FOR UNIVERSITIES
The question was never “is it patentable?” It is “is it commercializable?”
Hundreds of granted patents, a decade of maintenance fees, single-digit licences: the count was met every year; the mission was not. Outsourcing patent execution quietly exported the strategy that should have stayed home — the whether and the what rode along with the how.
What AI makes cheap: landscape and FTO analysis, drafting, filing — the execution the TTO once had to buy. The decision to patent can finally be unbundled from the capacity to execute it.
What stays scarce: translation judgment — is this commercializable, and who will carry it? The ground is relational: harvesting is trust built with researchers; licensee identification is network knowledge; deal sense is priced experience. AI shortlists; humans match and close. And the reform is cultural before it is technological — it is made against the institution’s own count metric.
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Commercializability triage: a licensee, a market, a path — before committing to file.
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Invention harvesting as relationship work with researchers.
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Licensee identification and invention-to-market matching.
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Deal sense and valuation judgment.
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Portfolio pruning against the count culture — filing less, translating more.
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Directing AI tools rather than being captured by them — or dependence migrates from law firms to AI vendors.
One skill, five readings: here, claim construction is licensability scope — what a claim is actually worth to a licensee.
TTO capacity programmes · IP-cell revival for Indian universities · metric and policy redesign (from counts to translation) · standing advisory for building the in-house competence..
Turn a filing office into a translation office.