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for inventions. A choice in these cases is whether or not to keep these secret and spend years working on them until their properties can be utilised or at least demonstrated practically. For example in the form of a new device or process. This would then allow an invention, using the properties observed, to be described in a patent application. By contrast, the position in any patent league table tells you little about real value and quality. You can have a valuable portfolio of a few patents or even just one exceptional patent and not be in the table but still be a world class player. There is a much bigger context, which is all important if you are to make any sense out of it. There is a danger that patent filings become ends in themselves. Certainly there are various motives for filing patents. They are not necessarily always taken out to be seriously 'worked' but rather to avoid endless litigations. Ever swelling portfolios are built up to be ready to cross-licence to competitors to avoid infringement court actions. Pouring money into patents just isn't our business. Dyson owns over a 1,000 patents and Apple received that number of patents in the last year alone. The University isn't building a portfolio of patents in one area – that's not our business model. You wouldn't expect to see the University recording such numbers of patents. Even then, that doesn't stop the various costly patent wars that you can read about almost weekly in any financial paper or licensing journal. These battles have been gathering in scale and momentum since Victorian times. It's not a situation that we need get into. We aren't in any game or battle (or race). If and when that happens to patents initiated at the University, it should be well downstream from our activity. There is no guarantee that the amount of patenting will be the key determinant of success.Blackberry's 9,000 plus patents haven't stopped it from being eclipsed by Apple, Google, Samsung and others. Estimates of the value of Blackberry's patent portfolio vary from around £625M to £1.75BN. No-one knows the value as many of its patents are already licensed out to others. It continues to acquire more patents but its sales and share price continue to fall. It may even have been acquired itself by the time this article is published. 4 Because we are at the start of the innovation chain, and particularly being a leading research university, we can find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma. In certain fields, such as physics, chemistry and biology, what our academic colleagues repeatedly come up with are fascinating observations of and amazing insights to physical phenomena. At that point, they are mostly not inventions that can be patented. They are perhaps best seen as the triggers However, taking such a course of action means that those observations and insights and early experiments cannot be published in the meantime. Ultimately, for many reasons, most of them will never become commercially applicable anyway. Forgoing publishing, in the hope or expectation that the work will be patented at some time in the future, does not sit well in an academic environment. This requires extremely careful assessment on each occasion. So we have special considerations to take into account and have to have different discussions and make different decisions around patenting than nearly every other type of organisations. Sometimes even something that obviously is an invention is just too early for its market. This also can be a real issue for us in the University. Patenting something ahead of its time can lead to a long, fruitless and expensive exercise. There are numerous examples of such false starts and commercial failures with - and without - patents. Social networking ideas and tablet-like products such as the Apple Newton were around long before the wider technology infrastructure and greater understanding of their capabilities could launch them into breakthrough businesses. The fantastic Nobel Prize winning discovery of the carbon 60 molecule (Buckminsterfullerene) in 1985 led to thousands of patent families, especially after it could finally be made in reasonably useful amounts (about five years after the discovery). If you look back at the reporting at the time, there were a host of commercial applications predicted and reporters stated that the 'race was on'. Various fullerene patent trends and league tables have been produced over the last twenty years. Japanese and US organisations initially outstripped Europeans but more recently show French, German and Swiss organisations in the top half of the tables. Patents that were rushed out in the early days after the discovery have all expired now and later ones are coming to the end of their life. Fullerine patent activity still swings back and forth between applications and manufacturing methods as the hunt for realising the commercial potential originally hoped for goes on. Many academic inventors are wary of patenting, fearing that licensing a major inventive lead forward exclusively to a company, or even non-exclusively to a few, will limit their take-up. You might choose the wrong company altogether. Of course, you can set performance criteria when you transfer a patent to a company. Nevertheless, it can take years to get back an invention for nonperformance because of the early stage nature of these 'technologies'. At York University, in 2009, Pratibha Gai created a completely new type of microscope that could view chemical reactions at the atomic scale. She did not patent her invention because she wanted to open up the work to as many people as possible. Being well informed, having worked in both industry and at universities, she believed that it was the correct