SuperGrid Institute, SME Patent Superstar of 2018
5th April 2019 – The INPI has published its 2018 list of patent applicants in France.
SuperGrid Institute has been rewarded for its ambitious intellectual property strategy, ranking first of the top 10 patent applicants in the SME category for 2018. Created in 2014, SuperGrid Institute has already filed 50 patent applications, including 16 in 2018 alone.
“We are very pleasantly surprised and above all, immensely proud to have come in first place. It is also a fantastic reward for the engineers and PhD students at SuperGrid Institute, who are very involved in the innovation process“, states Carole Guillaumin, Valorisation & Intellectual Property Director at SuperGrid Institute. Joining the company four years ago, she structured the process of detecting and protecting innovations and gradually created a team with essential skills to complement her own.
Having chosen a contact person in each research programme, Carole Guillaumin then appointed an engineer to work with her on the patents. “Each month, Pierre analyses the patents in order to decide where it would be most appropriate to a launch freedom of use study”, she explains. SuperGrid Institute does not wish to develop counterfeit technologies based on existing patents, nor to start developing technologies that have already been patented.
However, the most important thing for SuperGrid Institute is to create value from its patents. A jurist joined the SuperGrid Institute team 18 months ago. Her mission is to put into place all of SuperGrid Institute’s contracts, particularly those that include intellectual property clauses. “Laura also works on licensing contracts and patent applications,” explains Carole Guillaumin. Intellectual property licensing and the sale of research results now represent nearly 40% of the company’s turnover.
In 2019, SuperGrid Institute’s management intends to strengthen its intellectual property strategy, in order to orient its patent portfolio towards the technologies that the company most wishes to push forward. “It is essential for us to file patents, because our patent applications represent our intangible assets. They are our treasure and our continued development relies on the quality of our patent applications.” SuperGrid Institute carries out this work alongside three patent firms: Beau de Loméni, Opilex and Innovincia.
ABOUT SUPERGRID INSTITUTE
SuperGrid Institute was created in 2014 by a consortium of fourteen shareholders from the electrical industry in France (industrialists, institutional players & research and education organisations). A centre for research, tests and services concerning technologies for future electricity transmission networks, SuperGrid Institute obtained financial support from the “Investments for the future” programme, the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes Region and the Métropole de Lyon. A collaborative research platform boasting 180 people of 28 nationalities, SuperGrid Institute brings together the complementary skills of engineers from the industrial world and academic researchers. Their work revolves principally around high-voltage direct current and the wide-scale integration of renewable energy in order to ensure the stability and security of tomorrow’s electricity network.
