Keep or drop is the wrong frame for most patent decisions under budget pressure. There’s more room between full prosecution and abandonment than a budget conversation usually surfaces. Provisionals, continuations, national phase deferrals, and Unitary Patents all change the calculus. This session works through a framework for navigating the full patent lifecycle and covers how to explain those decisions to inventors and institutional leadership when the answer isn’t yes.
A Stanford study of 2,700 inventors found that those who successfully licensed their first disclosure went on to publish roughly 26% more per year. Commercialization compounds research productivity rather than competing with it. This session covers what that finding means for how TTOs handle first-time disclosers, and how three offices have built proactive outreach programs that treat inventor engagement as a pipeline function, not a relationship one.
Using AI on individual tasks tends to shift the work rather than reduce it — offices move from creating artifacts to reviewing AI-generated ones and still don’t have time for the strategic work that matters. This panel covers what it looks like to redesign workflows around AI rather than bolt it on, with examples from three TTOs at different stages of adoption and what changed about their capacity when they did.
Traditional metrics capture activity — disclosure counts, patents filed, licenses executed — but not whether any of it is working. This session covers a lifecycle-based framework for selecting metrics that match where your office is in its maturity, what to track at each stage, and how to use those metrics to communicate value to leadership rather than just report annual totals.