19 October 2020
What if Genrich Altshuller would perform his TRIZ research again?
As an innovation addict, I am always interested in reading, hearing and listening to innovative ideas. whether they are incremental, strategic or disruptive,... it doesn't matter. So for somebody like me, we live in great times. Technologies are changing at an exponential speed, creating new opportunities and opening mindsets because perhaps now we can make ideas happen from the past that were invented too early.
In the past there must have been several 'Einstein' people that were way ahead of their time, defining brilliant ideas... Unfortunately for these people technologies were not that advanced yet and therefore making it impossible to turn their idea into an economic viable product.
And that's why I decided to read more patents and try to figure out what is the invention described in the claims. Just like Genrich Altshuller did so many years ago...
Reading these patents and searching for the true invention became a struggle. It turned out that most of the patent claims have become very good in describing the idea but it turns out that only a few really explain why that particular claim is important in relation to the invention. Patent claims are filled with words like 'comprising', 'characterised in',... sometimes they just read like a design description rather than claiming an invention. Emphasizing the product rather than the true innovation is often the case.
If you claim a 'therapeutic delivery device for delivering metered volumes of a therapeutic product, a device comprising....' then it looks as if the therapeutic device is the invention or the therapeutic product, where in reality true innovation must be in the way/method the metered volumes are delivered. And most probably this method can be used in other situations outside the therapeutic industry, but might be a solution to any situation where liquid should be delivered in metered volumes. So in reality a scalable solution with an economical output.
Analyzing the process of how an idea is translated into a patent, has learned me 2 things:
- Patent industry is mainly focused by the business model that any idea or invention should be protected against copy or infringement. It is the strategy of a patent drafter and also the question of an inventor. In that mindset, it is clear you try to describe the invention to prepare yourself against lawsuits whenever an infringement or plagiarism happens.
- The inventor wants his invention to be protected and as he/she is focussed on the entire product and that first customer. In many cases the inventor has forgotten what problems he/she really solved and how these solutions can be used for other customers.
Bringing these two people together to draft a patent, ends up in very descriptive claims with no emphasis on the invention and revealing the valuable innovation in the patent description with all consequences on novelty.
It seems to me that we have forgotten to detect the true problems we solve with our invention and therefore miss opportunities because problems and solutions are scalable, ideas on the contrary are often not or less scalable.
And therefore if Genrich Altshuller would repeat his research leading to the 40 principles of Triz, I wonder if, with these descriptive patents, he would have detected these principles...
But perhaps with the evolution of artificial intelligence we could come up with an algorithm to detect these principles of invention or at least make a suggestion how to write patent claims that are closer to the invention.