IP landscape, scanned.
Also called: Prior-art search · Freedom-to-operate check · IP scan · Patent landscape review
A quick, cheap scan of existing patents, designs and trademarks to check you are free to sell, and to spot what is worth protecting.
Two questions, answered cheaply at the idea stage. Can you sell without infringing someone? Is anything here worth protecting? For most simple products freedom to operate is clear, and a £170 trademark on the look and brand is the only filing worth making early.
What exploring the IP landscape is
Two jobs, kept separate. The first is freedom to operate: can you make and sell this without treading on someone else’s live patent, registered design or trademark? The second is what you can protect: is anything in your product novel enough, and commercially worth the spend, to register? They are different questions. Most people conflate them and waste money on the wrong one.
Do it early and do it cheaply. At the idea stage you are not commissioning a patent attorney’s full opinion. You are running free searches, reading the obvious hits, and forming a working view. The point is to catch a blocking patent before you spend a year engineering around nothing, and to be honest about whether you have anything defensible at all. Usually you do not, and that is fine.
What a cheap scan can and can’t settle
- It can clear the obvious. A few hours on the free patent and trademark registers tells you whether something glaringly close already exists. That alone is worth the time.
- It can’t give you legal certainty. A proper freedom-to-operate opinion is a paid job for a professional. The DIY scan reduces risk; it does not remove it. Say so plainly.
- It stops you overclaiming. Most physical products use principles that are decades old and unpatentable. Knowing that early stops you promising investors or customers protection you don’t have.
The scan, on the running product
Here is what the scan produced for the proofing box we ran through Discover, so you can see the shape of an honest answer rather than a generic template. The patent position is narrow and uncertain, and the table says so.
Notice the table does not pretend to a patent it can’t earn. The defensible assets are the trademark and the registered design, both cheap. The working principle is public domain, and saying so is more useful than a hopeful filing.
IP theatre vs an honest scan
The same activity, done two ways. The first buys a feeling of protection. The second buys a decision you can act on.
- File a patent on a principle that is decades old.
- Tell investors the product is “patented” when it isn’t.
- Skip the freedom-to-operate question entirely.
- Spend thousands at the idea stage, before the design is even frozen.
- Run free searches first; read the obvious hits.
- Separate “can I sell it” from “can I protect it”.
- Register the brand and, later, the look; skip the patent.
- Write down what you don’t own, so nobody overclaims it.
IP theatre feels productive and protects nothing. The honest scan is duller and tells you exactly where you stand: free to operate, probably, and protectable only at the edges. That is enough to keep moving.
How it fits the bigger picture
Explore IP Landscape is activity 02.10.05 in the framework, mid-way through Stage 02 Discover. It follows the market context enquiry (02.10.04) and feeds straight into interviewing stakeholders (02.10.06), where what you learn about freedom to operate and protectable assets shapes the questions worth asking.
What it can do
It catches a blocking patent before you waste a year, and it tells you cheaply what is worth registering. It also keeps you honest: a written IP position stops you, or an over-eager founder, claiming protection the product doesn’t have.
What it can’t do
It can’t replace a professional freedom-to-operate opinion when real money is on the line; the DIY scan reduces risk, it does not remove it. And it can’t manufacture novelty. If the principle is old, no amount of searching makes it patentable.
See the full 10-stage process →
Try it yourself
Spend an afternoon, not a budget. Search the free patent and trademark registers for your product’s working principle and proposed name. Read the closest dozen hits. Write two short lines: “Am I likely free to operate?” and “Is anything here worth registering?” Be honest if the answer to the second is “only the brand and the look”. Flag anything that needs a professional opinion before you commit to tooling.
Or run the guided version. The Free Sprint surfaces the obvious IP questions as part of its risk framing. Start the Free Sprint →
Your IP-scan checklist
Project notes: free to operate, nothing to patent
▸ From the notebook · optional reading
An afternoon on the free registers with Dan and Anna in Stockport, and the moment we told them the heating principle was never theirs to own.
3 min read · click to open
Dan came in half-hoping for a patent. A patent makes a product feel real, and it reads well on a pitch deck. We worked through it with him on a single afternoon, free registers only, and the answer was not the one he wanted.
The patent search
A thermostatically heated proving box is old. Commercial proofing cabinets, home bread provers, warming drawers, the principle has been published for decades. I asked Dan to read the closest dozen hits himself, so the conclusion was his and not mine: “There’s nothing here we invented. We can’t patent a warm box.” Right. And nobody held a live patent a small ceramic box would infringe, so freedom to operate looked clear on the scan, with the caveat that this was our reading, not a paid legal opinion.
What was actually worth protecting
Two things, both cheap. The brand name was free in the relevant classes, so we told them to register the trademark straight away. The ceramic-and-wood form was distinctive, the part a copyist would lift, so a registered design once the shape was frozen made sense. That was the whole protectable footprint. No patent.
Anna found this freeing rather than deflating. The honest position, written down, was: “Free to operate, brand and look protectable, principle public.” It stopped them ever telling a Sourdough School audience or a retail buyer that the box was “patented”, which would have been untrue and, frankly, a liability.
What it cost vs saved
- Cost. One afternoon, no fees, in week 2 of Discover.
- Saved. A pointless patent attempt running into four figures, and the reputational risk of overclaiming protection they never had.
I left them with one flag: revisit freedom to operate with a professional before any tooling money goes down. Cheap insurance against the one thing a free scan can’t promise.
— Discover stage, project notes, 2026
— Next in Discover → Interview stakeholders