From harvest to end of life

Woodward designs, manufactures and services energy control solutions for aerospace and industrial equipment: fuel, combustion, electrical, propulsion and motion control systems for aircraft engines, industrial turbines, power generation and transportation. Founded in 1870 and headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado, the company runs a global engineering and manufacturing footprint, with roughly a third of its business in defense.

Alyssa Sandrowitz is Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property at Woodward. An engineer by training, with degrees from Rutgers and Princeton, she spent fourteen years in private practice at Sterne Kessler, McKenna Long, Polsinelli and Lewis Brisbois, splitting her time between patent prosecution and IP litigation for manufacturing and technology clients. Before Woodward she led IP at Gates Corporation, where she moved a traditional IP operation onto cloud tooling and data analytics and rebuilt its invention harvesting process. She joined Woodward in 2023.

Woodward’s IP management system was out of date. It lacked the functionality and efficiency Alyssa needed, and it sat apart from the way the rest of the business worked. Woodward runs its products through a formal product life cycle process, and the IP function had no system that followed the same path from an idea’s first appearance to the end of a patent’s life.

She went to market for a replacement with a specific brief: a tool “in line with the next generation,” configurable enough to match Woodward’s own process, and one that could live across the business rather than only inside legal. She evaluated several options.

Tradespace matched the brief on the fundamentals: an IP management system that runs from harvest to end of life and mirrors the product life cycle process Woodward already uses, with the customization to fit it to how the company works. That was the basis of the decision.

The AI was the part she had not gone looking for. Tradespace’s assessment and analysis tools give the patent practitioner, the business and the inventors a shared, data-informed basis for portfolio decisions. Routine work gets automated, and the people with the most experience are freed up for the strategy decisions that need them.

“Seeing that Tradespace had an AI component and could provide more analysis and assessments was an added benefit that I hadn’t considered at first. That AI component set Tradespace apart for me.”

Without it, she says, she would still be in the market for an IPMS and still struggling to keep up with portfolio management decisions. Her advice to IP professionals weighing AI is direct.