Origin of the invention
Mr. Fabian Mauri is an enthusiastic camper. However, he was missing the possibility of being able to prepare meals in an oven when camping, because campers don’t have an oven with them – at least not until now. This gave rise to the idea of developing his own camping oven, see https://grove-camping.de/pages/about.
Mr. Fabian Mauri also recognized the potential of his invention to have it protected.
Next, a search for prior art was carried out by the EZN Erfinderzentrum Norddeutschland GmbH, see https://www.ezn.de/, which yielded ten documents from the patent literature and one known product. This evaluation came to the conclusion that the device according to the invention can be used as an attachment to an external cooking burner, which can be a mobile gas burner or a gas burner of a kitchen of a caravan or a mobile home. This did not appear to be known from the present state of the art.
Official
Examination procedure
The corresponding patent application was filed with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) on June 11, 2021 under file number 10 2021 115 208.9 and published after approx. 18 months on December 15, 2022 as DE 10 2021 115 208 A1: Patent Publication at Espacenet. No subsequent applications were filed within the 12-month priority period.
The first office action cited three documents from the patent literature as prior art. Based on this, the Office objected to the lack of novelty of the combination of features of claim 1 and several sub-claims, but the examiner also explicitly held out the prospect of some claims of the application being allowable, including claim 5.
Since the features of claim 5 of the application continued to cover the invention very well, the examiner’s suggestion was taken up and the first office action was replied to with correspondingly amended claims. This led to the grant of the German patent DE 10 2021 115 208 B4 on November 09, 2023.
Current
status and contact
In the meantime, Mr. Fabian Mauri has pushed ahead with the commercialization of his inventive product, the multifunctional camping stove “Horst”. The product and further information can be found at grove-camping or at its online store: