Invention Manager™

Corporate Invention Management

For the Corporate IP Team

AppColl® Invention Manager™ (IM) is a user-friendly system for submitting and managing invention disclosures, designed to help corporations and their inventors document their inventions. The software offers patent committees a comprehensive overview of all disclosures, including their status and next steps.

Key features include:

  • Combining similar ideas, editing disclosures, redirecting steps in the process flow, and reassigning actions.

  • Reporting for inventors to track their filed disclosures, pending applications, issued patents

  • Scoring and Award Management Programs

  • Automated emails to inventors and custom email templates for status changes and action items.

  • Automatic notifications to outside counsel when disclosures are ready for filing.

  • Simplified patent views showing dates, application, publication, issuance numbers, and status.

AppColl Invention Manager Laptop

Our software supports custom tags tailored to your business, allowing inventors and patent committees to organize disclosures by product lines, technologies, and keywords, with quick reporting capabilities.

Invention Manager™ integrates seamlessly with our Prosecution Manager™ product, enabling full tracking of your intellectual property from idea to maintenance. With AppColl®, managing your intellectual property portfolio has never been easier!

Invention Manager™ has 6 main function areas:

 

DISCLOSURE FORM

AppColl’s Invention Disclosure Management software is fully customizable to meet your needs so that you can collect the information you need to make quick a decision on patent filing for an idea. You can include up to 48 questions with responses that can be free-form text, drop-down list selections or dates. The text and description of each question is entirely up to you.

APPROVAL FLOW

With AppColl® Invention Manager™ , you don’t have to change the way you currently process invention disclosures. AppColl® supports your current invention approval workflow, simple or complex, with as many or as few steps and reviewers as desired. At each point in the flow, emails can be triggered to notify people that they have an action to complete to move the disclosure to the next step, or to inform inventors that their disclosure has an updated status.

AWARDS

If your corporation provides bonus awards for inventors submitting disclosures and filing patents, AppColl® can automatically calculate the award amounts and feed that information, after approval, to your payroll department for processing. The payment calculation is flexible and supports award programs that divide a fixed amount across all inventors, with minimum and maximum payouts.

SCORING

A critical part of any invention review process is the collection of opinions on the value of the idea. With AppColl® Invention Manager™ you can create as many attributes as needed for reviewers to rank on the disclosure scoring form. These attributes can be weighted and contribute to an overall numeric score or just be a qualitative textual opinion.

INTEGRATION

AppColl® Invention Manager™ is designed to work with the other enterprise software systems you use. Single sign-on login can be setup so that inventors can directly access AppColl® after logging into your internal network without entering additional login credentials.

REPORTING

AppColl® has very flexible and powerful reporting features that allow you to generate the information you need to manage your invention process. Information can be filtered based on any value in any field, including the custom fields setup in the disclosure form. Powerful chart generation features are available to easily aggregate your data to show information such as the number of disclosures submitted per business unit over time.