Invention Broadening & Co-Invention

Most inventors’ patents fail, get invalidated, or return insufficient value for one reason: they stop inventing too soon.

They file one patent on one implementation and hope for the best. The result: a narrow claim set that a well-funded competitor can design around in an afternoon.

Inventiply’s invention team, led by Gary Shuster — named inventor on 256+ patents across dozens of fields — helps inventors extract the full potential of their ideas. Broadening & Expansion doesn’t just protect your invention. It improves it. This is the heart of the 16x.

How Broadening Works

We work with you to understand your invention, then expand it across new architectures, embodiment variants, workflows, data transformations, interfaces, and adjacent vertical use cases.

Gary Shuster on Broadening vs. Expansion: “We can take an invention and expand it so that it covers more adjacent things. If we broaden it, we make it cover more non-adjacent things. Expanding a patent on a more efficient way to make soap might involve soap-like substances. Broadening it would mean ‘we can also make certain foods this way.’ And ancillary use capture includes countermeasures.”

What You Receive

New patentable inventions (co-invented with you). Family blueprint. Continuation ladder planning. Expansion Horizon Map. Defensive posture analysis.

Real-World Example — Gary’s File Fingerprinting Patent: Gary invented one of the earliest file fingerprinting systems in 1999. Patent counsel drafted claims requiring exact byte counts (1,024 and 10,240 bytes). The invention was about fingerprinting files to detect illegal content. The patent was about two specific numbers. Broadening would have captured the principle — not the implementation detail.

Appears in: Validation (initial scope), Moat & Toll Booth (full scope).