The product is a digital first approach to a currently under-served segment of Australian businesses. The AI-assisted tool expands the degree to which users have visibility of the trade mark application process; it has semantic search to help users find the relevant goods and services for them and their brand; and it applies a ‘bucketing approach’ to help the AI compare like trade marks with like. It is also a new approach to partnering with third party businesses who often have relevant touchpoints for Australian small to medium enterprises than IP Australia.

The innovation ranged over multiple phases of the innovation process, starting with identifying new opportunities, generating ideas, validating and testing proposals, then implementing an innovation through a rigorous and disciplined process of structured iterative learning. The product is currently in pilot, having finished the incubation phase in September 2022.

IP Australia contracted with Boston Consulting Group’s Digital Ventures arm to help build out IP Australia’s internal innovation capability by establishing a new team, and the first product delivered to market was TM Embed. In addition, the team worked with a number of third party platforms that provide business services to SMEs in order to reach new audiences with the tool, tailoring context and information appropriate to their context.

Users:

1. Early stage checker: this audience benefits from using the check to make better brand choices. The tool helps them understand whether or when trade marks are right for them & gives them confidence to self-file when ready.

2. First-time filer: business owners whose first engagement with the IP rights system is through the tool. This audience is seeking peace of mind that their brand will be protected & benefits from easily self-filing their intellectual property without a costly investment.

To date, almost 100 small business owners who did not have intellectual property protection have engaged with TM Embed and submitted applications to add a trade mark to their business portfolio and over 9 thousand have used it to check a trade mark availability.

It is forecasted that this impact will continue to scale over the next 5 years as more partnerships are achieved and as the capabilities of the tool continue to mature.

The tool has provided a new way of engaging with third party must-use business services and platforms that have a much wider reach with small businesses than IP Australia. By providing a tangible and interactive functionality, it serves as a substantive way of more deeply engaging with existing educational content.

The development of the tool has introduced new technical capabilities in a digital first tool targeted towards customers.

The applied methodology reduced the risks of failure by having a clear set of hypotheses and identified proof points along with regular decision points and two major stage-gates for the agency’s leadership. The primary challenges involved included ensuring broader agency comfort and understanding of the risks involved with this new approach and the speed of the development. The team undertook significant consultation and engagement with relevant areas to help reduce concerns, however in the push for momentum and rapid decision-making, a degree of consultation was traded off. This meant the lessons learned from previous ideas and projects were not fully absorbed/acknowledged, increasing resentment of the “new”.

The innovation process benefited from:

- Extensive senior leader sponsorship, with regular meetings of a Venture Board to consider and steer the project

- A committed and willing team that was prepared to learn and adopt new ways of working and new skills

- Active engagement from other parts of the agency, including sharing of domain-specific expertise on trade marks

- Support from corporate areas to try and do things differently and quickly.

There are elements of the tool that we think are likely to be relevant to other patent/intellectual property offices, such as the ‘bucketing’ component (which makes it easier to compare like trade marks with like).

At a broader level, the underlying approach of working with third parties to extend the reach and to bring relevant information to small businesses, may also have broader relevance and value to others.

Align with business processes, but do not follow blindly.

Look to involve and engage interested staff early on so as to help understand potential issues and to allow them to be ambassadors for the work with their peers.

Having a dedicated innovation team with different ways of working can be an excellent mechanism for quickly developing a new approach, however such an approach requires ongoing leadership support and oversight (at least initially) and a willingness to ‘follow the evidence’ and see where the innovation process (structured learning to test and reduce uncertainties) takes you.