There is a bit of a cleantech rush going on. Within this rush, there is somewhat of a duality. On one side, business is buzzing about how our government is trying to stimulate growth in this sector. How can we take advantage of this? How can we profit?

But few people are discussing the main reason cleantech is catching on. People like it. People want it. There is a paradigm shift. It’s the beginning of a love affair. These things take time.

It will take years to update the grid. Car-to-grid energy storage will happen I believe, but not for a long time. Powerplants are built in decades, not quarters. And who knows how long the political tail wind will last. The approaches taken now, that will persist, are those that are built on fundamentals – delivering something with a solid business plan and some potential longevity.

This duality, speed vs. certainty, spills over into the patent world. What’s different with cleantech, versus other boom technologies, is that there are even more ways to poison your portfolio. It’s not what you can get away with at the patent office (speed), it’s what you can do to survive a litigation (certainty). It has always been this way in patent law, and just because there is huge boom in cleantech spending does not mean the approach to intellectual property should be a hasty one.

In future posts, we’ll discuss:

• Obviousness (a major cleantech hurdle)
• Accelerated patenting (aka, a bad idea)
• Patent prosecution that wins in court
• Strategies to manage time and cash flow

We’ll also publish the results of studies we do internally relating to cleantech. Industry trends in:

• Geothermal
• Lithium-ion Batteries
• Fuel Cells
• Solar Power
• Hydro Power
• Wind Power
• Electric Vehicles

In the meantime, feel free to send along your cleantech questions to mprater@slwip.com with “cleantech” in the subject line. Or, leave a comment!