Invention Disclosure Form: Fields, Examples, and Best Practices
AI Patent GeneratorA practical breakdown of invention disclosure forms: recommended fields, attachments, and examples across software, medical devices, and biotech.
Invention Disclosure Form: Fields, Examples, and Best Practices
What exactly should go into an invention disclosure form? This guide summarizes the purpose, recommended fields, and domain-specific examples to help teams submit complete, attorney-ready packages.
What to Include in Your Form
A well-structured form typically includes:
- Administrative info: inventor names, affiliations, dates, public disclosures
- Summary: 1–2 sentence overview of the invention
- Background: problem definition and prior art references
- Technical description: architecture, parameters, components, flow
- Variants: alternatives, edge cases, trade-offs
- Drawings: figures with labels and references
- Data: benchmarks, test results, acceptance criteria
- Deployment/Regulatory: environments, dependencies, compliance
- Attachments: versioned artifacts (CAD, API specs, datasets)
Domain Examples
- Software: APIs, performance metrics, concurrency, security boundaries
- Medical Devices: biocompatibility, sterilization, power and safety limits
- Biotech: strain/cell line, timings, controls, analysis methods
Why It Matters
Providing complete forms reduces cycles with counsel, improves patentability evaluation, and accelerates drafting. Treat forms as living documents connected to your engineering artifacts.
Related guides: Template, Enablement, Scoring Checklist.