A creative guideline for in-house inventors based on empirical study

Employee invention in a company is an important theme in MOT, because patents invented by employees can defend technology and products of the company, and can accumulate as intangible assets of the company. This article shows an efficient, creative guideline for in-house inventors, which has been led based on empirical study in an actual company. We researched the invention activity in a software development team of a certain Japanese company, and found some bottlenecks at review by in-house IP specialists in the process for filing the application. A comprehensible guideline which was derived from document analysis and observation, has helped the inventors to explain to the reviewers efficiently. As a result, the team has obtained some effects like a decrease of wasted inventing labor and an increase of the application rate.