Technology & Intellectual Property Solutions – TIPS

The initial project is a DGA thesis in economics by François-Xavier Meunier entitled "Dual technological innovation: an analysis in terms of influence and coherence" defended in September 2017. TIPS is exploiting some additional results obtained during the DGA PAESE3 school project (completed in 2018) and synergies with other ongoing research projects funded by the DGA: AUSTIN (school project, for UEA) and CAROLINE (RAPID, for the partner Onomia). In addition, the work of UEA is currently being supported by SATT Lutech in order to enhance part of the work carried out by Didier Lebert and François-Xavier Meunier. This process will lead to the creation of a spin-off from UEA that will become a natural outlet for the TIPS project.
By combining the technologies developed by Onomia and those from the Applied Economics Unit of ENSTA ParisTech, TIPS offers companies and public authorities a technology foresight software tool to analyse a technical system over the long term within a complex and changing technological environment while integrating - with the support of the law firm Courtois Lebel - the regulatory and legal risks associated with the technological orientations of R&D projects. These contributions are particularly relevant to two challenges for maintaining France's strategic autonomy. The first is the maintenance and development of the technologies required by the armed forces in an increasingly dual and technologically complex context of equipment, and the second is the management of the legal risk associated with technological interdependencies between countries (example of ITAR regulation).
Interviews with R&D departments of major industrial groups led to the identification of two key issues to which TIPS provides answers:
-- A competitive challenge: the need to have tools that help to better identify new partners, experts and researchers to innovate technologically, and at the same time propose solutions to anticipate and prepare for the organizational changes generated. The time dimension will be integrated: the identification of technological trajectories, the analysis of past decisions that have led to the production of irreversibilities, the identification of technical solutions that allow unlocks.
-- A legal challenge: the need to have simple tools that interface with existing information systems in the company to manage the very high density of legal rights and obligations that constrain technological innovation in order to quickly answer the question of what is legally feasible within an organization.
To meet the first challenge, TIPS relies on the construction of technological landscapes based on patent data and on the exploitation of these landscapes using specific tools that analyze the strategic and organizational characteristics of a patent portfolio and make it possible to predict the evolution of these characteristics over time.
For the second issue, TIPS enhances existing tools:
-- By integrating, through semantic analysis, other intellectual property rights on which the technologies under consideration depend and/or with which they have adhesions.
-- Through the effective contractual framework that determines both the geographical scope and nature of the rights exploited and the actual conditions and limits, enforceable against third parties for the exploitation of a referenced technology.
TIPS is an industrial research project that will produce a software prototype. At the end of the project, the level of maturity of TIPS according to the TRL scale will be 6 ("Demonstration of a prototype or model of a system / subsystem in a representative environment").