I recently reached out to a few clients, friends and former colleagues — all of whom are “IP-inexperienced” — to ask them what intellectual property (IP) answers they might find helpful during their workdays, no matter how basic the question might seem. Each person has a job that is not focused on IP matters but occasionally has IP issues arise. For this post, I selected one question each from the CEO of a software startup, a transactional in-house attorney and a project manager at an engineering consulting firm.

“How do we navigate the patent process? How do you decide whether or not to file for a patent, and is filing for a patent worthwhile?”

Perhaps with some exceptions (such as large, multinational corporations with established research and development (R&D) departments), companies have a wide variety of approaches to navigating the patent process, depending on the size of the company, how often the company is involved in the patent process, whether or not the company has an in-house legal team, and personal preferences among those responsible for patent decision-making.