As global leaders settled in this week to negotiate a climate agreement in Copenhagen — at the U.N. summit that the VP of the Chamber of Commerce’s intellectual property center has called “the IP battle of the year” — the Obama administration took a step that could have more immediate implications for startups hoping to finance and grow a business based on proprietary green technology: Some 3,000 applications for patents on clean technologies will be fast-tracked through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in a new pilot program meant to reduce a typical review time for these patents to 12 months, down from the current average of 40 months.
Cutting that review time comes as part of an effort to accelerate the process for “inventors to secure funding, create businesses, and bring vital green technologies into use much sooner,” according to the patent office’s release. Having patents in hand — the result of an often laborious and expensive process — can give some startups an important lever to pull, as Celeste has written over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required) in the competition for venture capital investment, joint venture partners and other opportunities to grow their business in a challenging market environment.
“There’s a direct correlation between IP protection and the flow of capital, particularly for smaller companies,” Scott Faris, CEO of battery developer Planar Energy Devices, told us in an interview earlier this year. “If we’re doing cutting edge stuff, we have to carve out a defensible stake with enough time to build up. That’s what investors look at — how defensible is your position?”
According to the patent office, as many as 25,000 applications already in the system could qualify for the expedited process. But solid targets at Copenhagen for reducing national and global greenhouse gas emissions, and the creation of a binding agreement for the reductions next year, could deliver a significant uptick in those numbers, if history offers a model: An explosion of patents on tech for controlling sulfur dioxide emissions followed passage of the Clean Air Act, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon and noted by the Environmental Defense Fund last year (illustrated above in a graphic from the Carnegie Mellon report).
Under the pilot program announced Monday, only “the first 3,000 applications related to green technologies in which a proper petition is filed,” will go through the accelerated process (details on how to get in on the program will be published on the USPTO web site). From there, the patent office says it “will examine ways to continue and expand the initiative.” So the pilot program may offer lessons for how to handle a potential influx of greentech patent filings more efficiently.
A full stable of patents, however, does not necessarily represent a make-or-break for companies these days. As Alan Salzman, CEO and managing partner of VantagePoint Venture Partners told us in an interview this summer, shortly after he returned from a separate Copenhagen summit designed to get the business community on the same page about climate policies: “In a world that’s innovating quickly, the life cycle of IP is short.”
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