Generating Patents Workshop

Team: Justin Coble, Jesus Olivera, Sania Saleem and Nina Lyow

My Role and Tasks:

  • Created workshop activities

  • Facilitated hybrid workshop

  • Managed all logistics

Disciplines: UX research, workshop planning, collaborative activity design, and workshop facilitation

Workshop Duration: 3 hrs

Project Duration: 2 weeks

Deliverables:

Overview

IBM fosters a culture of patenting to not only advance the innovation levels for the business but also to encourage everyone to think creatively and be in a problem-solver mode. My squad in IBM Client Engineering wanted to find a way to innovate together and apply a collaborative approach to the patent creating process. As a designer, I saw a way to utilize the design thinking methods our squad uses to approach co-creating with clients to support our squad in generating patentable ideas

This Generating Patents Workshop utilizes design thinking methods to help our squad collaboratively generate patent ideas.

Workshop Outcomes

I’m happy to say that this workshop resulted in 7 patent ideas that are on track for patent proposal submission. The following achievements were made during this 3 hr workshop:

  • 20 engaged virtual and in-person participants

  • 50+ potential invention ideas were ideated

  • 7 patent ideas were prioritized and detailed

This workshop framework is reusable and the upcoming goal is to scale this workshop to other teams and reuse a similar approach for client engagements or account planning.

Process

I created the following process flow to plan for the workshop:

Preparing the Workshop

The majority of the time spent on creating this workshop was spent in the prepare phase. During the prepare phase I focused on these areas:

  • Made the purpose specific and unique because a good purpose helped me make subsequent decisions about the session (how much time?, who to include?, where are we meeting?)

  • Planning the structure: pre plan timing for activities and breaks, creating an agenda

  • Determining workshop activities that start with encouraging exploring ideas and end with focusing in on a few prioritized ideas

  • Collaborating with the workshop planning team to distribute ownership of logistic items (gathering workshop materials, catering, booking a room etc.)

I approached creating a workshop framework for brainstorming patent ideas by first opening the workshop with capturing ideas that members had previously brainstormed, and allowing time for members to share their ideas outloud, and work together as a team to build on each other’s ideas. Then narrowed in the focus of the workshop to prioritize ideas based on value to IBM and novelness and then closing out the workshop with capturing the patent idea in more detail through a custom made invention worksheet and sharing out the idea with the team.

To my knowledge, a design workshop framework focused on brainstorming patent ideas has not been done before within IBM Client Engineering, so my workshop approach demonstrates the outcome of infusing creativity and new ideas into design sessions

Day of the Workshop

Day of the workshop I facilitated all workshop activities and coordinated logistics to ensure timely completion of activities, and high engagement levels from squad members.

At the end of the workshop, each the sub teams within the squad took turns presenting their patent idea. We noticed that in this hybrid workshop format the virtual participants couldn’t see the invention worksheet that the in-person teams were holding so we took turns walking around with our phone cameras to shine the camera spotlight on each presenter. This was a pretty hilarious moment that brought our team together!

Reflection

This Generating Patent’s Workshop was the first experience I had with planning and facilitating a workshop from beginning to end. Even before planning the workshop I already had waves of fear that I'd create a workshop where there’d be low engagement and no patent ideas would be generated. Then, I remembered that I was not planning the workshop on my own and sharing my fears and questions with members of my team who had filed multiple patents and had successfully facilitated workshops gave me confidence to plan out this workshop! Fostering collaboration within the planning team and participants made this workshop a great experience for me. I’m eager to plan out and facilliate the next workshop!

A couple of learnings for planning the next workshop:

  • Book a larger room to allow participants to have more space to engage in activities

  • Setting more clear ground rules so that participants approach activities with an open mind

  • Mix virtual and in-person members in a team so that all participants are heard and included in discussions