If your business viability depends on the ongoing creation of new patentable ideas, this book might well be of interest to you. Donal O'Connell shows you how to decide if you need a "patent factory", how to organize one, and how to get the best return from your inventions. He shows you how to use third part resources including services to protect your patents and how to license them profitably.

You will also be interested in how to use metrics to measure your factory's performance, how to manage its costs, and how to select tools to help you manage the process effectively.

This is not a book for the general business audience, but it certainly has value for its target audience.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

Mr. O'Connell sees the production of patents in terms of a factory analogy, with everything that this implies and entails - raw materials (inventions) going in one end and product (patents) coming out the other, factory machinery and operatives, quality control procedures, production targets, cost controls and use of toll manufacturing (subcontracting parts (or even all) of the process to external suppliers and specialised services), and the management and coordination of all of the above. Mr. O'Connell is not specific as to the nature of this Patent Factory, not, I believe, because he won't, but simply because he can't and he is sensible not to try. He knows that one size won't fit all - what works for an international pharma or telecommunications giant with a huge portfolio won't necessarily work for a small local engineering firm with a small portfolio. So he presents a large palette of ideas, from which anyone interested can mix'n'match his or her own patents factory according to needs/demands.

Although I find the factory analogy quite a good one overall, I think it has several shortcomings, namely in the matters of quality of raw materials and production targets. How does one maintain quality in "patentable inventions"? More importantly, how does one ensure a constant flow of such inventions? Nobody I know has yet managed to create to order - unless there were creative people there in the first place.

However, the overriding idea of the Patent Factory, be it a one (wo)man-band or a large, self-contained in-house department, is one of control. There must be someone, be it an individual or a department, with a clear strategy, overseeing the factory, its input, its output, its quality control, its outsourcing, its budget, its relations with other parts of the company and with senior management. To me, the really important message of this book is that there has to be some sort of in-house function, even if only a coordinator. This Factory should also set down standards for external attorneys, not of course in patent professional terms as to how an invention should be drafted, claimed and prosecuted, but in strategic terms by imparting the Company strategic vision to the attorneys, and making them an integral part of its achievement.

Anyone seeking the answers to all of his or her patent problems will not find them in this book. But one will be confronted with the facts that one needs to have a coherent patent policy, strategies for the efficient obtaining and maintaining IPR and the extraction of maximum benefit therefrom, and some way of implementing it all with the maximum possible efficiency, including cost control. These concepts alone will be news to many smaller companies. There are also very clear chapters on patent procedures, refreshingly free of patent jargon.

One of the problems I have with the book is the occasional (and perhaps unconscious) drifting towards the idea that patents are ends in themselves, rather than tools for extracting maximum commercial advantage. I think this is because Mr. O'Connell seems to have a tendency to believe that good material will inevitably end up as good, strong "quality" patents, as he calls them. This, with respect, completely ignores the recent catastrophic decline in standards of patent examination in the USPTO in particular. In addition, there is some repetition.

This is an invaluable book for the small organisation that has some patents, but which wants to organise and control its patent affairs a bit better - the book is a positive mine of useful ideas. It is also useful for the private practitioner, in that it puts him or her in the position of the client, seeing things from the client's point of view, and that can only be a good thing.