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Intellectual Property & Patent Strategy for Engineers - Course & Test
Enhancing patent literacy in engineering curricula to empower r&d professionals and streamline innovation processes.
Reading, searching and reasoning about patents does not require a law degree, and building exactly that skill set is the goal here, stopping short of the litigation and prosecution work that belongs to a patent attorney. It opens with the distinction between a patent, a copyright, a trade secret and a non-disclosure agreement, moves through the practical skill of reading a patent’s claims rather than its abstract, the full patent status lifecycle from PCT filing to granted patent, and the search tools and invalidation strategies an engineer uses when checking whether a competitor’s patent is defensible.
Very few engineering curricula teach patent literacy, yet an engineer who cannot read a claim independently depends on legal counsel for even routine decisions, which slows a program and raises its legal cost. This course serves R&D engineers, product developers filing a first invention disclosure, and technical leads who need to assess a competitor’s patent portfolio before committing to a design direction. With only eight genuinely on-topic articles published today, this is the thinnest course on the list, and the missing items below, the actual application process and freedom-to-operate analysis, are the ones most worth writing next.
The Concepts & Tools to Learn in this Course:
These are the bodies of knowledge that will be assessed in the test below:
Patent versus copyright distinction
Trade secret versus non-disclosure agreement protection
Reading a patent without being a patent attorney
Patent status lifecycle: PCT, pending, published, granted
Free patent search tools and databases
Patent search technique
Patent invalidation strategies and tools
Fighting a pending patent
Provisional patent application process
Non-provisional patent application and claims drafting
Freedom-to-operate analysis
Prior art search methodology
Patent Cooperation Treaty international filing strategy
Invention disclosure form and internal capture process
Patent claim structure: independent versus dependent claims
Espacenet and USPTO Patent Public Search tool usage
Patent family and citation analysis
Licensing negotiation basics for engineers
Employer versus employee IP ownership rules
IP portfolio management and maintenance fee tracking
Our Suggested Readings
The list below is a special selection of our original articles, tools and methodologies available on this site.
Tip: the big dot at the start of each title indicates if that post/article has already been read ( ● ), or not ( ○ ). Refresh the page if necessary.
Tip: the reading progress is recorded either in a cookie (if you are not logged in or no account created), or in your site profile. Use the later to be sure not to loose your progression.
As soon as you start a given article, your progress will be indicated on top of each page to help you finish and move on to the next.
Note: for this particular course, we recommend to read the articles in that order.
Intellectual Property & Patent Strategy for Engineers :
After you are familiar with the lectures above, so as having done your own readings, we recommend attending the Exam below.
The test consists of 20 questions in random order, out of many more, to insure novelty each time. Each completely correct answer gets you 10 points. You get a full correction at the end of the test.
If the course has different levels, the current test does not include questions of lower levels, making it … hardthat level!
radio-buttons: only 1 correct answer must be selected
check-boxes: 1 or several answers must be checked (with strict all-good-or-nothing grading logic)
Tip: mouse over “Hint” to get an advise for the response.
Only innovation.world members can see it below and attend it.
