Crown Electrokinetics Corp. (NASDAQ: CRKN) (“Crown” or the “Company”), a leading smart glass technology company, has acquired 10 patents from IBM Corporation that complement its patent portfolio. Crown now has a patent portfolio of broad applicability in the smart glass technology area consisting of 34 patents and applications that offer coverage in key global markets. Crown used IPwe, a patent transaction platform, to identify, analyze, negotiate, and complete the transaction with IBM.
“Many of the companies that use the IPwe platform recognize that there are highly relevant patents owned by innovation leaders like IBM that offer significant benefits if they can be efficiently identified, analyzed and acquired. IBM has thousands of employees that focus on research and these experts innovate in many areas, including smart glass technologies. Crown is forward-thinking enough to realize that acquisitions are a key part of any intelligent intellectual property strategy and acquiring patents from innovation leaders like IBM and others through highly efficient transactions makes tremendous business sense,” said Erich Spangenberg, CEO of IPwe.
“Crown has an excellent in-house research and development team dedicated to innovating in the smart glass space. We are also aware that key innovation is occurring outside of Crown, and we want to leverage these opportunities through a highly efficient platform like IPwe,” stated Douglas Croxall, CEO of Crown. “The time for faster more efficient exchanges of IP is now made possible by the IPwe Platform and smart buyers and sellers will take advantage of this to dramatically improve their market positions.”
Far too often, the only metric used to measure IP is “how many.” Crown and IPwe wanted to do something other than just increase the number of patents Crown holds and to ensure Crown is significantly improving the overall quality of its patent portfolio. As this market expands, Crown wants to occupy the leading technology position in the smart glass market, and according to IPwe analytics, Crown is well on its way to obtaining the leading position in smart glass intellectual property.
Crown acquired 10 patents and applications from IBM with coverage in the US, China, Great Britain, Germany and Japan. The patents are core to smart glass technologies, ranging from technical features oriented to dynamically changing the opacity of glass to different applications such as glass that is impenetrable to laser or different uses for the automotive industry, including smart vehicle windshields and windows that eliminate glare and provide environmental control.
