Posts Tagged: "interview"

Does the Patent Gender Gap Matter?

Why should we care about getting more women inventing? What does it matter? You don’t find more innovation by looking in places where you’re not likely to discover it. You’ll find innovation by researching and developing and we have several untapped sources of potential. Up until now there has been little or no real significant output on an entrepreneurial innovative level for female inventors, as well as with minority inventors. So I’m very interested in the types of programs that are going on at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and I’m very interested in the efforts to try and bring women into the entrepreneurial and innovative space because I think that’s where we can find creative, fresh ideas. So I think this is a very important initiative.

The Patent Gender Gap Goes Beyond Fewer Women in Math and Sciences

“[W]e are finding that when the schools that are starting to measure their invention disclosure and their patent filings, again with at least one woman represented, even when they control for the percentage of female faculty members within a given department, for instance, they’re still finding that yes, there are fewer women represented but those fewer women that are represented are not filing as many invention disclosures as their male counterparts. So while we do need to concentrate on changing the culture and on making sure that girls and women are encouraged within these fields, we also have to, I think, for the sake of our economy, concentrate on women who are in these fields and are working and make sure that they also know about the patent process and find that accessible to them.”

More Applicants Should Use the First Action Interview Program

The First Action interview (FAI) program affords applicants a no-fee opportunity to speak with examiners early during prosecution, before the examiner has invested the time to prepare a complete Office Action. Yet, a free FAI request is filed in a mere 1 of 625 applications. Our analysis shows that the prosecution benefits of this program continue to be realized and that the program improves both the efficacy (allowance rate) and efficiency (office-action counts and time to issuance) of prosecution. We have seen, both in our professional experiences and through these statistics, such great benefit of this program that we have encouraged the USPTO to take this program one step further and establish a Pre-Search Interview Program that would allow the applicant to explain and potentially demonstrate an invention even prior to the examiner conducting a search.

Tech Transfer 101: It’s A Better World with University Technology

AUTM collects quantitative data and facts about the benefits of university tech transfer, but the qualitative evidence is actually the most important. With the Better World Report, which just hit 500 stories, AUTM provides evidence that university tech transfer makes a better world. Just look at those stories in the Better World Report; they’re heartwarming. It is amazing that some of the critics tend to overlook or completely discount the very real stories of success. I don’t know what the critics are after— I guess the success of university tech transfer doesn’t fit the narrative that they wish to impose on everybody.

Talking Trademarks: An Exclusive Interview with INTA’s Debbie Cohn

What follows is our wide ranging discussion, which start out with what Cohn is doing with INTA and then moves into an in depth discussion of issues surrounding counterfeiting, the newly formed Trademark Caucus in Congress, and the recent Federal Circuit decision on disparaging trademark registrations in the so-called Slants case. We ended with the familiar fun questions that give us an opportunity to get to know Cohn.