Peer-to-Patent: A System for Increasing Transparency

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So, why do many leading corporations support an initiative that appears designed to surface more information to challenge patent applications? In short, Peer-to-Patent offers the potential to deliver stronger, more litigation-proof patents in shorter time and lower cost. By increasing transparency at the outset and surfacing potential issues regarding prior art earlier, this process can preempt very costly litigation down the road. In an important way, Peer-to-Patent becomes a powerful insurance program to mitigate risk of patent challenges.

The early success of this pilot program has led to efforts to engage patent agencies around the implementation of similar initiatives in Canada, Japan, and Western Europe. Noveck anticipates further benefits from the ability to "create a global innovation network uniting patent offices around the world."

Lessons for Business Executives

Beyond its relevance to strengthening the patent application process, the Peer-to-Patent pilot offers some broader lessons regarding efforts to harness open innovation and crowdsourcing.

Move beyond individuals to harness the power of teams.
Diverse experiences and perspectives are powerful drivers of creativity, but this potential can be further amplified when diverse participants must collaborate around shared goals.

Move beyond short-term transactions to build more sustaining relationships.
By requiring the formation of teams, this initiative encourages the development of relationships that help to more effectively focus efforts and tap into the diversity of the individuals involved.

Define action points that require negotiation.
Much of the value of this initiative for the patent examiners comes from the requirement that teams reach agreement regarding a short list of prior art. It avoids the risk of an avalanche of input with widely varying quality.

Pay attention to institutional innovation.
Many executives have the mistaken impression that these initiatives are completely self-organizing and emergent. Instead, this pilot and other successful initiatives like it reveal that considerable institutional innovation is required to redefine relationships, roles and decision-making processes across independent entities.

Do not overdefine the collaboration space.
While the designers of this initiative defined the broad relationships, roles and decision-making process required to make this successful, they left considerable room for individual teams to define how they wanted to work together.

Invest to attract and integrate new participants.
These initiatives often succeed or fail based on the degree to which they can create visibility for potential participants to become aware of the opportunities to contribute. Also, this pilot illustrates the power of investing in visualization tools and other mechanisms to rapidly integrate new participants into the discovery process.

Findability is key.
When bringing diverse participants together in broad collaboration efforts, helping participants to connect with each other and to connect with relevant material is a key challenge. As the tagging efforts in Peer-to-Patent illustrate, the participants themselves can be very helpful in these efforts, but they need the tools to encourage and support their contributions.

John Hagel and John Seely Brown are co-chairman and independent co-chairman, respectively, of Deloitte LLP's Center for Edge Innovation. John Hagel writes a blog at Edge Perspectives. Their monthly column, Innovation on the Edge, explores what executives can learn from innovation emerging on various forms of edges, including the edges of institutions, markets, geographies and generations. Sign up here for an RSS feed.