Could we all be doing more with the masses of unused patents that exist in the world?

That’s the question today’s startup sets out to answer. Read on to find out all about Enginuity.

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Enginuity wants to turn forgotten patents into innovation fuel

A stat commonly thrown around says that up to 95% of filed patents are never put to any use.

Now, given that this figure has been circulating for years, seemingly without a source, you could argue that it’s perhaps not quite exactly accurate, but we certainly know that many companies and inventors file lots of patents just to protect their unused ideas. That’s a lot of innovation that has come to nothing.

Enginuity wants to do something about that with its mission to “make the world’s IP searchable and actionable for innovators”.

You could just go to Google Patents to search up all of the patents featuring certain keywords you’re interested in, but the results are rudimentary and better suited to finding a patent you already know about than exploring innovations.

What Enginuity wants to do is help R&D departments, entrepreneurs, universities, and investors better understand what already exists in fields they work within.

How it works

Founder Richard Heggie says that Enginiuity is focused around the pillars of exploring, building, and commercialisation.

Enginuity is built to mine patents for the features, the functions and the concepts embedded within them, and then help innovators use these insights to solve problems and uncover new commercial intelligence.

It offers AI-based semantic search to navigate IP in the context of what you're looking for. You can then interrogate the patents it brings up to find what you’re most interested in, with prompts like “Could you summarise the claims in this patterns in terms of feature, function, and concept?”

If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, and just want to understand innovation in a particular space, Enginuity has a structured workflow for you.

“You can achieve inherent landscaping of existing technologies as they relate to the problem that you're solving,” Heggie says.

“The final way we help you explore is we help you understand topics of research around the subject area that you're interested in. So we help contextualise what you should be looking at in relation to a problem.”

Enginuity also wants to help users understand whether they should buy or build a particular technology they’re interested in. It does this by guiding users in how their own products should be different from existing patents. This is the kind of work you might otherwise go to a specialist consultant or lawyer for help with.

Heggie says that if the user decides to build something themselves, Enginuity can identify companies making highly relevant existing technologies that they could partner with for faster and perhaps cheaper results than going it alone.

And finally, Enginuity can identify commercial opportunities for a user’s own patents.

“We do market trend competitor analysis, and use the data in our system to identify commercial leads,” Heggie says.

The story so far

Heggie began his career in banking, including time as Head of High Growth & Entrepreneurs at Barclays. After taking time out to do an MBA, he started an innovation consultancy.

“My only criteria was not to work in finance,” he says.

“In particular, I focused on advanced manufacturing. I would scout technologies around the world and then do proof of concepts with them. In doing that work, I spent a lot of time with CEOs of organisations that had huge R&D budgets and thousands of patents.

“I would always ask the CEO two simple questions: how many of your patents are you actually using, and what's the commercial opportunity of your patent portfolio? Neither of those relatively simple questions could be answered by the CEO, or could necessarily be answered by anyone in the organisation.”

And so Enginuity is Heggie’s shot at changing that situation. Since getting started in April last year, he and CTO Christoph Geiser have built an MVP alongside design partners who gave input into its development.

They’re now gearing up for beta launch aimed at entrepreneurs and medium-sized, R&D focused companies (to avoid the long sales cycles they’d have to endure with large companies).

Their initial focus will be the UK, Germany, and USA, with expansion into Japan and South Korea planned for the future.

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