By Nick Sargent
Wausau Daily Herald
The real value of the local economy isn’t found in the community’s big manufacturing plants or countless square footage of office space.
In the 21st century, a company’s most valuable property is found in the heads of its employees. Intellectual property, or IP, is what separates a business from its competitors in an information economy.
But until earlier this year, the Wausau area didn’t have one of the key resources needed to develop those valuable concepts and inventions: a registered patent agent. If people here wanted to file a patent, they would have had to travel to Green Bay, Madison or Milwaukee to find an agent.
One local resident has changed that. Fred Lane became a registered agent and established Lane Patents earlier this year. His goal is to help local companies and inventors make the most of, and make money from, their inventions.
“Intellectual property is where the real value is,” said Eric Kauten, director of business and manufacturing for the University of Wisconsin Extension. “By staying at the cutting-edge of business development on the IP side, you (can be profitable) at a level that you can’t when everyone is doing the same thing and only competing on the basis of cost.”
An inventor himself, Lane needs only to look down the hall to see the economic value of innovation is a suite of offices he shares with SafeAssured in Wausau’s Corporate Cove building.
He helped develop a technology key to that company’s product; youth identification kits that can be used by law enforcement in missing child cases.
The company was born from Wausau Financial Systems, which used biometrics technology in security solutions for financial institutions. With Lane’s help, innovation and invention, the technology led to a new product and eventually, economic development.
SafeAssured employs six people and has the potential for future growth, as its identification kits grow increasingly popular with law enforcement agencies and parents throughout the country.
More than a year after spinning off SafeAssured into its own company, the innovation and invention opportunities associated with the product dried up. The technology is fully developed, and Lane wanted to opportunity to continue to use his ingenuity to develop new ideas.
“I like that whole idea of taking the product of someone’s mind and then make something of it, exploit it and see how people react to it. I just really fell in love with that process,” said Lane, who generated and prosecuted patents for the SafeAssured product.
Lane Patents allow him to work with people like Richard Theiler, who runs a business consulting firm in Wausau and is about to launch a Web business he thinks might be revolutionary. Next month, Theiler and his business partner, Marty Schreiber of Wisconsin Rapids, plans to launch prybuy.com, an advertising site and coupon search engine for central Wisconsin businesses.
Schreiber and Theiler want to protect the process of how that site conducts the searches, which makes the site easy to use.
The duo probably would not have applied for patent protection for the product before Lane became a registered agent, because of the distance to the other agents.
If the technology proves effective, it’s something that could conceivable be used in every community, leading to a new business for the area or the ability to license the technology.
As the local economy continues to develop, it’s the type of new business the community needs, Lane said.
“One of the statements that came out of (a discussion at a recent meeting of local business people) is that in this community we don’t need another hair salon, another restaurant where people are spending money in that community (and it’s recycling),” Lane said.
“What really vitalizes a community is when you can play in the larger arena – when you can (become a large employer) that has products and collects from all across the country and all across the world,” he said.
“Patents and IP give you the ability to play in that arena. For companies that want to compete on the national and global scale, it gives them the ability.”