THE CHALLENGE:
Traditionally, the idea of a Fortune 50 company engaging a big law partner would bring to mind white male professionals focused solely on bottom-line objectives.
But recent movements advocating for change in the workplace have empowered passionate diversity, equity and inclusion leaders in both industries to change that image. In order to facilitate real progress, Meta and its outside legal team have come together with shared priorities to tackle historical barriers and systemic disparities.
OUR OBJECTIVE:
Together, Meta and outside counsel not only develop a data-driven patent strategy to prepare, file and obtain patents, they also implement actions that measurably increase Meta inventors’ diversity.
THE OUTCOME:
To do so, the team applies key principles from a Gender Diversity in Innovation Toolkit developed by the Intellectual Property Owners trade group. Drawing in part on the toolkit’s tactics, they developed an internal survey to identify how select employees engage with the patent program, as well as revising Meta’s internal invention submission form. Among other changes, they replaced potentially biased words such as “invention”
and “inventor” with “solution” and “contributor.”
Meta also instituted a concept called hybrid brainstorming, which aims to eliminate bias issues that stem from the traditional patent brainstorming process. In hybrid brainstorming, participants anonymously and individually write down solutions to a key technical problem, then return as a group to comment on the most valuable of the stillanonymous ideas. This strategy puts the focus on participation and the merits of each idea, rather than the person sharing it, sidestepping implicit bias due to gender, race or ethnicity. It also empowers everyone in the room to offer their ideas without fear of
judgment and regardless of seniority level.
Based on the success of the ongoing diversity in innovation collaboration, Meta and its outside legal team also helped support the United States Intellectual Property Alliance’s first Diversity in Innovation Conference in July 2021. It included 15 sessions over four days, for more than 200 highly engaged attendees. The conference advanced the idea of publicly reporting inventor diversity numbers, creating transparency for the issue of diversity in innovation and pressuring large companies toward greater innovation equity.
