In judging whether to fund an entrepreneur, venture capitalists rely on more than just the gut feeling they’re famous for. In his book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, writer and surgeon Atul Gawande writes: “But finding a good idea is apparently not all that hard. Finding an entrepreneur who can execute a good idea …
Image courtesy Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com Last week at lunch, my colleague ordered an “Impossible Burger.” It took about two bites to understand why they called it “Impossible,” because this burger looked, tasted and went down like meat. It was, however, not meat. My colleague slid the dish over to me for a meat-eater’s opinion. I took a …
This past weekend, the New York Times reported that American diplomats suffered “sonic delusions” and possible brain damage during mysterious sonic attacks in 2016 in Havana, Cuba and Guangzhou, China. The “microwave weapon” attacks caused the medical evacuation of 21 American diplomats in 2017, as well as the expulsion by President Trump of Cuban diplomats …
Ever since this thing called the Internet erased our horizons, many of us have found ourselves conducting business far outside the United States. For many of our clients, filing a patent in the United States is not enough. They seek also to protect their invention overseas, where the rules are different. U.S. patents do not afford …
Trump’s proposed tariffs bode poorly for small business. When you work with startups, you get a ground-level view of economic trends in action. In the last few weeks we’ve been watching how the Trump administration’s new trade threats are affecting our clients. As you probably know, President Trump just announced tariffs of 25 percent on about …
Q. What do these innovations have in common? – The Space Suit – Step-On Garbage Cans – The Bra – Random Radio Frequency – Kevlar ® – AZT – The Mars Rover A. They were all invented by women. We learned this from the awesome book Patently Female: From AZT to TV Dinners, Stories of Women …
THE HEALTHY DIVIDE BETWEEN INNOVATORS AND MANAGERS Karen James is one of those software developers: focused, methodical, binary. She is also inventive. She can envision a solution to a problem via lines of code. In the early 90’s Karen wrote a software application that medical staff could use to keep track of patients and manage …
The United States government, through its National Institutes of Health (NIH), supports thousands of drug trials each year, and spends about $40 billion per year on research. At the same time, it continues to grant legal monopolies to companies in the form of patents. These patents are supposed to last 20 years, but some of …
(Originally published May 8, 2019) Eighty percent of our clients are white males. That’s cool, but we’d like to see more women and BIPOC inventors represented. So would the patent office. To that end, the United States Patent and Trademark Office is soliciting comments during open sessions to promote the SUCCESS Act of 2018. Here’s …
Pharma Company Accused of Using Legal Tricks to Squash Generic Version Last October, we wrote about the tactics used by pharma company AbbVie to artificially extend its patents on its billion-dollar drug Humira. Now six groups are filing lawsuits against AbbVie for “anticompetitive conduct.” Humira is a rheumatoid-arthritis and gut-disorders drug that enjoys sales of …