Sanjana Sahayaraj

Project Overview

• This is a secondary job role some IBMers (and Kyndryls) take up to foster innovation, in addition to their primary job role
• I was also one of them, who held patent mining sessions department wide to form innovator groups and guide the group in confidence (not leaking their patent idea and not requesting to be named an inventor just for guidance)
• I was also a full time Invention Development Team member for Analytics and ML disclosures alongside a team of 7 full time members and 4 part time members
• The responsbilities included doing a pre-review ensuring the disclosure has all major parts filled in and doing a secondary prior art search to find any prior arts that may have been missed / appeared post submission time.
• At the time of review, the inventors present their disclosure, implementation feasiblity and claims. And the IDT puts forth the findings from the pre-review homework as well as questions from the presentation. The answers can be resolved during the review meeting or be resolved offline as well.
• After getting all the points addressed, each member of the IDT votes on the idea individually and in a concealed way (to avoid group thinking) on the idea - whether to patent, publish or drop. And the votes are then aggregated to give the final decision, with reasoning, based on majority vote. This can of course be challenged by the inventors with enough reasons as well.
• Beyond this, we also occassionally work with the patent attorneys to advise on how to best navigate writing claims for an invention in a highly crowded space, that also provides competitive advantage to us.
• My contributions in this secondary role gained me a mentor badge and a silver member badge (on top of the bronze I had earlier) from IDT