Q&A With Inventor Amit Kumar Agrawal, Senior Product Manager and Patent Specialist at Motorola Mobility.

Amit Kumar Agrawal is a prolific inventor, patent specialist and innovation leader in the mobile industry who has been at the forefront of cutting-edge technology in the mobile industry for over 18 years, including an impressive 16+ years with Motorola.

Gifted with the ability to predict market trends and anticipate user needs, Amit has a talent for aligning new features with organizational roadmaps, ensuring solutions that users love. As a true product specialist, he has helped transform novel ideas into real-world products that have left their mark – think Ready For, Edge Touch, Voice over Display, ViNE, and Talk to Me!

Acknowledged as a resident patent expert, Amit Kumar Agrawal has led software groups to uncover patentable subject matter, resulting in 125+ granted patents and 375+ patents filed across the globe, including the USPTO, Europe, PCT, India, and China. Many of these patents have become integral parts of Motorola and Google products.

A core member of the Motorola patent review board for a decade, Amit has played a role in the review and decision-making process of over 500 disclosures. He collaborates with in-house and external patent counsel for prior art searches, claim drafting, and office action responses.

From forming India’s IP ambassador team to conducting patent workshops at Motorola Brazil, India, and the US, he loves to ignite the spark of innovation everywhere he goes.

Learn more about Amit’s patents here.

When did you begin thinking of yourself as an inventor? 

In 2013, a hackathon event was conducted at the Bangalore site at MBG. During that time, Motorola was a Google company. I participated in that event with a set of my friends on a project called ViNE. (Not wine, but Voice Interactive navigation system.) 

At that time, we were working on a voice assistant engine with the trigger word as “Hello Moto,” similar to “Hey Siri, OK Google, Alexa etc.”

The project enabled navigating any Android application on the phone using view hierarchy via voice — for example, one could say — “Send WhatsApp message to Shivangi that I am running late.”

The hackathon demo was so good, that it was taken to Larry Page (Google’s cofounder) and later we deployed it into Moto phones products under the Moto Voice feature. We were also able to file and get a patent granted on this idea. The amount of satisfaction this idea generated was beyond our possible imagination and that led me towards the path of an inventor.

How did you learn about patents?

When you really want something, the whole universe will conspire to help you achieve it. 

I have been very fortunate to have several mentors teaching me about patent basics. I learnt most of the fundamentals from Motorola’s in-house counsel Sylvia Chen, who is with Google now, Bob Witte, and David Watanabe. 

Once I realized that patents are my passion, I went to law school to get a postgraduate diploma and also cleared the patent bar exam in India to get a more detailed and official understanding of the craft.

Where do your ideas come from? What inspires you?

I have a simple approach: I just chase problems. I believe the crux of an invention lies in identifying a problem. If you have identified a problem, half of the goal is achieved. 

If that problem has not yet been addressed in the market or is not known as a publication, then you have reached 80 percent. And finally, if you can find a novel way to solve the problem and also procure a patent, then that’s a done deal.

Take us behind the scenes. What does a typical workday look like for you?

I believe I am an organized individual. For me, planning for the week and for a day is usually most important, as that way I can prioritize my upcoming tasks and milestones given I play a dual role at Motorola both as a product and patent specialist. 

On average, I divide my time into two categories: 70 percent for deep work and 30 percent for shallow work which includes meetings, emails, and tasks which are necessary, however don’t involve too much creativity. For the deep work, I spend around 70 percent for my features as a product manager and 30 percent on innovation where I am involved in coming up with new disclosures, reviewing draft claims/applications, reviewing office action responses for my pending patents, or brainstorming ideas with my colleagues.

What is “Ready For”? Tell us about what this innovation is and how it came to life.

MBG has been shipping a commercial device collaboration solution called Ready For since 2020. Ready For unleashes the full potential of your Motorola smartphone by seamlessly connecting with your other devices, such as displays (which could be TVs or monitors OR computing devices such as PCs and tablets.)

With this solution, one can access and enjoy all their Android content on a larger screen for productivity and entertainment. I am proud to say that we have some industry-leading experiences with Ready For, especially while using a phone as a Web camera.

Most importantly, this feature was proven to be very useful in India (especially during COVID) where in many households, students can’t afford a PC for remote learning. With some peripherals though, like a TV or monitor, keyboard and mouse, they can plug in their phone and have a PC-like experience.

Many people who are developing solutions to problems do not know when they have an actual invention. What does it mean to “scrub for patentable subject matter”?

Most of the teams in an organization are often occupied with milestones and deliverables. Most of the R&D teams are so focused on making a project happen within a stipulated time frame with excellent quality, that evaluation for patentable subject matter is often ignored. 

Engineers who work on such products and features are subject matter experts and most of the things they do or create seem obvious to them since they already know the subject matter so well — and that’s why you need an expert who knows details about technology as well as patents to help with “scrubbing for patentable subject matter.” 

This activity is needed at a very early stage of the project — usually when a project is moved to the discovery or concept phase — so there is enough time to identify potential patents and secure filing before the feature goes public.

You invented a solution that benefits people who use Gmail every day. Thank you! Please tell us about it. 

Back in 2013, we had proposed an idea you might be aware of or might be using in your day-to-day life. We had in HR a colleague named Pathy and a colleague named Gulprit. When we used to email them, autocomplete would kick in and many times emails were sent out to “Party” and “Culprit.”

This made us come up with a patent disclosure where the email composer would look for emails/names mentioned in To: CC: list and prioritize those names over auto-complete. It would also help in forming the correct salutations.

This feature has been incorporated in Gmail and Google has four granted patents around these concepts. 

I love that you describe your role as “bridging the gap between engineering features and patentable ideas related to those features.” What factors does the review board consider when deciding which ideas to patent? 

Usually, we consider the following key aspects for deciding which ideas to patent: Novelty, non-obviousness, patentable subject matter, technical feasibility, usefulness, longevity, detectability, relevance to the business, and relevance to the competition.

Aligning a patent portfolio with a product roadmap is important for intellectual property to have value in the marketplace. What is your advice for inventors? What questions should inventors ask? Do you have tips for writing a patent application so that it aligns with a product roadmap? 

Building a competitive portfolio and staying innovative and relevant is of critical importance. The value of the patent portfolio is having a patent that you can leverage against the competitor, given that a patent is an exclusionary right. 

Thus, it is important to know what are the aspects of software and hardware differentiation a company is building which are likely to have a high probability of being copied by competitors or becoming adopted in the industry. 

That will allow you to utilize that patent or leverage that patent in any negotiations, licensing and other environments, and that provides the business with a competitive advantage. 

So, if you don’t have competitive intelligence, then all you’re doing is filing a bunch of ideas and you don’t know if they’ll ever be useful, right? Thus, it’s all about knowing what the competition is doing. For example, foldable, rollable, device collaboration, and marketplace, etc. Competitors would like to be in these spaces, right? 

If you’re early in the game, you will run into the problems that everybody’s going to run into eventually. Thus, if you file your patents in those areas, when you have a new product — like a foldable or rollable phone — and if you’re the first to solve the problems, you can leverage that competitive intelligence to make sure that your claims are steered toward the products that your competitors are making or would make.

There is a perception that inventing is done alone. Has that been your experience? Why or why not?

I am a firm believer in teamwork and collaboration. I believe by sharing your knowledge and experience with others, one can only gain and it is always a win-win solution. In fact, the whole patent system relies on disclosing your idea to the public and gaining exclusionary rights for a limited duration while it helps society in a longer term to be able to build upon those ideas. 

I am proud to state that I have worked with almost every single hardware/software team at Motorola and collaborated with over 150 unique inventors.

You describe writing and prosecuting a patent application as an art, not a science. Why is that? There are those who think that AI programs will be writing patent applications pretty soon. What are your thoughts on this? 

Any form of creativity is an art in my opinion, especially once you get a knack for it. When computers were becoming ubiquitous a couple of decades back, there were those who thought computers would replace humans. What we saw was a phenomenon where a massive number of jobs were created due to the computer age. 

I believe human touch will always be required. Despite the many online courses and study materials that exist, people still prefer physical schools and colleges. There is a lot of buzz going on with Gen AI. Personally, I believe we will still need innovators and clever patent practitioners to deal with innovation and patent applications.

What is your advice for young innovators?

I would advise a 4P theory which I usually follow as a continuous cycle:

• Identify a Passion. One needs to know what they are passionate about, what they love.
• Prioritize your goals. This is absolutely needed before we can start any goal or task. 
• Prepare well. Whether it is a product or a patent, it is an art and learning is required to grow in any field. Thus, the right amount of preparation and practice is a must.
• Exhibit Perseverance. Don’t give up easily. Sometimes an idea may not work. You submit a disclosure for a patent application that might get rejected. At times, you will come across very hard problems. Good takes time, patience, and staying focused. A positive outcome is just a matter of time. 

Watch our interview with Amit on our YouTube channel here.

Follow Amit on LinkedIn here.