Robert L. Cantrell

Biography

Robert L. Cantrell is a registered patent agent adept at working with inventors to identify and protect the heart of their inventive concepts. He has walked in the shoes of the inventor. Before becoming a patent practitioner, Mr. Cantrell was an inventor on more than one hundred and fifty patent applications at Walmart, HP, and IP.com. His inventions are in the fields of drones, store robotics, data management, artificial intelligence, blockchain, packaging, and transaction security.

Mr. Cantrell has worked with individual inventors to define the most defendable and saleable aspects of their inventions. He was also instrumental in building system-wide patent portfolios at Walmart to enable that well-known retailer to venture deeper into the technical domains of Silicon Valley.

Mr. Cantrell includes within his work experience several years of running patent analysis teams for technology assessments and valuations. He also ran patent hunter-killer teams aimed at putting the validity of asserted patents into doubt both by scouring the earth for prior art and looking for holes in the patent language.

Mr. Cantrell received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Duke University in Biology and Military Science. He received a Master's in Business Administration from Edinburgh Business School in Scotland and served as an infantry officer for the 101 st Airborne Division of the United States Army. Mr. Cantrell is a faculty member for the venerable Patent Resources Group (Kayton Courses) for the Patent Strategies for Business Course. He is the author of the book Outpacing the Competition: Patent-Based Business Strategy, published in 2009 by Wiley.