The Singularity University in Silicon Valley has an ambitious mission when it comes to educating its international, diversified student base: the 10^9 challenge, which involves developing ideas that improve the lives of at least one billion people over the next 10 years. In the eyes of visionary founders Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, these large-scale, ambitious ideas on the critical path to solving world problems should be top of mind for innovators worldwide. Looking at patents through the ‘Singularity’ lens, it quickly becomes clear that high patent value does not always correlate to the magnitude of the underlying innovation. On the contrary, many valuable patents today derive their value from the size of the product market employing the underlying invention, which might be a very small and marginal feature whose value can be traced back to a few words in the patent claims. That type of analysis is focused on ‘enforcement valuation’ based on the breadth and coverage of the claim language, as opposed to the magnitude of the problem that the invention is addressing. The questions then become whether patents are valued the right way and whether there is a better way to measure the value of patents that would reflect the impact of the underlying innovation on people and markets. Continue reading “Revisiting Patent Valuation: Lessons Learned from Toilets, Singularity and the Triple Bottom Line – Industry Report”