BlueTech Forum 2011 - To Patent, or Not to Patent

A few introductory remarks. I'll give you some of my bias. I will reveal at the outset that I am a patent lawyer. So you say, what's a patent lawyer? He's going to tell us we need more patents. Of course, he tells you need more patents. You go to a surgeon. He tells you you need surgery. No, you go to a patent lawyer. He tells you you need patents. But I'm really here not wearing my patent lawyer hat on. My. My firm is a national, international firm. We've got offices throughout the U.S. six of them here in California, a bunch of them in Florida, from Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, Detroit. I happen to be in our Milwaukee, Wisconsin office. Believe it or not, Milwaukee really has a great water cluster. And we owe it all to the beer industry. Milwaukee was famous for beer, and the beer industry uses a lot of water, which means they needed a lot of suppliers. So all of those suppliers who made pumps, pipes, filters and meters to serve the beer industry built up in the Milwaukee area. And they're all still there, and they've expanded. And we have a great cluster of water technology companies. We, a couple of years ago, I and some others in the Milwaukee area, CEO at Badger Meter, Rich Mewson, Paul Jones, who's the CEO at AOC in the water industry, loosely formed a little almost lunch club and decided that we had this cluster. We ought to build on it. So we formed the Milwaukee Water Council. Then we incorporated and we've expanded. We had no authority, no money, no staff. We started doing a few things. We got some grants, and now it's a pretty thriving organization. So I'm really here with my Milwaukee Water Council hat and looking at water technology, economic development opportunities. And I combine that with my interest in intellectual property. Before Milwaukee, I spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C. i hope you won't hold that against me. And one of the things I looked at was technology trends. We did some work. I worked at the patent office for a while. I was a congressional liaison. I did a lot of work in the area of science and technology for the Department of Commerce. We advised Congress on technology trends. Things like, you ought to realize that the number of US patents owned by foreign corporations has just for the first time in history, gone over 50%. We thought Congress ought to know that when they were looking at funding opportunities and whether the National Science foundation or the Department of Defense or the Environmental Protection Agency or any of the other agencies ought to be doing more R and D or giving out more money for R and D. So I've looked at Patent data for a long time on predicting technology trends. And I've started to look at it a bit, little bit in the water area. And that's what led me here. Sort of what I talk about. Okay, there's our panel members. But what I talk about really is I like to think of it as inventing the future. And you all in the audience really have that capability. You are going to invent the future of the water industry and water technologies. You've got that capability. You're going to decide where we go, how we get there. I like the whole theme of this conference is mapping the innovation landscape in water technologies. When I think about mapping the innovation landscape, I think of a map. Map tells me where I am, map tells me where I'm going to be going. And if I can read it correctly, it tells me how I'm going to get there. And that's part of what we've been talking about so far and I hope will give you a little more insights into to where we are, where we're going and how we're going to get there. And I'm just going to look at one small piece of that mapping innovation strategy and that's looking at patent data, see what the patent data tells us. It tells us a lot. I think of it as a leading indicator. People file for patents early on in the technology development cycle. Patents now are publicly available 18 months after they're filed. So long, usually long before a product is on the market. I know who's filing for patents, who's in what areas of technology. I even know the individual researchers who are doing the work for those companies. And it tells me where companies are spending money. Patents are expensive and companies are making business decisions every day on getting them or not getting them. And when they make the decision to get them, it tells you something. So all that data is somewhat revealing. And that's kind of what we're going to talk about today and whether it's really worth getting. When I talk about inventing the future, we're not going to talk about the entire future. We're just going to take on the easy stuff. And that's the future of the water industry. And it was intriguing to me as we have gone through the day and starting with this morning and through Hank Vanderlaen and through Jim Thompson, almost everybody has mentioned IP in some way or another. They've talked about patents, they've talked about. And some have talked about it being critical, some have talked about it being helpful, some have talked about it being a tool And I think you'll see as we go through our panel discussion that it can be all of those things or maybe none of those things. Because where you stand on any issue may depend on where you sit. Whether you're a small company, a startup company, a research company or a big company depends on how critical that IP may be. But we've been focusing on innovation all day. We've been talking about water utilities, embracing innovation, we've talked about the hot technology areas, we've talked about innovation, partnerships. And really what we're going to focus on a little bit here is how we measure some of that innovation. One of my favorite quotes comes from Alan Kay, who is in the computer industry, who said the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And that's sort of where I think we've got the capability to control our own future. We can invent it. If we invent it, maybe we ought to patent it, or maybe we shouldn't. But that's some of the things we're going to talk about on the panel. When I look at patent data, one of the nice things I got from Paul O', Callaghan, and it's in this BlueTech tracker book, which was in your handouts, I think, when you registered, there's a very nice report about halfway through through where he looked at patent landscape on desalinization technology. And he's got some nice charts and graphs and it's pretty comprehensive. And it's a nice report where he dug deep into looking at some patents on the desalination. About halfway back you'll find it. And this is one of the charts that he came up with. And I sort of noticed it because not only is the report that he did and the data that he collected, I think is impeccable and comprehensive, but I looked at the absolute number. I don't know if you can see it on the slide from where you are, but it shows that from 2005 to 2010, the number of patent, global patent applications, these are not patents that issue. These are just applications. These are people asking for patents. Some of those are never going to issue. And this is global. This is, this is not just us. This is all over the entire world. The number of applications went from 80 to just under 160. And I look at that and I say that's an unbelievably low number of people coming up with ideas all over the world that they're going to ask for patents in a technology that I think is going to be as critical as Desalinization. And so I looked at it and looked at some of the other areas. And I don't know if you can read this because of the type it came out in gold type because I copied a chart that was prepared by the Intellectual Property Owners Organization that put this chart together. But it shows the top 10 patent owners just in the US in 2009. And these are people just in the US not global. These are patents that actually issued, not just applications. It starts out with IBM that has about 4,800 patents it received in 2009. Goes down to in intel, which received about 1,500 patents. All the other companies, Samsung, Microsoft, Hitachi, Panasonic. When you go down the list, you see there tend to be electronics, they tend to be software or computer related companies. And when you add up all the patents of just the top 10 companies in the United States, it's a little over 23,000 in 2009. Compare that with 160 applications worldwide on desalinization. And so I look at that and I don't draw any conclusions one way or the other. But it's just striking to me that the number of patents in the water area and desalinization looks extremely low. I did my have done for the last couple of years my own patent landscape report. I don't dig as deeply as Paul does. I take a bigger picture look and I handed out a copy of just the executive summary of that landscape report that should be on your tables. And when I look at it, my data is somewhat consistent, is consistent with what Paul found. I looked at the total number of patents based in these are 2009 patents and I looked at them in 2010 increased, the total number of patents increased by 52. And the increase was generally consistent across all the categories that I studied. The categories I studied were seven. Purification, desalination, metering, irrigation. You can read them on the list. They all increased. But looking at percentage increases is misleading. When Heinrich was talking about his prediction about some of the leading areas of technology for the future, he mentioned metering, smart metering. And that's on my list. I looked at it and it had 100% increase between 2009 and 2010 in the number of US patents. The 100% increase went from 16 patents to 32 patents. The entire smart metering technology. I think Heinrich is right. Everybody who I know who looks at technology trends predicts smart metering is going to be important. We need to measure water so that we can price it properly. We need to come up with technologies that will tell us whether the red light or green light should go on. When you turn on your faucet, that's easy. Come up with some sensors and other significant technology. Turn on the faucet. If the light is red, the water is not drinkable. If the light's green, it is. You can put that on the meter that goes into your house and you'll know immediately. A hot area for technology. Lots of white space. Only 32 patents in the entire United States. And this is a chart of the seven areas I saw. And you see the absolute numbers are pretty small. In all the areas in desalinization in the US patents, we had under 50. All the biggest area, we had just about 300 patents in 2009. So there's not a lot of patent activity, which tells me there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of white space. So I look at it and I'm going to throw out a couple of these ideas and let the panel challenge me, tell me I'm right or wrong. And I want to encourage you all to participate. I like to think of this not so much as a tennis match where you sit quietly and have polite applause at the end. When there's a good point that we make. I want it to be more like a soccer match, interactive. You hear something you like, raise your hand, interrupt up the boo cheer. Just don't throw anything that's going to hurt us. But. So when I look at innovation, this is a quote I picked up from the Artemis Project, one of their reports in 2008, which I think is true. The water industry is not accustomed to an injection of innovation and not accustomed to disruptive technologies. Maybe they should be, maybe they shouldn't be. But we're going to explore why do we need more venture capital. This was a report from 2010 that talked about the amount of venture capital available. And a $500 billion a year industry is only getting 120 million a year in venture capital funding. To me, that seems pretty low compared to other industries. So maybe we need more venture capital. Certainly we could use more water. Looking at the simple economics of supply and demand, when you look at the studies, we need more water that the available water supplies. Based on whatever studies you look at, the numbers can change. Whether it's 60%, 50%, 70%, we're going to need to supply more water in some way, whether it's through recycling or other ways. So you look at supply and demand, and water is a good business opportunity. Demand is going to outstrip supply Unless we do something. So it's a great business opportunity. It's got all the structure of a wonderful investment. And I wonder why we're not seeing some more. We look at, you know, we need a new plan. This comes from a report from the water resource, the 2030 Water Resources Group. Their conclusion is, you know, business as usual is not going to work. We need to do something to change. And this is a recent book which came out about the future future of water that talked about, well, we need new technologies and then also the new local cooperative efforts that's going to be the future of water. This book just came out in a couple months ago in April and so and all that stuff to looking at the future of water, where we're going, how we're going to get there and mapping our innovation. We've got a great group of people, Rafael Simon, who as John McArdle and Joe Zubak all are going to approach it from three different perspectives. I think we put together a terrific group because they can look at it in different ways. Rafael is with Vantage Point Venture Partners, former COO at Xenon, so he can look at it from the venture side. We've got John McArdle, who was active Battelle, in charge of their water programs. Battelle is a research organization. They don't make anything. All they do is come up with technology and then if they're going to make money, they license it. And then Joe Zubak, who is now the founder and president of Global Water Advisors, but spent a long career at Siemens and Chief Technology Officer and holds the very distinguished title, at least from my perspective, of Inventor of the Year at Siemens in 2008. So let me get the panel involved. I'm going to throw first question out. Rafael, maybe I'll let you start. We look at the patent trends. You look at all the data, you look at the statistics. Why aren't we getting more patents? And from your perspective as a venture person, does it matter?

I tend to agree with the last speaker that patents are just one form of ip. And in the water industry in particular, it's not the electronics industry. It's not moving at the same rate. At Xenon, we had about 100 patents and I'd say two of them were mediocre and none of them were particularly good. And 98, that's because you need better patent lawyers. Rafi, here's the problem is that we were involved in synthetic hollow fiber ultrafiltration membranes. There's over a thousand patents in synthetic hollow fiber ultrafiltration membranes dating back to the 1950s. So some of those in the 1950s and 1960s were really good. You know, the ones, you know, the core, the really core fundamental concepts were done then. The later ones were mostly small tweaks. And you know, from a venture capitalist perspective, you can patent anything. You can patent, I'm sure this bottle has a patent to it. If it was a patent for a plastic drinking vessel, that would be really good. But it's going to be for some very, very, very small innovation on its manufacturing or something because you can patent anything. And so just because someone has patented technology, in fact in the water industry, 99% of it is, is going to be more like the ones which are on this bottle or more like the ones that Xenon had on. Small innovations, but not enough to really put your arms around your sector and keep everyone else out. There's 20 companies out that are copying Xenon's fundamental product right now. And only the most egregious violators, Jozo and company was. No, no, no, no. Still going on. It's still going, it's still going. In Australia you won the first round. But those were our good ones. I mean those are the medium ones, but they weren't strong enough to keep out the 20 people who are copying it. From a venture capital perspective having patented technology, that's a given. Everyone's going to do that. It's really getting into it and saying, do you have something that's so good that a really, really smart, well funded company. Company can't get around it or not. And those are the rare gems that you need to find.

But as a follow up, when you're looking as a venture investor in a company, everybody this morning talked about they either had patents or patent pending. Is it a factor if they come in the door and they don't have a patent? Is that a non starter?

No, because most of the people who present it, when we evaluate the companies, the patents are not going to be a major consideration from my view. You know, are they, are they, do they have a low cost technology with some tacit knowledge and oh, how that they can protect? Do they have, you know, market lead in the market development? I mean, do they have other factors? Because most of the patents out there are not going to be strong enough. You know, some of them, like son who's developed a new compound, you know, that might be one of the, I don't know their patents, but something like that we've come up with a new composition of matter might be strong Enough to actually hold up. But the other companies are playing in sectors where people have been patenting for decades. And it would be a nice bonus if they really offered some good protection. But I don't count on that.

John, from Battelle's perspective, how do you deal with patents? What do you decide to patent, why do you patent and what do you do with them?

I'd like to comment that from, from two different perspectives. One, from the perspective of the company I previously worked for, which was a supplier of components and systems into the water business. In fact, I competed both with both of these gentlemen as an equipment supplier over the years when we were looking specifically at acquisition candidates and we did some acquisitions at the time, some very strategic acquisitions. One of the things that our investor, our owner looked at was, well, what was patent situation with respect to the company that we were going to acquire? Not necessarily so much to keep people out, but to allow us to perform, to allow us to operate as a defensive type of a mechanism. So from that perspective of someone coming and looking at the company to make an investment to acquire, the patents were an important part of what we were looking at. Not necessarily from an offensive perspective, but from a defensive, defensive perspective. It was something that was looked at very carefully. So from that perspective, it did have value. If you had your patents covered as a technology licensing, as a contract research, as a technology licensing company. At Battelle, patents are very important for us. I mean, we develop technology in two different ways. One, we invest our own money and generate our own IP position which we will then license out for royalties if we have something that's of value. And then companies like Siemens and Xenon would take that and make something out of it that would be valuable. But we also work with smaller startup companies or academics or people who have concept or idea that for whatever reason don't have the wherewithal to bring it to a demonstration phase, not all the way necessary to a commercialization phase, to a demonstration phase. So we would work with them as a technical partner to bring them up to that point. And part of that would be to put them in a position where they could develop patents which would then be make their company more valuable to eventually be bought out or be sold or whatever it might be. So from my perspective of the two companies as a technology licensing company and as a component or a system supplier that's doing acquisitions, patents were an important component.

For those of you who don't know some of the history of Battelle, when Chester Carlson came up with a new process for copying stuff called xerography in the late 50s, early 60s. And he couldn't find anybody to help him develop it. He went to Battelle and they invested some money and took a pretty significant piece of the technology. And that technology was brought to him by a company that was at that time called Haloid. And a few years later Haloid changed its name to Xerox.

That was one of those good patents.

And so that was, I can assure, Patel's investment. Joe, you know, from your perspective, both. Let me start with your perspective at Siemens. How important were patents? Did you even care about getting any patents on your technology?

Absolutely. Patents were a key metric for the success of any business within Siemens. I'm sure it's the same as GE that we tracked and had very aggressive goals for invention disclosures and patents filed year to year. So we try to maximize invention disclosures first to feed the stage gate funnel, if you will, in the very first filter. In that process, I think this is really important is to do a very robust analysis of the commercial prospects associated with that patent. So before we ever spent more money than the initial filing fee, we really needed to know with a high level precision what the commercial expectations would be before we could secure funding. We'd always had to go to an internal P and L manager to sponsor the final funding. But the patents clearly were critical. Again, if you're a major company of the likes of a GE or Siemens, you know where your whole business model rests on the expectation you're gonna be number one and number two in any area that you enter. You have to have a strong IP portfolio and you'll make, you'll make patent generation a key part of your metrics for your employees.

It sounds like you had a plan before that your patent strategy fit in with your business strategy. You just didn't stuff because it was cool technology.

No, it would never, we would never invest money in other than sending in 180 bucks or whatever it was for the, you know, for the initial, you know, provisional patent or something. But beyond that it was, we maximized disclosures, but we quickly filtered out the probably 85 to 90% of those to the 10% that we thought had some validity, but, but again based upon more in commercial drivers than features that were simply different than what was already available in the marketplace.

Without embarrassing you, and I don't want you to be too modest, what's involved in becoming inventor of the year at Siemens? That's a pretty big company. And how do they determine who's the Inventor of the year, which you were in 2008.

That's a good question. I guess I hadn't thought of the answer to that, but they look at the inventions in terms of commercial impact. And the invention that I was credited for was 40% reduction in energy in memory bioreactors. Sorry, Rafael. It was just one of those things. Again, an interesting point relative to our little exchange here. One of the things that drives patent behavior is competition in the marketplace. You know, in our case, you know, we were going tooth and nail against our favorite competitor and we had to come up with an idea to thwart, you know, their advantage in the marketplace. And so we came up with a new idea and they will come up with a new idea.

Everyone's trying to copy your idea, by the way.

Sure, yeah. Now that I'm done, you know, go for it.

Right.

But that's what drives, drives a lot of innovation is simply the, you know, the competitive forces in the marketplace, not just the pure beauty of a new idea.

That's different.

John, when Patel gets patents, you've got a plan for what you're going to do with it. You're obviously going to license it. But did you say this is a patent we're going to enforce, we're going to go to court, we're going to license, this is a patent. We're going to try and sell the technology, spin it off, create a startup. How sophisticated is that plan? When you start down the patent process.

Path, we go through the same funnel technique less think most companies go through. For example, in the water business, the decision was made for management two years ago, three years ago, that water was an area that was ripe for innovation and good opportunity for a company like Battelle to be involved with. So you basically do a call out, you talk with the national laboratory. We actually happen to manage the U.S. department 5 of the U.S. department of Energy national laboratories. So we can actually take a call out to laboratories to call out to our own, our own laboratory in Columbus and come up with, well, we had more than 100 concepts that we actually looked at. And we had a group of people that put a set of matrixes together, which includes what the business prospects are, what the technical prospects are, what the patent possibilities are, what the innovation is, any number of things, perhaps 10 of them. And we would score each of these hundred processes as we we themselves down to, in this particular case, to five over the course of maybe two or three months, using our best estimates or best assessment of a group of people. And then at that point where we decide, well, you know, we need to weed this down even further. We bring more people in and we get it down to 2 or 3. It seems like it's like this 2 or 3% is the number of things that you would typically work your way towards to actually follow through and make a serious investment. So all of these things that people have been talking about you would look at, and to answer your question directly, is that the intention would be to have something that would be patentable if you were actually able to invent something in that area, and that would then generate a more lucrative licensing revenue to Battelle as a result of the value of the invention itself and also the protection that was afforded buy a patent, among other things.

Now, I'll ask all three of you this question. I look at the numbers looking at technology trends, and I've looked at a lot of technology trends in a lot of industries. Patents are just an indicator. It's a tool. It's just one indicator. It's not the only indicator. I've looked at indicators. We'll look at technology and industry trends and the number of IPOs. How many companies went public? Well, some people think that's an interesting trend on technology development. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. When Siemens develops a new technology, there's not always an ipo, even though it may be a breakthrough technology. So if I'm just looking at the number of IPOs, that may not be my best indicator. But in looking at the patents as an indicator and recognizing it's not a perfect indicator, I'm just struck with the low absolute number. The fact that in desalinization there were 80 applications or 160 applications worldwide. In 2010, there were less than 50 US patents. Is that a good thing? Do you think those. Why are those numbers so low? And is there something we ought to do to change it? Is there something we can do to change the customer perception? Or I'll just throw it out.

Joe.

I think tracking OD patents is a bit of a misleading indicator of innovation. We used to track publications globally. So publications would include patents that were published, but also technical papers and new product releases. We would track that by geography globally. And I think that was a much better metric for getting your thumb on the pulse of the global rate of innovation in the water space.

Rafael, I've never Xenon. We never tracked patents. I couldn't even tell you how many patents xenon would do in a year wasn't a major metric. We tracked what the cost per cubic meter of water that was coming out of our system and what our percent reduction was. And that was the real important factor. And I was downplaying the impact of Xenon's patents. But Xenon is still the number one company in the world for membrane bioreactors. It's still a very innovative company and it's been hugely successful. Probably the most important patent of the last 40 years in the water industry has been the thin film composite patent from the 1970s that basically enabled membrane desalination in a major way. Very good fundamental patent. Dow Chemical about 30 years ago bought film tech in order basically to get that patent and control the industry. And within a few years after doing it, they challenged some people, people and the patent was thrown out on a technicality. But here's the interesting part of the story though, which is I talked to the head of Dow a while ago. We got some Dow guys in the room here and he said losing that patent battle was the best thing that ever happened to Dow. Best patent in the history of water. And you lose it, it's great. When we lost that patent, we couldn't sit back and rely on that patent to give us the market. We said we have to innovate constantly and be the low cost manufacturer of RO membranes and we need to do this every year and never stop. That's the only way we're going to stay ahead. And that's absolutely what they did. And even though every single RO membrane company in the world since that patent was expired immediately copied that patent, and there's probably 100 companies doing RO membranes, DOW still has an enormous market share. It's, I'm sure it's over half a billion in revenue now. Hugely profitable. The most profitable RO membrane company still, even with all the competitors. And so they did that without having the patent. And so that's really the main thing that I want to look for in a company.

Do you think the patent gave them that sort of initial market share, initial reputation and lead in the industry?

The invention, I mean they invented a radical new way to make membranes. Without the patent, they, they would have still had that head start and that share and then they were able to drive down the cost and scale up the manufacturing.

John, say dupont may still have been in the RO business that that patent, patent went through because, I mean, and a lot of people would still be living in Mexico making RO membranes to sell to the rest of the world. So there were a lot of interesting things going on at that time. I'll go back 160 patents. I mean there are people in this room and looking at a couple of them that have been in the RO business for a long time and have a better perspective than me. But there are 160 good ideas out there for RO Sewater desalination or for seawater desalination. That seems like a pretty healthy number of good ideas to me for a fairly narrow technology that's been around for quite a while.

Although it may not be 160 ideas because those are global applications. And as you all know, I might have one idea and I, I filed that application in 40 different countries, so that translates into 40 applications, one idea. So I'm not sure it's 160 new applications, but it's a fairly. If you think 160 would be a good number of new ideas, I'd be.

Curious the rest of the panel, but I mean.

Well, there's a lot of ideas that never get patented. They just kept as trade secrets too. A lot of those, those are process methods that never sees the light of day, I think. So it's probably a little bit misleading to just look at published patents. It may just be the tip of the iceberg in that particular application.

I look at the patents as an indicator. I look at the numbers and I'm trying to predict trends and see what corporate intelligence. I want to see what my competitors are doing. I want to see where they're investing. And let me go back to the Artemis quote about how the water industry is not used to steady injection of innovation and disruptive technologies. Do you think that is keeping down the number of patents or the interest in seeking patents? Because what I heard from this morning from every small company, every startup, all these innovative companies are all getting patents and trying to protect their technology.

Patent activity results directly from a sense of a technology need in response to opportunity for profitability. And I've seen examples. For example, when the perchlorate scare hit in California years ago, the technology advancements were phenomenal. Within a year things changed very rapidly because there was a perception of a need and profitability. I think the problem in the water industry street, and I think it's undergoing changes. The fundamental problem is the way risks are managed, that there's overcoming risk by our key customer base, or rather dealing with risk drives their behavior. I'd like to see more innovation in risk mitigation vehicles. Maybe there's an insurance method that could help us deal with risk issues that have to be resolved between technology providers and technology users to really open up the marketplace. I don't think it's the lack of technologies per se. I think we need to go downstream more into the marketplace and see if there's some remedies there that can be had.

Rafael, when I look at all these startups, are they, do you think wasting their money on getting all these patents or is there some benefit that it's going to give them?

You know, there's, you know, being. Defending your technology is only one of the benefits of a patent. One of our favorite uses of patents at Xenon was to go to friendly consultants and customers who needed some help in preparing their bid specifications, asking for advice. And we would say, hey, you know, why don't you put this wording in there? Which happened to sit on top of one of our patents. And you know, when you have that, then you basically can win, win the job. So that's important to prevent someone from making an exact copy of your product to get your replacement business. That's important if you want to license your product. I mean, for a lot of startups here, you're looking at licensing strategies. You have to have a patent. Even if it's a useless patent, you have to have something. What you're probably really licensing is the know how and you're providing value. I mean, it's not, it's not a scam, but you need to have that patent to, to be able to do it. So I would definitely not suggest that companies don't patent. I would just suggest that, don't think that that's the major defense for your company. It's just one of the, and I.

Think that's a good point you bring up that there are a lot of reasons to get patents. You know, some are you're going to license like Battelle may do. Some you're going to, you're going to sue, you're going to protect your position. Some may be it's, it's just a credential. If you're to going, going into China and you don't have any patents in China on your technology, I'm not sure you're going to sue in the Chinese courts to protect it, but you may need it. Joe, when you were getting patents, let's say at Siemens, how much of a factor was it they'd say, let's get a patent on this one just because we want to beef up the portfolio, we need the credential.

Yeah, that was significant because oftentimes when you get into a dispute, you weigh your portfolio versus the whoever your opponent is. So beefing up the portfolio and having families of patents was very, very important.

John, is that something that you would.

Tell and you could just reinforce what you said from Battelle's perspective? I mean, when we go out and we're negotiating a license for technology that Battelle has developed without a patent, we're not going to retain know how over any long period of time. I mean, not, not with people like Zenon, Siemens that we're, that we're talking to or viola. So we really do rely very much on the ability of us to generate licensing revenue from a patent and our licensees will take full advantage of that as they go to market and trying to exclude whatever competition they can.

Okay, well, you all are a very polite audience as if it were the tennis match and provide applause. We're about 15 seconds from our ending time and. And really not enough time to explore questions. So I just want to thank Rafael, John and Joe for providing some food for thought and hopefully we've challenged you that you can indeed invent the future of the water industry. So thank you to our panel.

Thank you.