Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs are challenged not by intent, risk aversion, or hard work. Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs are limited by investable resources. What, then, could small businesses and entrepreneurs do if they were handed 300,000 inventions from top Universities and designers around the world? What if that many inventions were handed to them annually? What if they already are? Every year hundreds of thousands of Patents Expire and become a public good (everybody owns them and has the right to use them).
Do you think Small Business owners and Entrepreneurs could find a way to make their businesses more profitable, serve more customers better, or expand if they were already past the Research and Development stage? Expired Patents represent exactly this opportunity.
WIPO (World Intellectual Property Office) Conference documents from 1996 state that 5-7% of Patents were being commercialized:
Inventors and all those involved in marketing inventions and innovations should not forget that only a very small percentage (5 to 7 percent) of all inventions for which patents have been granted reach the commercialization phase of the innovation process.
Download full WIPO document here (.docx)
Forbes believes 95% of patents are under capitalized and published this in June of 2014:
“Of today’s 2.1 million active patents, 95 percent fail to be licensed or commercialized. These unlicensed patents include over 50,000 high-quality patented inventions developed by universities. More than $5 trillion has been spent in the U.S. alone on research and development over the past 20 years, much of which went to create the very patents that remain unlicensed.”
- Forbes Article
Expired Patents are now part of the public domain. Every human being on the planet has a right to use them free of charge. The legal protections on expired patents have expired. Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs are uniquely set up to rapidly incorporate them into profitable operations, capitalize on their use, and realize these opportunities rapidly.
Let BDTwo help you find something to increase your efficiency, expand your product lines, satisfy your customers, or cut costs. There are literally millions of things, that were patented, just waiting to be implemented, exploited, and capitalized on.