302 – The Journey to Our First Patent

0:00Hello and welcome to the items podcast. I'm George Simmons and I'm joined today by David. Hello David. Hi George. We're discussing our patent. We are. Yeah. We thought we'd have, you know, without going into details about the patent, really just talking about the process we went through, the challenges we had, why it was difficult when we started involving legal help and how eventually the whole thing got over the line. The application was submitted last week, so it's been a very long process. I think the initial ideas for this started coming out late last year. Well, I've been thinking about these ideas for many years, but about just over a year ago, Kate pushed me to say, if what we're doing is really innovative, should we be

1:00patenting it? And I took that seriously and recognized that, yes, what we were doing could be published as an academic publication, but then we would lose the commercial rights. It could be a trade secret, but that's not really going to serve us because most of what we build is open source, and that actually a patent was the right mechanism to try and both enable us to communicate, but also potentially commercialize for the commercial applications of it, because it will have commercial applications, we believe. Yeah, and there's lots of reasons you can file a patent, even towards commercial applications, so one of the phrases we're using is this is about defensive IP as well. So this is, I guess, preventing others from exploiting these ideas for purposes that we

2:08don't support, or we don't think would be of white benefit, is that a reasonable summary? Well, that is one way of saying it. I think it's slightly differently. If somebody, and in some ways I help people, we're just pick up these ideas, use them for pure commercial gain, and then pay and contribute to the development of the systems, which are for social impact. So the defensive nature of this is partly, maybe there are ways in which we can stop people from doing certain things we really disagree with, but that's a whole another story, and I don't actually know what that would be or what that would look like at this point in time, but I can see real cases where there are applications of this for, you know, the example which comes back to me very often is pubs in the UK, a chain of pubs where you want each pub to be individual, and yet you want the chain to be a chain.

3:12You don't want to franchise model where it's just McDonald's, but you want individuality which is related to the local context, but you want to have the efficiencies that come from managing 100 venues rather than one. This is a commercial scenario where I believe what we're building will have real commercial applications. Hotel chains would be similar in this. Again, not your big hotel chains where you want everything to be the same, where when you go from one location to the other, it's as if you're in the same place. That's not what we're talking about. It's where each hotel would be individual, but managed by a hotel club. Yeah, without going too heavily into details, it is very fascinating to just step back and think about the potential applications and routes. I guess we should switch to the process that we went through. Before we switch to the process, let's transition into that by saying, well, we've had this

4:16idea where we knew there was real originality and does relate to some of the work you'd been doing on modeling, pest and diseases related to agriculture. It's interesting power there between that and your hotel chains, which is interesting. We had this underlying innovation of how we wanted to do things differently. We were thinking, what is it about this, which is actually innovative and new that we can communicate and patent and how does this fit into our implementations in different ways. Most importantly, and this I think comes back to the process we've run through, how are we setting ourselves up to be able to really build these things out for these multiple applications? Because that's what we want to do. We want to be able to do this for textbooks across Africa, which are related to competency

5:20based curriculum. We want to do stacks textbooks. We want to do your pest and disease management related to invasive species. There's all these different areas which we recognize who are parenting our parenting work. We want to reduce violence against children through parenting programs where the technologies to deliver them get adapted in local contexts. We have an underlying process that we're trying to do and we needed to break that down to say, well, what are the really innovative pieces? We're just building from things that don't exist. Where do we have genuine innovation? That wasn't as straightforward as I thought. I have to confess, when I started down this road, I thought, okay, what we're doing is innovative and new. This is what we're trying to do. Let's just wait. I must admit that your work on this over the last nine months to a year has been incredible

6:21and really shown me just how different this word is from the word that I previously knew, the academic word, if you want. Yeah, although it's interesting you say that because a lot of the features of the process you can compare to conducting a piece of academic research in the sense that you need to do a literature review. You need to know what's out there. You need to know how it works. You need to understand the limitations of what people have done. That's because a page like research needs to exist in the framework of what's currently known in the page of languages is prior art. As you said, we know that these ideas can work across examples and we're trying to find the common methods. In some respect, this was no different to a big piece of mathematical research where we

7:29have all these examples of what we want to do. We have this process trying to extract commonalities. We have this machinery that we're theorizing, all this massive back and forth process of trying to actually hook it all up. That's not to say that was the whole thing and a lot of the difficulties then that you're talking about sit on top of that. But as a basic method was still very scientific, I found. Absolutely. That's how I cope with it. Which is why you thrived, Nick, I believe. At times you might not have felt like you were thriving, but anyway. The difficulties come then, or the ones I found most difficult to navigate, were the ones you don't get in a research environment. These are things that say you can't patent certain things. That list for us became quite difficult to navigate initially.

8:29The four main things that are typically excluded are mathematical methods, mental acts, patenting a way of thinking about something, patenting a way of improving or easing business methods like accountancy or bookkeeping or tax or whatever, and computer programs. Given what we want to patent was something in the region of mathematically powered or derived computer programs, this kind of created a lot of issues for us initially. You only touched two of the four. We can touch all four. What we were wanting to patent was really touching on all four of these in some way. Exactly. But this is where then you need to then be very careful about navigating the landscape of patents. You can't touch those things, and the crucial word is as such. That essentially means you can't just patent a computer program.

9:30You can't just patent math, but you can patent it if it brings some demonstrable benefit outside of that thing. So good example is you can't patent an optimization algorithm, but you can patent the process that allows you to apply that optimization algorithm to how you improve maintenance schedules or something like that. So the patent that you're writing down needs to be very specific on the method or thing that you're trying to write down, but it also needs to have this much wider awareness of what is actually changing, impacting, improving under the hood of other things beyond the computer program or algorithm or whatever that you're trying to do. So I think for us, that was a good few months to really work out how to move past, how to write down the problem on our solutions in a way that allowed us to think around that.

10:35Just in those few months, as you said, really what we did is we went from one patent to three. This is the thing we actually broke down what we were trying to do and actually went into the details in a way which then we realized we didn't have one innovation. We were building innovations on innovations. Yeah, and I think the interesting thing about that is that's a realization we had independently. And then it was really back at our in about may time when we actually started interacting with patent attorneys. I was going to say they really changed and improved the patent we eventually fart, real credit to them. We had of course the invention ideas, but the patent which has been filed is both much simpler and more precise than our previous formulations in a way that I'm really proud of real credit to them. They know there were they were able to identify within what we were expressing which we had

11:41already subdivided out. They were able to get to the essence of it further of really saying now this is the real innovation which you've compared. Yeah, and that was something. Well, I think two things are true. One, we couldn't have done it without them. We couldn't have gone through the end of this process without that guidance and their thinking on this is how you need to frame it. This is how things like claims are written. This is how things like the diagrams need to be drawn. But also we wouldn't have got to that point without the months of legwork we did before then because there was so much we needed to figure out. I want to go into another difficulty for running into the first few months this year which is there's a condition for what a patent needs to do kind of defines what an invention is and it's to do with prior art.

12:43So we've done our literature review and the patent itself needs to provide a description of your invention such that a sufficiently skilled person is able to implement it without making any assumptions of their own. And the real issue we had to work through, argue through, go back and forth on was we need to describe how to build this thing without having the time or resources to get to a prototype or build anything. And that required, I guess, a credit to Gabe and Kate too who have held in this process massively to really with the resources we have get to a point where we could describe how to build this thing in sufficient detail. And that's for me one of the big steps that separated this out from an academic paper.

13:45This is not just writing down a concept that you can prove or demonstrate exists. This is actually writing down the instructions for someone else to follow in ways which you can pass this barrier and we didn't get to that point entirely on our end when we did need the attorneys to help us through that. But I think without that we would basically have had a non-starter with actually trying to file. I mean, this is the thing that we, Kate and I made this really strong decision just over a year ago that we need to actually own and lean into the fact that we can and we will build a technology which is very different and fundamentally different from what all of the exists. But to do that, we either need to prototype it or we go through the process that we did actually saying no, this is an invention. Let's patent it. We are trying to prototype it.

14:46But as you say, the resource is to do that well to get to a proper implementation. It would have been so nice if we could have just spent a few years building that out and then gone through a patent process retrospectively to say well, what have we actually done? Where we had to sort of do this on issue strength in a way which has been so challenging. And I know you found real frustration at the fact that well, shouldn't we just build this first? Definitely, why is that? That's my mouth, yeah. And my answer unfortunately has been we can't afford to. I would love to. I would love to accommodate it. We cannot afford to. And I underestimated, you know, it is legally true that you don't need attorneys to file a patent. Having seen the added value, I know that if we had filed without the attorneys, our file wouldn't have been rejected. And so it would have been an inefficient approach.

15:48Now, that doesn't mean that necessarily this will be accepted. We don't know it's pending. It's going to take a number of years as before we know whether it's accepted or not. But I am so happy with what we filed thanks to the impact of the lawyers. And it's interesting. I have to confess and slightly wading to me how little time they needed to spend on it to have that impact. This does tell me, okay, if we learned enough, maybe we could learn how to do this and it would be cheaper, we would save money. But I don't want to save that money right now because we don't know enough. They know their stuff. They are experts and they are adding value to our process. Even if we can't really afford it, it is needed. And that recognition is really surprising to me. I did not expect them to add as much value as they did. Yeah, I had an exact same opinion. I remember the first meeting we had with them and they said 99% of self-file patients will fail. And maybe that's marketing to some extent. But I can definitely believe there's a lot of truth to that, that number in that statement.

16:53And with their help, with their value, we are in as good a place as we could be. We're on the same footing as everyone else. Now we're just at the mercy of the examiner's hand. I'm actually an examiner's, I think we have a really good patent filing. The things that I would have been concerned about before through the process of what the lawyers have helped us do, I'm really confident what we've got is not only a patent which is filed, but I think I'm confident it satisfies the condition. So it's not going to be thrown out of something which is negligible. I'm confident that the prior art they did is much better than what we had done before. And I'm really confident that they've identified that yes, and this is new this is original. And the thing is, the first patent that we're filing, this is actually, it's really different from anything else which is out there. And it's very timely. So I'm really confident on many fronts that this is a really solid filing.

17:55And it's just the first of a sequence. You know, the way they did those claims and the way I now understand the claims is even if our strongest version of the claim is not valid, a weaker version will be. That's how they structured those claims. And I think our strongest version of the claim would be valid. And that's going to be really exciting. This is a really foundational piece on which we and others can really build. And again, my understanding is we actually had 12 months to follow the follow ups. Did you see that? I don't understand that well. My understanding is the document itself is going to remain closed. I think it's actually 18 document remains close to 18, but we have 12 months to file follow on patents, which then gives them a preferential. I don't know exactly what that means. That's what I don't understand. So the single patent filing now means we have a, I figure, is something like a preferential date or thing. The date on the filing means they will only consider prior out up to that date as being

18:57things which we can't in French on. And anyone coming after us, well, we're with them before and that can be sorted out. But I think the same is then true of follow on patents. So even though ours is not considered prior out, we have this priority window where we can use our original filing date to file the follow ups with that being considered prior out still. Oh, okay. I think I understand now. So what we're saying is the follow on patents can be building on this patent using the prior out of this patent. Exactly. Yes, even though it's not and that will obviously depend. It's like a shroding and thing. You would don't know if it's been granted or not, so whether it can be considered prior out or not, but it allows us to proceed on the basis that we can assume last true. Yeah. Yeah. That is a good explanation of it. Thank you. Any stats are understanding. We may be wrong in our understanding of this. This is very new for us, but it is something where we got to get our skates on because we've

19:59got at least two more, which we need to follow on and which probably need to be filed there for in those 12 months. And actually, probably more than that once we actually get that out of the details, because there were bits we took out of this one, which really now we probably should put back in as another filing is my understanding. Yeah, this is exactly what we were helped through. What is one invention? What's the boundary around that? Because even our original attempts probably consisted of two or three, like you said, but yeah, working out which pieces of those are. You could consider them all inventions and they're all right, because they're all building on something that's not been seen before, but yeah, which are useful, which is situated, which you could say is onwards and upwards. One thing I'd like to say, this resource in point has been improved with AI. And I think we should acknowledge the power that we're going to get from AI in actually being able to build prototypes of this filing and future filings, which we've already underway.

21:02And without that, we would pretty much have no chance, well, except some massive piece of fundraising. Yeah. But even without that, we now have a chance to actually build prototypes of these things before they all become public information, before they become evaluated. And that is giving us, I hope, such power in the future to actually say, yeah, we've got the pace and we've got the prototype. I'm afraid I still think we now go to need to fundraise on this building out the prototypes as we are trying to do. And as you say, using AI to do so, which has transformed what our team is able to do in terms of these, what would have been substantial work for a large team has become substantial work for a small team is really the difference that we've seen that once you've got that expert knowledge of what we're trying to do, we have been able to move so much faster than we've ever seen.

22:02You're absolutely right to call that out. And I think let's finish by calling out the fact that the lawyers themselves use AI as part of them being more efficient with our application and how they did that. And I was impressed again with that. And this is where we are seeing the things we're working on in different ways are coming together. My final comment feels really cool to be working on this at literally the frontier. It is this year, but probably AI assisted, Peyton writing has come to the fore is the year where technology can really be built properly using these tools and we are there. We're in a monastic. Exactly. We've been waiting for this. We actually made the decision last year when the AI tours weren't there, but they were on the horizon. It is. We do seem to be at the right place at the right time to make this all happen. Absolutely. Okay. Thank you. That's been a very fun conversation, Peyton. It has been. Thank you.