Invention Broadening & Co-Invention: Multiply Your IP Value

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

They think they’re done before they’ve developed their invention to its maximum capabilities. 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. Co-invention makes your product better for your customers while making your IP harder to attack, more licensable, and more valuable at exit.

This is the heart of the 16x.

How Broadening Works

We work with you to understand your invention and what you’re trying to accomplish, then put that knowledge through our systems and unique backgrounds — from invention and go-to-market to fundraising and exit strategy — to expand your idea 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, different densities of soap. Broadening it would mean ‘we can also make certain foods this way.’ And ancillary use capture includes countermeasures: we’ve figured out the best way to do it, now let’s figure out less effective ways someone might use to avoid licensing our patent.”

We categorize expansions by time horizon — immediate through far-future — so your portfolio grows where protection is feasible and investment is rational.

What You Receive

New patentable inventions (co-invented with you). Family blueprint. Continuation ladder planning. Expansion Horizon Map. Defensive posture analysis. The result serves both protectability (your Moat) and licensing revenue (your Toll Booth).

Real-World Example — Gary’s File Fingerprinting Patent: Gary invented one of the earliest file fingerprinting systems in 1999. His implementation used lightweight hashing of the first 1,024 and 10,240 bytes — a design choice to minimize server impact, not the core innovation. Patent counsel drafted claims requiring those exact byte counts. The invention was about fingerprinting files to detect illegal content. The patent was about two specific numbers. Broadening would have captured the principle — hashing any portion of a file for identification purposes — not the implementation detail. The difference: a patent suitable for framing versus a patent family worth licensing.

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