MINDMATTERS TECHNOLOGIES, INC., the leading provider of secure enterprise software for capturing, managing and protecting ideas that lead to new and improved products and IP.COM, the leading provider of legal safeguarding services and host to the largest collection of prior art in the world, today announce a partnership to integrate their offerings.  The partnership is embodied in release 6.5 of the Innovator™ which seamlessly integrates IP.com services.  Already offering the highest level of intellectual property protection for innovation, the new release further enhances an organization’s product development and invention business processes, increasing the quality of intellectual property and reducing risk, while creating irrefutable evidence of the intellectual property development process.

Innovator™ 6.5 enhancements include:

1. Legal Safeguardingto create “snapshots” of ideas as they change from simple ideas to potential patent applications, creating a certified record,
2. Prior Art Searching to provide inventors with quick 80-20 rule prior art searches on new concepts, and details to IP professionals, helping to make better informed decisions, and
3. Defensive Publication to automate the process of publishing key research and innovation, proactively blocking others from IP overreaching.

Tom Colson, CEO of IP.com stated, “Our partnership with MindMatters provides customers with a way of automatically managing the safeguarding and defensive publishing processes in the context of an intellectual property management system.  This allows greater control and security throughout the entire IP process, and ensures that sensitive information is properly protected in a deliberate and structured way.”  John Gabrick, CEO of MindMatters added, “By integrating IP.com’s Prior Art Database with MindMatters Innovator™, our customers will be able to automatically search through prior art every time a new invention is captured, and then automatically update their records with relevant results.”

Continuing, John Gabrick said, “Our customers use Innovator™ to manage the ‘ideas to assets’ business process, and these new capabilities help create more durable IP while ensuring freedom-to-operate for new product introductions.  By partnering with the premier provider of prior art and legal safeguarding, we are enabling the ‘next practices’ in intellectual property management interwoven within the innovation lifecycle.”

Legal Safeguarding

Digital fingerprinting and electronic date-stamping will now be effortless with the integration of IP.com Legal Safeguarding.  Innovator’s advanced workflow engine will create automatic “snapshots” of innovations at important points through invention development, such as on initial submission, during key review phases, or on innovation modification.  These snapshots freeze the entire contents of the innovation, including attached documents, comments, tasks, and other record attributes so they can be later viewed and compared with later versions.  Since the snapshots can be authenticated at any point in the future, a robust digital record will be able to verify the invention dates, inventorship, review dates, and other important IP information, creating irrefutable evidence of the state of your innovation at a given point in time.

Prior Art Searching

Assessing whether an idea is subject to legal protection, and provides potential market exclusivities is an extremely important step in judging its relative worth to the organization.  As new ideas are created in Innovator™, search agents may automatically search through the IP.com Prior Art Database for relevant publications that may already exist, automatically delivering the results not only to reviewers, but possibly also to the inventors themselves, in accordance with company policy.  With the search results incorporated into the invention record, reviewers will have the ability to view the contents of result documents seamlessly as part of the invention record.  Most companies today search patent history as a routine part of their IP due diligence, but many miss the equally important body of information: formal prior art.  IP.com’s publicly searchable, library indexed Prior Art Database collection is the largest in the world, and soon shall contain the exclusive and complete publications of such organizations as IBM and Motorola. 

Defensive Publication

An often-overlooked aspect of intellectual property protection is the publication of information in place of patenting or keeping an innovation secret.  This critical element of the overall IP strategy is now seamlessly incorporated into Innovator™, and can occur automatically as reviewers or managers make final decisions regarding IP. Defensive publication protects valuable first-invention rights against others who might otherwise use IP rights as a weapon against the originators.  Leading best-practice organizations use defensive publication strategies to create competitive barriers, reducing IP conflict risks.  In the event that you need to present evidence of disclosure at trial, IP.com's Prior Art Database has extensive safeguarding measures to provide evidence of document integrity and date-stamping for every publication.

About MindMatters

MindMatters Technologies, Inc. helps companies stimulate, capture, validate and profit from innovative product ideas and emerging intellectual property created by employees, customers and business partners.  MindMatters’ patent pending technology solution, Innovator™, is the only enterprise system that helps business managers effectively determine which innovations are most likely to turn into profitable products.  Companies like 3M, Dana Corporation, Johnson Controls, Sony and PPG Industries rely upon Innovator™ to support their intellectual property, innovation and growth aspects of their product lifecycles. 

About IP.com, Inc.

IP.com, Inc. is the world’s leading source of prior art.  Many of the leading innovation companies in the world use the IP.com Prior Art Database to disclose technology into the public domain, including companies such as IBM, Motorola, Siemens and others.  Serious innovation companies also rely on the IP.com Prior Art Database as a source for researching technology.  IP.com also provides Legal Safeguarding of innovation, business records and creative art through their Legal Safeguarding Agent product.  To learn more go to www.ip.com.