North Fulton Business Radio, Episode 482)
Brock Kolls, Owner and Patent Agent at Gr8BigIdeas LLC, discussed the patent process for entrepreneurs. He and host John Ray talked about how Brock got into specializing in intellectual property and patents, products he helped develop at Coca-Cola and elsewhere, ways to protect your intellectual property, his connection with the tech community, types of patents, and much more.
North Fulton Business Radio is broadcast from the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX® inside Renasant Bank in Alpharetta.
Entrepreneurs, startups, and innovative companies have lots of ideas and can move through product development at a fast pace.
Protecting ideas is important, but ideas often evolve during product development. So how best to protect the early ideas as well as the final product?
Think differently about intellectual property. Embed a patent professional in your product development cycle or team to collaborate, capture, and create IP.
Change the way your company identifies new products and market opportunities. Think bigger and more disruptive. Act on insights.
Leverage fractional professional IP services to add in-house patent capabilities to your company. Invent more, pay less.
Get your talent involved in the patent creation process to patent smarter.
Working with private equity and venture capital firms, Gr8BigIdeas can support, mentor, and build IP for your portfolio companies.
They use a patent strategy that includes mentoring entrepreneurs and startups about the patent process. This approach engages the product developers and inventors to participate in refining ideas and collaborating in the development of patent applications.
They also integrate designing the patent applications into the product development cycle so that early ideas, the final product, as well as product variations for the future are all protected. They call it Bootstrap Patenting and they do it on a shoestring budget because that is how startups and entrepreneurs operate.
Brock Kolls is a registered US Patent Agent with more than 20 years of patent experience and a prolific inventor with more than 100 patents.
He founded Gr8BigIdeas to help entrepreneurs, startups, and innovative companies patent their ideas and assist corporates who are seeking to innovate in the technical community. He has startup experience raising more than $120 million in funding and a successful exit on NASDAQ.
In his startup, Brock invented a wireless cashless payment technology that is widely used today. He then became a member of Coca-Cola R&D. At Coke, he led a team of innovators in the design of cold drink equipment. One such innovation was the Coca-Cola Freestyle dispenser. After Freestyle, Brock successfully grew Coca-Cola’s open innovation program. The program scouted for technologies to meet Coke’s business needs worldwide.
Questions and Topics in this Interview:
- Patents from a tech community perspective
- Different types of patents
- When to file, how to budget/manage costs
- Unique needs and pitfalls to avoid for entrepreneurs and startups
- The tech community in North Fulton
- Non-tech ideas
North Fulton Business Radio is hosted by John Ray and broadcast and produced from the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX® inside Renasant Bank in Alpharetta. You can find the full archive of shows by following this link. The show is available on all the major podcast apps, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Amazon, iHeart Radio, Stitcher, TuneIn, and others.
Renasant Bank has humble roots, starting in 1904 as a $100,000 bank in a Lee County, Mississippi, bakery. Since then, Renasant has grown to become one of the Southeast’s strongest financial institutions with over $13 billion in assets and more than 190 banking, lending, wealth management and financial services offices in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida. All of Renasant’s success stems from each of their banker’s commitment to investing in their communities as a way of better understanding the people they serve. At Renasant Bank, they understand you because they work and live alongside you every day.
Special thanks to A&S Culinary Concepts for their support of this edition of North Fulton Business Radio. A&S Culinary Concepts, based in Johns Creek, is an award-winning culinary studio, celebrated for corporate catering, corporate team building, Big Green Egg Boot Camps, and private group events. They also provide oven-ready, cooked from scratch meals to go they call “Let Us Cook for You.” To see their menus and events, go to their website or call 678-336-9196.
