10月12日に日本を襲った超大型台風「ハギビス」。私は無事でしたが、翌日には21件の河岸崩壊が報告されました。日本では9月上旬に台風ファクサイが発生したばかりです。ファクサイは、関東地方に上陸した台風の中では、記録的な強さだったと言われています。この台風の影響で、まだ回復できていない人もいます。 最近の台風は非常に強力です。第4次全米気候評価報告書（NCA4）で予測されているように、台風の降雨量や強度が増加しています。これは、地球温暖化の影響で海面温度が上昇していることが原因です。

We launched a new project working with a US-based M&A advisory firm. In this project, we help Japanese companies find opportunities for investment in and partnerships with foreign technology companies. It includes setting up of joint ventures to manufacture products of such technology companies, and also do sales and marketing in Japan and other Asian countries.  First of all, we have started by introducing two technology companies. One provides a full-body, autonomously powered robotic exoskeleton. The other provides 3D metal printers and printed products. Both are promising opportunities! So, please contact us for further information.

A Japanese local government Kawasaki-city, which plays an active role in patent licensing between large companies and SMEs as presented here, has set out on a new endeavor. Kawasaki-city invites creators to an IP business matching event to ask them to propose applications of patented technologies of participant large companies. For this, Kawasaki-city works with an agent company CREEK & RIVER to ask dispatch of the creators. Here is a press release (in Japanese) for this project, published by CREEK & RIVER. In this scheme, the key is whether or not the creators can propose specific products that SMEs are most interested in implementing such patented technologies. Also, extra care […]

Here are some useful patent research & analysis methods to identify salable or licensable patents, responding to previous article. 1. Technology trend research  This research is for reviewing whether or not a subject patent is likely to be used, from the viewpoint of technology trends. For a technology that is not used in the market, a patent for that technology has less opportunity to be sold or licensed. 2. Market research This is for researching current and future market size and trends of products or services related to a subject patent. Some investment is required to enter a new business or developing a new technologies. If the expected return does […]

“Patent utilization” has been a buzz word in Japanese IP industry. There seems to be an increasing number of companies thinking that they should make effective use of patents that haven’t been used by themselves; i.e. monetize such patents by selling or licensing them to others. Actually, a client of ours has asked me what salable or licensable patents are like. First of all, you may need to know when a patent transaction occurs. One is when a company has to use a patent. In other words, it is the case that the company possibly infringes someone’s patent. We may be able to call this case an assertion-based transaction, since […]

As previously reported, the progress of open innovation is slow in Japan. However, the government has been actively developing measures to promote open innovation. For example, it prepared “University Factbook” which provides contact information of business-academia collaboration office, performance of joint / contract research, performance of patent filing and utilization, and technology field of patent applications and other information of each university, and also announced the scheme of “Innovation Management Hub” which sets up a proven TLO to assist technology transfer for local universities. A recent noteworthy measure is the development of “IP asset platform” to match domestic and international needs with Japanese IP assets such as technology seeds, which […]

Open innovation is essential for companies. It has been said for quite some time now. However, many of Japanese companies seem to be not yet able to make good use of open innovation, comparing to European and American companies. The Japanese government released the White Paper on Open Innovation (the second edition) on June 27 2018. It shows the current status of open innovation and some successful cases in Japan. The findings are that: Collaborative or contracted research between private companies and universities or public institutions has been increasing both in the number of cases and in terms of expense. However, both the proportion of research expense to universities in the […]

A global automotive company is looking for new services or application for connected car. So, we are looking for persons who are willing to develop new ideas or innovations (inventions) for the automotive company via an open-innovation platform. In this project, we are working with Xinova which provides the open-innovation platform with inventor network worldwide.  We can give you documents for detailed information which includes problem definition, examples of existing relevant technologies, and requirements for the ideas to be proposed. And if you develop such good ideas that the company selects for its use, you will be able to receive monetary rewards.  If you have interest in such open innovation activities, […]

I attended a trading show specializing in character and brand licensing, Licensing Japan, which was held in Tokyo on April 4th to 6th 2018. Japanese people of all ages love characters of TV animations, movies, games and the like. It’s said that some people seek healing through such characters. The market size of Japanese domestic character goods is around 1.6 trillion JPY (approximately 16 billion dollars). In the Japanese market, Japan-origin characters such as pikachu and precure are strong, as expected, but recently the ratio of overseas characters is getting bigger. In character licensing, in many cases, a company who wish to develop its products using a particular character applies for a […]

After having posted the article regarding the intellectual property business matching model, we received inquiries on the model. So, we would like to explain it in a little more detail here, based on the material we received from a local government. It’s called “Kawasaki model” in Japan, because Kawasaki-City started a project under this model as a pioneer in 2007 to revitalize local industry while involving large companies successfully, and attracted attention from other local governments. The basic concept of this model is patented technology transfer from large companies to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It could be a win-win solution for both large companies and SMEs. Large companies desire […]