Before you invest, know what you are allowed to make.
A global prior-art search positions your development against everything already published and registered. It establishes whether freedom to operate exists, which patent families constrain the design and where genuine novelty remains. It is the cheapest phase of the project and the one that avoids the most expensive mistake.
NDA signed at the first meetingRegistering and exploiting are two different questions.
A third party's patent in force does not prevent you from developing: it prevents you from exploiting. The difference surfaces late, and almost always after moulds, tooling or a pilot run have been committed, when redesigning is no longer a cheap option.
A prior-art analysis turns that uncertainty into a map: what is protected, in which territories, until when and with what claimed scope. With that map in front of you, a redesign — if one is needed — happens on paper and costs what a design review costs, not what a mould costs.
What gets reviewed, and how.
- Databases consulted
- National and international patent and utility-model registers, alongside non-patent literature: standards, manufacturer catalogues, technical publications and trade-fair material from the sector.
- Search criteria
- We scope by classification and by family, not by keyword. Searching by term misses functional equivalents, and those are precisely the ones that block.
- Freedom to operate
- Identification of rights in force that may affect manufacture and sale in the target territories, with their legal status and expiry dates.
- Room for novelty
- Where claimable space remains and which specific design features support it, so that protection is built on something defensible.
What closes the phase.
- Prior-art report
- Relevant documents grouped by family, with a reading of their scope and the concrete consequence each carries for your design.
- Blocking map
- Rights in force by territory, with validity and legal status, and a risk assessment per target market.
- Protection route
- A recommendation between patent, utility model, industrial design or trade secret, with priority criteria and a timetable.
- Decision record
- Continue to phase 02, redesign specific features to clear the block, or stop the project.
This phase comes first, unless it is already done.
It makes sense before any development spend, before presenting the project to an investor or an industrial partner, and before signing a licence agreement. It also applies when a product has been on the market for years and a new territory is under consideration: freedom to operate is territorial, and what was clear in Spain may not be clear abroad.
A technical description of the solution, sketches, drawings or a prototype if they exist, and the markets you intend to sell into.
The boundary of this phase.
[[TBC: define the exact boundary between the technical analysis Honeycomb performs and the filing of applications before the OEPM, EPO or WIPO, which is the work of a registered industrial property attorney. To be confirmed with the client before publication.]]
Tell us where the project stands.
A thirty-minute conversation is enough to establish which phase your development enters at and what it would take to close it. We sign the non-disclosure agreement before you describe anything.