THE STRONGEST PATENT IN THE WORLD THAT YOU HAVE PROBABLY
NEVER HEARD OF
While many countries offer a single type of patent to
protect inventions, Australia offers two – a standard patent
and an innovation patent. As this article will show, the innovation
patent is probably the strongest patent in the world and also the
least known.
Australia's unique innovation patent system was introduced
with the objectives of providing a "second-tier" system
to protect lower level or incremental inventions and to encourage
innovation amongst small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) by
providing a faster and more cost effective mechanism for obtaining
patent protection for their lower level inventions. However,
although introduced to achieve these objectives, the availability
of innovation patents is not limited to incremental inventions or
to SMEs. Rather, subject to the limited exclusions from patent
eligibility referred to below, innovation patents are available for
all forms
