Demystifying the amazing benefits of applying for a patent for technical students, you definitely can't miss it!Today, I would like to share with you why you should write a patent and how to apply for a patent from the perspective of a technical engineer (programmer).
First of all, it is necessary to popularize science, not that something must be made to be patented, and unlike imagination, most patents are innovative ideas. So what is the most prominent feature of applying for a patent?That is, it must be new and exclusive. It doesn't matter if it can be put into specific use, but it must highlight the "new". The core requirements of the patent are actually very similar to **, not necessarily put into actual use, but the key is to be "new". This is also the case that patents attach great importance to whether someone has already written them, and duplicate patents and patents are of no value. The second feature is exclusivity, which can be protected by patents, and will not be easily bypassed by others.
There are three types of patents, namely invention patents, utility model patents and design patents. An invention is a new technological solution proposed for a product, process or improvement thereof. Invention patents include product patents and process patents. Since programmers are generally rarely able to have "utility model patents" and "design patents", we specifically refer to "invention patents" here. Here we would like to explain that an invention does not have to have a real thing, but can be a method, for example, the xxx solution realized through xxx is a patent name. For example, a cache degradation scheme, an AI-based capability scheme, and so on are common patents that programmers can write.
As mentioned above, the keyword "new" is an essential feature of patents. For any patent, there is a special feature of innovation, but the word innovation itself is relatively large, innovation can include completely 0-1 inventions, such as the invention of the computer, the invention of the lamp, the invention of ** are all inventions, and the integration of existing materials can also be used, this innovation can be a combination of existing capabilities, such as installing a lighter on the TV (don't laugh at such a patent), integrating an electric shock tool on the mobile phone, and so on. When many students think of patents and inventions, they think of Edison's invention of the light bulb, or the invention of the atomic bomb. Of course, these are very, very big inventions, and even enough to affect all mankind, but objectively speaking, at this stage, it is difficult to invent an innovation that affects mankind and no one has ever done it. Therefore, most of our current innovation is based on the reintegration, combination or optimization of existing technologies. No matter what means can be used to have new functions or features, it is in line with the elements of innovation. So do we have very few opportunities to innovate in our day-to-day work?Relatively speaking, our daily business is basically repetitive business, so there are many patented inventions and have been applied for by predecessors, for example, we write an order trading system, which is likely to have been applied by others, and we have designed a caching system, which has a high probability of being applied for by others. However, the innovation we are talking about can have certain differentiated characteristics on the current basis, so it can be regarded as having certain patent conditions, so in this case, we can combine some characteristics of some of our businesses and be able to apply for many differentiated patent points.
Let's take a look at it again, what kind of innovation is obviously differentiated?Before we make a function or an idea, we must see if there is a similar function on the market, for example, most of the tables have four legs, if you say that I also design a four-legged stool. Then it is easy to be covered by the patent of the previous person, so at this time, if you set up a five-legged table, then in a certain situation, it is a very good innovation. Of course, some students soon thought, can I apply for a six-legged table?So it's infinite, endless, so some students will think about whether I can design "a multi-legged table" so that it can cover all kinds of situations, yes, this is the exclusivity of patents. If you write a patent that can be easily bypassed by others, then the patent is also worthless. For example, if you just apply for "a table with five legs", it is a bad patent, although you can also apply for it, but you will find that there is basically no value, and others can easily bypass it. A patent is essentially a kind of intellectual property that protects oneself, and if it can be bypassed, regardless of whether the property right is useful now, the patent is essentially invalid.
We often discuss what kind of innovation is a very good patent, and we often give an example, that is, Alipay's gesture decoding. It is possible to set a password through gestures, which is a very good innovation. It turns out that they are all by swiping left and right, entering passwords, Fingerprint and so on directly boot, we take into account the security, generally set a password, but when we manually enter the password, often the password will be forgotten, and when operating the password will be more complicated, after all, to operate the keyboard, but if we use our gestures to decode, on the one hand, we are easy to remember its shape, on the other hand, the operation is particularly simple, as long as the lines are drawn, this is an innovative point, it is now widely used in various occasions. Another innovation is in the area of face recognition, we usually know that in most cases, face recognition needs to be able to directly use the face to take off all the faces before facial recognition, but we found that during the epidemic, we all wore masks. At this time, if we want to use the face recognition function, because we take off the mask, on the one hand, it is very inconvenient, and on the other hand, there is also a risk of epidemic transmission, so at this time, if we can think of a strategy to solve this way, then it is also an innovation, it is very simple, that is, face recognition is a very good innovative solution based on the mask situation. This is a small optimization patent in the case of existing face recognition. So from these two examples, we can see that innovation is actually everywhere, but only if we have new ideas or ideas from solving these problems, although it may not be realized. But as long as there is still something innovative, we can apply for it as a patent.
But then again, there is a cost to apply for a patent, generally speaking, there are two ways, the first way is for you to apply for a patent personally, and the other way is for your company or unit to help you apply. Either way, the applicant is required to pay, and the payment mainly includes the application fee and maintenance fee. Patent application fees include application fees, additional fees, substantive examination fees, reexamination fees, registration fees, annual fees, etc. Different types of patent applications have different fees, but here are some common ones: 900 RMB for invention patents and 500 RMB for utility model and design patents. Annuities are also an important factor for patent applicants to consider. The annual fee standard also varies depending on the type of patent and the number of years. For example, the annual fee for invention patents ranges from RMB 900 per year for the first to third years and RMB 8,000 per year for the 16th to 20th years. The standard of annual fees for utility model patents and design patents is relatively low. Generally speaking, if you apply for an individual application, because you have to pay for the application and maintenance of the patent, you can apply for any kind of patent you want, but if you are borrowing a company or a school or unit to help you apply for this patent, someone will generally come to review and determine the patent. The second cost is lower, because your company or unit to help you apply for this patent, it is necessary to continue to pay a lot of fees, so just like our company, the original patent application is very relaxed, in order to be able to motivate everyone to apply for patents as much as possible, but now due to the huge cost, the whole company is not on the case, it will be very strict, in this case, it is indeed required to have a particularly large innovation point, such as either to form direct competition with friends, or to agree to apply for a patent if it is very technical。 Therefore, we can also see that it will become more and more difficult to apply for patents later.
Then I will also talk about the experience of my own patents, first of all, I have applied for three national patents, two of which are already in the public announcement stage, and the other is still preparing patent documents. I can already share the first two patents with you, the first one is a kind of downgrade in the absence of a network, I have an article to introduce it before, and then talk about my second patent, the name is "a solution that uses AI to generate portals".
So why did you come up with this plan?On the one hand, in the context of the general situation, our exploration of AI is in full swing, and the direction I am responsible for is the DingTalk workbench portal, so can I build a more intelligent and faster portal in combination with my current business scenarios?For example, if a customer can generate a portal page with a single sentence, can it solve the problem that some customers think that the threshold for creating a workbench portal is too high?Isn't that a novelty?From the perspective of practical use, we now believe that it is actually very difficult to solve most problems with AI, because AI is not sufficient for many proprietary words in the vertical field, for the context of business experience, so the use of AI to generate a page is actually essentially in the demo stage, but it is actually extremely difficult to put into production. Therefore, although its applicability is very poor, it is a very good idea or solution, so it is very suitable to apply as an innovation patent. So even though we didn't have a feature online, it didn't prevent me from applying for a patent.
So what exactly is the use of patents?I believe that this is the easiest answer, and it is estimated that many students know the importance of patents in their job search or promotion report. Many units in the system will generally take into account various hard indicators when they are promoted, among which patents are a very strong indicator, so it is also why many people are willing to pay to buy some patents, of course, I do not encourage the purchase of patents After all, it is very risky, and it is of course best to write it yourself. Some companies and units in order to make the company have technical barriers will encourage the company's employees to write patents in the name of the company, not only to reimburse all expenses, when the patent application is successful, there will be a large bonus, for example, Alibaba Group will give each patent a bonus of 2w RMB, just imagine, if the application is successful 20, it is 40w RMB into the account, don't think it is difficult, many students of Alibaba have written dozens of patents.
For example, a P8 classmate of Ant wrote 150 patent applications, and 50 of them were successfully authorized, so in terms of patent bonuses, there is an income of 1 million.
For private enterprises, if you have a patent or a lot of patents, you can directly prove that your innovation ability, your thinking ability is very strong, and the gold content of this patent certificate is not low, on the other hand, the core competitiveness of many companies is technical competitiveness, and the core embodiment of technological competitiveness is patents, so many companies will establish patent barriers.
For example, one of the core competitiveness and PR publicity of the recent new energy "Wei Xiaoli" is the number of patents they own, except for some patents purchased, most of which are patents applied for by the company's internal technical personnel in the name of the company. If you think about it, if you work at NIO and hold 50 patents, how awesome a technology god should you be?Of course, after reading our above introduction, it is not difficult to apply for 50 patents. When looking for a job, if you have a lot of patents that have some technical barriers, especially when you are looking for a job with higher technical content, and you happen to have these patents to bless, then in the eyes of the interviewer, you will directly gain +20 points. There are also cases where you rely on the patent applied for by yourself, and if you happen to meet the needs of other companies, they may acquire your patent, saying that your patent may not be able to sell for tens of millions.
Write at the end, why are patents so important?The essence of patents is differentiated value, and the essence of differentiated value is innovation, and innovation is the core of talent competitiveness. And patents are a tangible proof of innovation, so what are you waiting for, hurry up and apply for a patent.
Nuggets: Ali Lao Jiang.Original title: Why do I recommend technical students to apply for patents?
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