Work / Case study / Consulting engagement / 2025

Turning a founder's invention into a patent pipeline

A single-day workshop for an early-stage hardware startup. Product dissection, use-journey mapping, my own 10x ideation method, then scored down to a counsel-ready shortlist.

Role: Designed and led the workshop as a paid consulting engagement. Set the agenda, facilitated the strategy and ideation segments, and authored the method. Colleagues co-facilitated individual segments.
Context: An early-stage hardware startup in the balance and movement-training space. Client unnamed.
Engagement types: Workshops and speaking, Expert consult
Date: June 2025

The problem

A founder with deep domain expertise and a shippable product had real invention in hand but no structured way to convert it into a defensible patent portfolio. The goal was to surface novel, non-obvious, patentable concepts, prioritize them, and hand clean direction to patent counsel, rather than filing reactively one idea at a time.

The approach

A single-day workshop I designed to move from strategy to a prioritized, counsel-ready shortlist.

Why patents. Facilitated discussion to pin down what the portfolio was actually for: licensing, defensibility, visibility, and how aggressively to file.
Product dissection. Deconstructed the existing product into features, mechanisms, and materials, the raw surface area where claims live.
Customer-use journey mapping. Mapped diverse use cases across markets to expose where new, ownable utility could emerge.
10x ideas. My own facilitation method: push participants to imagine the product ten times bigger, not ten percent better, across three prompt categories (extreme use cases, exponential technology jumps, unexpected user mashups), favoring quantity and non-obviousness over feasibility.
Sort, score, prioritize. Affinity-grouped the ideas, filtered each against a patent test (novel, useful, non-obvious, describable, strategically valuable), then dot-voted to a shortlist.

The outcome

A prioritized shortlist of patentable concepts with a clear filing direction, including provisional strategy, that fed directly to patent counsel. Ad-hoc filing replaced with a deliberate, founder-aligned portfolio plan.

What it demonstrates

A repeatable method for turning a founder's raw invention into a prioritized, defensible patent pipeline.
Facilitating strategy and divergent ideation, then converging to a scored, decision-ready shortlist.
Bridging product, human-factors thinking, and IP strategy, drawing on a track record as named inventor on 358 granted U.S. patents.

Reusable asset

The 10x Ideas facilitation guide (three prompt categories, timed divergent rounds, affinity sorting, patent-filter voting) is a standalone method I can run for any inventive team. It is mine to share. The client's session content is not.

Method-only. Client unnamed. The client's specific inventions, scoring frameworks, and filings are withheld. The facilitation method described is my own.