USPTO Annual Inventors' Conference - something we should do here

Every year at this time of the year the US Patent and Trademark Office opens its doors to private inventors and puts on a conference for them. I have mentioned this several times before (see "US Patent and Trade Mark Office helps Independent Inventors"  11 Sept 2005). Last year it was cancelled owing to wrangling between the President and Congress over the budget (see "Politicians wrangle at Inventors' Expense" 12 Oct 2013). Happily a conference is taking place this year between the 15 and 16 Aug.

There is an impressive agenda with star speakers one of whom is the serial inventor Woody Norris. Here is a link to talk he gave about two of his inventions.  The attendance fee is US$90 which is just £53.50 at the current rate of exchange.  Independent inventors are taken seriously in America - not mocked or patronized as they are so often elsewhere. We really should do something like this here.

The USPTO also provides a comprehensive portal for inventors resources which include information on patents and trade marks, inventors' assistance, pro bono services and an excellent newsletter.

UKBI Conference

UK Business Incubation ("UKBI") claims to be "the UK’s and increasingly international principal and successful authority on business incubation, business incubation development and best practice."    Since 1998 it has

"helped governments and development agencies to build a thriving business incubation infrastructure that will make increasingly significant contributions to local, regional, national and international economic growth, as thousands of incubated clients grow and move out of their business incubation environments and achieve sustainable commercial success in their own right."

Further information about the UKBI, its resources and news of its latest activities and of incubation generally can be found on its website.

Every year it holds an annual conference and this year it took place at the University of Lincoln Faculty of Business and Law between the 20 and 22 Nov 2012.  One of the events at the conference was a workshop on Protecting and Exploiting clients IP.   I was invited to speak at that workshop together with Mr. Simon Portman, managing associate of the Cambridge branch of Marks & Clerk solicitors and Mr. Brian More, Director of IP at CUE Ltd.  The session was chaired by Mr. Doug Scott, CEO of TEDCO;

I kicked off the workshop with an introduction to IP which Simon kindly described in an email as  "one of the best introductory summaries of IP" he had seen.  In another email, Doug said:

"As I mentioned at the conference, when I was asked to chair it I thought I was well informed about the topic in hand but partly because the world has moved on rather more than I had thought and partly because there were some interesting details that came up in the presentations and responses, I found it extremely useful."

I was followed by Simon who spoke interestingly and perceptively about licences and assignments and other IP contracts and by Brian whose presentation on IP valuation was concise but authoritative.   My slides together with those of all the other speakers at the conference can be downloaded from the UKBI's page on livedrive,

After the sessions we had a reception and dinner at the chapter house of Lincoln cathedral which can only be described as glorious.   You can get some idea of the setting from the pics on UKBI's Facebook page.   I was lucky enough to sit between two very interesting delegates: Maha Al-Bulushi of the ITA in Oman and Mr. David Gill of St John's Innovation Centre in Cambridge.

I was gratified to meet two old friends, Amanda Lennon whom I have mentioned more than once in this blog and Olivier Tomat of Lyon who used to run the Elsie Whitely Innovation Centre in Halifax.   I also made a lot of new connections from Dome Enterprise Centre of Chichester and Cornwall Innivation, Sangeetha Shinde, managing editor of the Business Incubator magazine and of course Bhavan Desai and Keiron Broadbent if UKBI,

If you want to learn more about incubation or the services we provide to incubators and start-ups, call me on             +44 161 850 0080 or send me an an email through my contact page. You can also follow me on Facebook, Linkedin, twitter or Xing,