The entire procedure for attaining a patent, starting from conceptualizing your idea, writing down those crucial points, filing patent applications, answering office responses, etc. Did I miss anything? Yes, the missing link is thoroughly conducted “Prior Art” research. Many a times, an Inventor often overlook that important aspect thinking his innovation being the pioneer in the field and one of its kind. The result is no Patent granted ,infringing claims or multiple amendments in the claims structure. In all the cases, your prospect of attaining a Patent seems dodgy.
The idea behind a Prior Art search is to negate all those possibilities which could hamper the approval of your patent application. Imagine your latest invention comprise of certain features (if not all) which are already patented a year back or may be already disclosed in a peer review journal. You, as an Inventor have no idea where does this enter into picture. Anyways, there is not much left for you now but to carefully amend the claims of your application or carry on answering the multiple office actions. In the entire process, you lose precious time and intellectual energy while making futile permutations and combination. To be more precise, time is money, can you afford to lose it.
As an IP strategist, I have always advised individual inventors and start ups to pay crucial attention to this foundation point. There is absolutely no point in running a prior art research after filing your patent applications. Prior Art forms the base of the pyramid, a well conducted prior art search report can help an inventor to draft the most appropriate set of claims in the patent application. Besides that, it enables an inventor to possess a complete knowledge of existing and pending patent technology domains and freedom to operate space. As said before, it saves your time and intellectual energy. Eventually, I hope you find it useful to implement!
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