Invention Evaluation Services: A Review of the State of the Art

This article presents a comprehensive review of the current state of invention evaluation services in the United States. Gerald Udell critically examines technical evaluation programs at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and discusses the Preliminary Innovation Evaluation System (PIES) developed during the Oregon Innovation Center Experiment. He reports that most evaluation services using the PIES format are operating below the state of the art reached by the Oregon experiment and that the quality of some evaluations is suspect. Some of these programs appear to have adopted portions of the PIES format without considering PIES' substance and the five years of research and experimentation that went into PIES' development. Inasmuch as invention evaluation activity is now part of public policy in the United States, invention evaluation activity is likely to increase. Replication and extension of either the technical evaluation procedures of the National Institute of Standards and Technology or the PIES format should be undertaken with careful attention to past experiences.