[Patent Talk] Prior Patent Searches to Avoid Duplicate Research

This is a column by our patent attorney Taeyoung Lee, published in Etoday on December 7, 2020. It discusses why companies need prior patent searches to avoid duplicating research that has already been done.

[Patent Talk] Prior Patent Searches to Avoid Duplicate Research

After about eight months of research, Manager A in the R&D department of a small business completed a new product. He asked the production management department to build a prototype and asked the patent department whether a patent application could be filed for the product.

The answer from the patent department, which arrived about two weeks later, came as a shock: the newly developed product was likely to infringe a Korean patent held by a large global company, so a design-around would be needed.

Manager A hurried to stop the prototype work and so avoided further losses, but he now faced the prospect of writing off roughly KRW 1 billion in R&D costs spent over the previous eight months.

This scenario is hypothetical, but such unfortunate cases are far from rare at small and medium-sized enterprises. Large companies with well-established patent organizations have standardized processes, so this rarely happens to them. Startups and SMEs, however, often have no patent function at all, or, if they do, have not yet put a standardized process in place.

In such cases, the problem can be solved with a design-around if one is feasible. But where a design-around is difficult...

(For the full column, please click the link below.)

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