Director Sam Bird to discuss Prevayl’s unique IP culture and strategy, along with reflecting on the past year and a half at Prevayl®.
IP is an important part of Prevayl’s culture, how did you help implement this?
Luckily, many of the Prevayl team members had previous experience working with IP. They understood the importance of IP from the outset and the value it holds for the business.
That has made it easier to implement a strong IP culture.
We have also tried to make ourselves available to all team members, including more junior employees and the ones not involved with the day to day R & D. We want everyone to be aware of their role in generating IP and the importance it has to the business
We have an “open door” approach when it comes to ideas and inventions. We don’t want anyone to be afraid of sharing their ideas with us or to think that their ideas are less valuable because they do not have a senior management position.
Why is intellectual property at the core of what Prevayl do?
We have developed a great product and software platform. Protecting them with patent applications and other IP rights ensures the hard work does not go to waste.
We are using IP as a tool that helps us stop people copying or imitating the hard work the team have put into developing the product.
In addition to this, we want to establish an impressive and powerful portfolio of patents and other IP rights to gain competitive advantage in years to come.
How has Prevayl’s IP strategy differed to other companies and how have you involved the wider teams to execute it?
I joined Prevayl very early on, Prevayl was founded with a focus on strong IP protection and strategy from the start. Both the IP and business strategy were aligned from the outset.
IP was never an after-thought, it was present from the start, which is different to most companies.
It is common for start-ups to develop the product, tell the world about it, and then go and see a patent attorney. This means it is often late to fully protect the work they have done.
Whereas at Prevayl, we’re unique. We have in-house patent attorneys; we have IP ingrained in the company.
We can work with the teams to identity inventions and guide the overall business strategy.
We’re always here and we can react to ideas and situations, no inventions can be missed this way.
How does it feel seeing the Prevayl product finally built, given your extensive IP work around the product?
When we prepare patent applications, we normally work from technical design documentation. It’s amazing to see those original ideas reflected in the physical product.
We can see how the patent applications we made relate to different parts of that product in real life.
There has been an increased understanding of IP rights due to Industry 4.0, what are your predictions on how this will shape the IP industry?
Industry 4.0 has been discussed in the IP industry for a number of years.
I don’t think it will have much of an effect, beyond an increase in patent filings in certain areas. We have already seen increased activity and awareness regarding patenting machine-learning technologies. On the whole, patent offices are adapting to these new technologies and developing guidelines to provide some certainty about what can be protected.
There are some on-going legal issues which need clarification like the who owns an invention made by an AI and even whether an AI can be an inventor, but the likely impact of any decisions in these areas will be small at least in the near future.
What would you suggest to other technology companies starting up and how they can protect their ideas and inventions?
Build up your awareness of IP. And the many different areas of protection in different forms.
IP as an integral part of your business strategy. You likely will not have the resources to protect every invention you generate. Develop a process for prioritising what to protect and why.
It’s not just about protecting the work you do. You also need to consider the IP rights of others. Awareness of the patent landscape in your business area is often invaluable.
Be aware of external resources that can help, for example, patent attorney firms that can assist in invention protection.
How did it feel being ranked 14th in the list of most active patent filers at the UK IPOin 2019?
My college, Debbie Slater and I put in a lot of effort to protect inventions of the hard-working team. It’s great to see the results of this and how our work put us along house-hold name companies and leading academic institutions.
The company is small but innovates rapidly. We are still developing and protecting many inventions.