What makes your discovery an invention?
Not many of them will, without prompting, use words such as “invention” or “innovation”. And yet, more and more inventions are arising from university research and inventions are becoming an important output and indeed metric for both the researchers and the institutions themselves.
By now some of you will be asking what the difference is between a discovery and an invention. On the face of it, this may appear to be a linguistic distinction (of the kind that patent attorneys are infamous for!), but the two are contrasting but often complementary developments of human knowledge.
Scientific discoveries, by definition, satisfy the two main requirements for patentable inventions: they are new (otherwise, someone else would have discovered them before) and they are inventive or non-obvious (otherwise, they are simply routine developments of what was already known and so would unlikely be considered a “discovery” in the academic sense).
The distinction lies in the third, but often overlooked, requirement for a patentable invention, that it be “industrially applicable”. Whilst this specific wording stems from the origins of the patent system several centuries ago, it draws an important line between new findings that represent an improved understanding of, or increased knowledge about, our world or universe (“discoveries”) and advances in technology which give rise to new and useful systems, apparatuses, devices or methods (“inventions”).
Indeed, “discoveries” as such are explicitly excluded from patentability in the UK and Europe. Similarly, in the US, “laws of nature, physical phenomena and abstract ideas” have been held to not be patentable inventions and so discoveries which relate to these will not be inventions.
So, at what point does a “discovery” become an “invention”?
Probably the best explanation is that, whilst discoveries increase the overall content of human knowledge, inventions are generally directed at solving particular problems or at particular useful applications of technology, whether those are in engineering, material science, chemistry, biotechnology or any other field.
In some fields the distinction is clear. Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation was a discovery about the way in which bodies exerted force on each other, but did not immediately lead to new technological innovation and so was not an invention in itself.
Numerous subsequent inventions apply knowledge from this understanding, from cat flaps to GPS systems via grandfather clocks. Similarly, Einstein’s theory of the equivalence of matter and energy was a discovery that led to numerous inventions in the fields of fission and fusion.
In other fields the distinction is narrower. When a new material is discovered, or when a particular physical or chemical property of a known material is discovered, inventions that use that material for purposes which take advantage of the newly discovered property naturally follow.
Similarly, while finding a previously unrecognised substance occurring in nature is a discovery, as is the determination that it has a particular physiological effect (such as being an antibiotic), if the substance has not been used for that purpose before, then therapeutic use of the substance for that purpose and an industrial process for manufacturing that substance are inventions.
The recognition that scientific discoveries do, more often than not, lead to innovation and invention has been behind the exponential growth of “technology transfer” in past few decades and is the foundation of the concept of a “knowledge economy”. This has inevitably led to certain areas of research being highly directed to innovation, with the expectation that inventions will arise from it.
As patent attorneys we are unlikely to make any “important discoveries” in our careers. However, we spend our working lives talking to scientists and engineers about inventions. If you have one, or even if you have a discovery, then we would be delighted to discuss it with you.
