Duluthian's patent no longer pending
After a prolonged approval process, a Duluth woman who invented a device making mammograms more comfortable gets good news.By: John Lundy, Duluth News Tribune
- Ann Harrington receives patent approval
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Six years, seven months and 12 days after she filed, Ann Harrington of Duluth got the news she’d been waiting for: Her invention, the CozyMamm, was patented.
Only she wasn’t sure that was the news at first.
“They call it a ‘notice of allowance,’ ” Harrington said last month in her windowless office at the Center for Economic Development in Duluth’s Technology Village. “And I didn’t know that term. I e-mailed the patent attorney and said, ‘Translate. Is that what I think it is?’ ”
It was.
Harrington’s invention, written about in May 2010 in the News Tribune, is designed to warm the surface of a Bucky, the machine used in mammograms. She took the first step, filing for a provisional patent, on Jan. 18, 2005; the notice of allowance came on Aug. 30 of this year.
That doesn’t mean Harrington can start to market her invention. It’s considered a medical device, so she has to get Food and Drug Administration approval. It’s an electronic device, so she has to get Underwriters Laboratories approval.
Her story illustrates how long it can take to go from a new idea to a product, and how much it can cost. On Sept. 16, President Obama signed the America Invents Act, designed to streamline the process. It’s a process that took Thomas Edison seven weeks when he invented the phonograph, Obama said, and today takes an average of three years.
It often takes longer than that —four to five years —for technological devices, said Mark Bergner of Chicago, the patent lawyer who represented Harrington. For mechanical devices like Harrington’s, three years is more typical. “But what made Ann’s situation a little bit different is the fact that she had three different designs that she tried to protect,” Bergner said. “This last application put her in a different examining group and at the end of the queue, and that caused the lengthy amount of time to pass.”
Harrington explained that she had to file three “continuations in part” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as her design became more sophisticated. Each added to the time the process took, and in the final go-around she was switched from one patent examiner to another.
“I’m just darn lucky I have a patent attorney to help me keep all this straight,” Harrington said.
Harrington and Bergner met at a party in Chicago. They tell slightly different versions of the story, but the upshot was they discovered a mutual interest: getting an invention patented.
“That happens more often than you might think to a patent attorney at a party, and most of the time you hear these very hare-brained ideas,” Bergner said. “As an attorney I politely listen to them, and maybe I toss out a couple of typical dollar amounts that getting a patent might cost. Usually that causes them to scurry off or change the subject.”
But Harrington’s idea seemed like a good one, Bergner said. “So when I gave her my inoculating speech to see if she was still interested in it, she kind of hung in there, and it wasn’t daunting.”
It could have been. Harrington said she has spent $39,000 on the patent and expects the total to ultimately be $50,000.
Harrington, who shares credits on the patent with Bill Pedersen of Arrowhead Innovations and Mark Dexter, doesn’t know when she’ll be able to recover some of her investment. Does she sometimes wish she had never thought of the idea?
“Financially, some days I’ve been worried enough … that I’ve thought, ‘What have I gotten into here?’ ” Harrington said. “However, people-wise, and learning-wise, I really wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
For Bergner, who said he has been involved in more than a thousand patents since he began in 1999, Harrington’s was unique in at least one respect, he said. “I think she’s the only case I’ve had where someone at a party (said), ‘Hey, I have a great idea for an invention,’ and it actually worked out.”
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