Development Of New Product And Related Patent Position
This consultant has been working very closely with a specialty materials company whose products are used in the energy services sector. Just before starting work with this client, they had developed and patented a novel chemical process. For the next phase of their R&D, they needed the help of a materials scientist to develop optimum embodiments of the product, for commercialization as a premium product providing outstanding performance characteristics, from among the vast range of possibilities that the new process offered them. The work of this expert consultant for this client has involved many types of R&D services.
Our information services affiliate searched through the STN (miscellaneous technical literature), Delphion (patent literature), and Factiva (trade journal and press release literature) databases to help us come up to date on the published information on all aspects relevant to the product development challenge at hand. A monthly search process was established in each of these databases to ensure that we remained current with the state-of-the-art. The search outputs were reviewed to identify hits of strongest interest to the client and to consider how they related to our work. This information identification and digestion effort was very helpful to the client both in conceptualizing and developing the new product and in ensuring that very powerful patent applications could be written with full awareness of the prior art.
This consultant planned and implemented a cost-effective and efficient testing and characterization program with laboratory services affiliate to evaluate the prototypes of the product rapidly after preparation. This consultant also worked closely with another testing laboratory with which the client had previously established a relationship for additional (specialized and application-specific) testing.
Working with the client, this consultant helped to determine which prototypes of the product should be prepared, how the formulation and process conditions should be tweaked to provide the best prototypes, how these prototypes should be tested, how the test results should be interpreted in terms of the performance envelope of the product in end use applications, and how the many technical difficulties that were encountered along the way should be overcome. The outcome was the development of a new product with breakthrough performance characteristics that was ready for commercialization.
This new product is now being commercialized by the client who is scaling it up from the pilot plant to the manufacturing plant. This consultant continues to help with this stage of the product R&D effort as well. More specifically, this consultant has provided help in selecting and evaluating some of the equipment needed for manufacturing the product on the commercial scale, in selecting the techniques and equipment to be used for quality assurance and quality control, and in helping resolve some of the encountered technical difficulties.
Along the way, a keen awareness has been kept regarding opportunities for helping the client develop a strong intellectual asset position. This expert work has resulted in the filing of five patent applications (two of which have been published thus far) listing this consultant as either the sole or the first inventor and with all the rights to the invention assigned to the client.
To see the resume of the expert associated with this case study, see the link below.
