Step 10:  Product Differentiation

Once you have successfully sold or licensed one of your patents, you may want to work on product differentiation to further increase your future royalties and benefits. Your goal is to create spin-offs or improvements to your invention that could be added to your licensee corporation's product line to supplement sales of your original invention. If your marketing innovations are different enough, they may be patentable.

Even if they are not given patent protection, because your original patent generally covers it, these derivative products may be worthwhile to pursue. Corporations may find them appealing enough to add to their product lines to work their innovation marketing magic on (requiring them to kick back even more royalties to you). In fact, if you license a successful patent to a particular corporation, you can almost guarantee that the corporation will try to come up with modifications or next-generation improvements and new innovations to your original invention in the future. Why not beat them to it? Some of the invention ideas you designed to protect you from copycats (Step 9) may be applicable here if they are valuable enough inventions to pursue on the market.

This chapter focuses on two types of derivative products that can increase your patent royalties: spin-offs and modifications.