Your Invention. How to Develop, Protect & Market It

YOUR INVENTION

How to Develop, Protect & Market It

By Raoul E. Drapeau

Smashwords Edition

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Your Invention.

Copyright 2011 by Raoul E. Drapeau

All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition License Note: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to others. If you would like to share this book, please purchase an additional copy for them. If you are reading this ebook and it was not purchased by or for you, please purchase your own copy at smashwords.com. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Dedicated to all those inventors who go against the grain in pursuit of their idea.

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"Doubt is the father of invention."

Gallileo Gallelei

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: What Lies Ahead

Chapter 2: Market Research

Chapter 3: Product Development

Chapter 4: Protecting Intellectual Property

Chapter 5: The Patent

Chapter 6: Utility Patents

Chapter 7: Patent Searching

Chapter 8: Plant Patents

Chapter 9: Design Patents

Chapter 10: Improvement Patents

Chapter 11: More USPTO Publications

Chapter 12: The Application

Chapter 13: Patent Processing

Chapter 14: Oops & Other Problems

Chapter 15: Foreign Patents

Chapter 16: Legal Matters

Chapter 17: Trademarks & Other Marks

Chapter 18: Copyrights

Chapter 19: Trade Secrets

Chapter 20: Other Protections

Chapter 21: Marketing

Chapter 22: Setting up the Business

Chapter 23: Financing the Business

Chapter 24: Licensing

Chapter 25: Invention Outcomes

Appendix A: Confidentiality Agreement

Appendix B: Submission Agreement

Chapter 1: What Lies Ahead

Why this book?

Before we launch our journey through the intricacies and fun of bringing your invention to fruition, I’d like to describe the people I had in mind when I undertook this project. This book is primarily for you, the budding inventor who has an idea that seems very clever to you and the few people who have seen it (and showing it around is a big mistake, as you’ll see later). And it is for the manager whose responsibilities include trying to supervise unruly and iconoclastic inventors, researchers and other creative people. It is also for the long-suffering spouse who will probably never fully understand what drives an inventor but wants to try to figure it out.

You have surely heard friends say you ought to patent that. But you don’t have a clue as to what to do next. You don’t know how much it would cost, or for that matter, whether that is in fact the best way to protect your idea. You also probably don’t know what’s involved in bringing it to market or manufacturing it, or what kind of troubles to expect along the way. You may have heard the pitch of Invention Marketing Firms that advertise on late-night TV and been lured by their message, or you may have been encouraged by success stories appearing in the newspaper. And most frustrating of all, you may have seen previous ideas of yours that you didn’t pursue, eventually appear in the stores or written up in the newspaper as someone else’s money-maker. If you’re in this category, as many people are, then this book is for you.

This book is also a somewhat lighthearted introduction to what you need to know in order to decide whether and how to protect your intellectual property. I use the expression ‘intellectual property’ rather than invention because there is a wide variety of ‘inventions’ other than products that need protecting; such as writings, performances, names, slogans, processes and logos. We will spend a good amount of time on patents though, since most people think of inventions as products, and patents as the only way to protect them. But there are other effective ways, and we will examine them in some detail, too.

Inventing is partly art, because many people can have the same set of facts about a problem at their disposal. Most won’t fully understand the problem and others who do, don’t have a ready, cost-effective solution. The true inventor is the person who has that unexplainable ability to see past the usual solutions and create an elegant one that goes to the heart of the problem. Often, this is by using simple ideas that everyone else overlooked. But objective, analytical methods can also be involved. The methods may be common-sense technical procedures, applying tried and true business maxims, or adhering to established intellectual property protection laws.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a patent attorney or agent, or an expert on the Patent Office’s rules. The rules are just what one would expect from a government organization dealing with legal minutia - complex and voluminous. However, these same details are easily available to you on the Internet, if you only take the time to seek them out. If you want expertise though, and there are times that you will, then you need to seek out an expert and employ their services.

What I am is an independent inventor who has filed and been granted patents and trademarks, both on my own and with the aid of a professional. I have poked around in the bowels of the Patent Office, know where some of the bodies are buried, and will share with you what I know. My background is that of an engineer, writer and businessman. Inventing is an important part of what I do and who I am. As a result, this book is written from the perspective of an inventor and contains subjects and approaches that I think would be helpful to any inventor.

Laying it out

This book will introduce you to the many and varied topics that you need to be intimately familiar with in order to bring your invention to the finish line. One important aspect along this tortuous route is protecting it against unauthorized use by others.

It’s not as simple to turn your idea into a successful product as you may think. Many inventors-to-be assume that potential licensees or investors will see the value in their idea from a discussion or sketch and line up to throw money at it. The newspapers are filled with these tales because they make good Horatio Alger, human-interest stories. The reality is much different, though, and involves a lot of hard spade work and even some luck. This book will provide a dose of reality but also some hope.

First, we will discuss the difference between an idea and an invention. You may think that they’re the same, but they’re not. Rest assured, though, the people you will want to convince to spend their money to finish the development, arrange the manufacturing and do the marketing will know the difference.

Then, we will see whether you have what it takes to be a successful inventor, because not everyone that has had a great idea has those characteristics. Almost everybody has had a great idea at some point in their life that they were too busy to pursue. And then they saw it on the store shelves as somebody else’s money-maker. There’s a lot that goes into avoiding this kind of disappointment, and you will learn the characteristics that you should have (or should have had).

If you think that you do have what it takes, then you need to evaluate your idea carefully. Protecting an invention can be a costly, time-consuming ordeal, and there’s no point in doing it if your basic idea is flawed. We will examine a set of criteria to help measure your invention against, to help judge whether you’d be wasting your money.

If you get past those steps, then you’ll probably want to protect your invention against all the predators out there waiting to jump on it for their own benefit and muscle you out of the picture. In that regard, you’ll probably be surprised to learn that there are a lot more ways to protect your invention than just patents. For many ideas, patents are good protection. But they cost a lot of money and have other flaws, not the least of which is they have a relatively short lifetime. And then where are you? We’ll look at a whole array of other protections, including those that cost practically nothing and those that last forever.

Once you’ve decided that your idea is worth protecting and how to protect it, another important effort is to do market research to help answer the pressing question, will anyone want to buy it? This is a very important question to answer, because the patent files are filled with perfectly valid patents on completely unmarketable products. Or, does your invention uniquely and elegantly solve a problem that no one has? Either way, the Patent Office and the attorneys that serve it will be happy to take your money.

Product development is an important aspect of bringing your invention to market, unless you are such a genius that there can be no improvement on your initial concept. Most of us mortals need to research and consider different materials and design variations so that our invention is as good as it can be. There’s no sense in going to all the effort to apply for a patent and then later discover that some there was a better variation that you should have applied for instead.

If you do decide to apply for a patent or trademark, then you need to find out what’s gone on before. Did someone else already patent something similar 120 years ago? Was it published in an obscure foreign technical journal many years ago? Was it the subject of your Ph.D. thesis just a few years ago? You may think that long-expired patents or unpatented disclosures don’t matter, but they matter a lot. They can make all your effort wasted. So, you need to find out who did what and when they did it by conducting a search of the prior art. You’ll learn how to do that

If all these steps check out, then in order to make a success of your invention in the marketplace, you need to get the word out effectively. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Even though all new patents and trademarks are published weekly by the Patent Office, the chances of your getting a nibble without being proactive are about nil. But just placing a bunch of ads is a good way to spend a lot of money in a hurry without much better results. You need to make sure that your marketing dollars are wisely spent, which includes spending them on the right thing and then measuring the result. So, effective marketing is a key ingredient to your success.

Licensing your invention can be a terrific way to have someone else bear most of the risks of bringing your invention to market. You’ll have to take a smaller piece of what probably will be a bigger pie, but that might be better than no pie at all. But a licensee will take his pound of flesh, so we’ll discuss how to approach potential licensees and what they’ll want to know.

If, on the other hand, you decide to go it alone, you’ll need money - maybe lots of it. Finding others to take the financial risk can be a daunting task, but they are out there. But of course, there are strings attached. We will show you who these people are, what they will want from you, and what you need to do to reach them.

And there is the possibility that you will become embroiled in some kind of legal hassle. In spite of your having played by the rules, there are people who will come after you and make your life miserable, particularly if you’re successful. We will spend some time on what to do when you get that unwelcome letter from a legal firm you never heard of.

All of this is so that you will know what to do and what not to do in the pursuit of your dream.

Using the Internet

There is a great deal of information available on the Internet that can be useful to you in every aspect of the development and marketing of your invention. You absolutely must get familiar with using the Internet, because it is a resource these days that you cannot do without. Combined with your local public or university library, you will be able to locate whatever materials and assistance you need.

To help you find some of this data, I have given the Internet addresses (or URLs) of some key organizations that I know about. They are presented as hyperlinks, so most eBook readers will let you invoke the link and go directly to the web site. Since hyperlinks do change from time to time, my apologies in advance for failed links. And don’t forget to come back to the book after you have checked out the material at the link.

Since most inventors become involved with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (known hereafter as the USPTO) at some time or other in the process of protecting their invention, you might as well memorize their main Internet site at uspto.gov.

Ideas vs. Inventions

Everyone has ideas. You may even have had an idea for a product that you didn’t do anything about, and then one day you saw it for sale in the stores. That’s very frustrating. Perhaps it gave you the idea that you were an inventor. But not all of these are real inventions. An idea can lead to an invention, but most ideas lead nowhere, since they are spur-of-the-moment concepts that upon reflection or further examination prove to be unworkable, unsalable, old-hat, too expensive or too complicated for you to pursue. As you will learn, the Patent Office does not approve patents for ideas. Investors do not put their money into mere ideas. Licensees do not take on ideas to manufacture and sell. All of them deal with proven inventions, not ideas. The difference is an important one.

Ideas are possible solutions to a presumed problem. Either of these conditions can prove to be the undoing of a nascent invention. Ideas are characterized by much uncertainty that can be resolved only by a lot of effort. They are only the first step in a long process. This may be why you haven’t been able to get anybody interested in your idea.

On the other hand, a true invention is the result of all that effort. The need for it has been established by market research, the technical viability has been established by product development, and its protectability has been determined by searching the prior art. The inventor and all the others that will become involved now can have the confidence to proceed.

Are You An Inventor? Evaluating Yourself

One of the first things you should do before you spend your time and money on what might easily become a wasted effort, is to make sure that you have what it takes. There is a whole set of desirable personal characteristics. You don’t need to have them all, but if you can honestly say that you see yourself in only a few of them, then you might want to reexamine whether you should proceed, because you may be in for a rough ride.

There are many reasons why people subject themselves to the abuse that often befalls an inventor, and it can be useful to know in which category you fall. For example, it can be because you’re basically a masochist and enjoy having people heap criticism on you. Not likely, you say? Perhaps it could be to satisfy your ego, since being a successful inventor can assuredly be ego gratifying. Or, it might be for the profit, although that’s a long shot, since most inventions don’t come close to paying back all the money put into them. It could be for the pure enjoyment of it, because the thrill of seeing your name in lights is hard to beat. There are some inventors who do it because of their altruistic nature; inventing something that saves lives or truly makes lives better is just a different kind of thrill.

Some inventors go about their creative business because that’s what they were hired to do for their employer. Many development labs in large companies produce great numbers of patents to help protect their competitive position. But only a much smaller number of them actually make it to the marketplace. The people who invent things for employers are just as much inventors as the person who works in his or her basement or garage. One difference is that it’s easier for employees to pay the bills when there’s a paycheck coming in for doing what they love to do. But the flip side is that they are restricted to working on only what their employer wants them to, and that can be stifling to their creativity.

The last category of people who are inventors is those that never gave it much thought as to why they do it. They just had a clever idea and decided to try and follow through with it. Maybe that’s you.

When it comes to the kind of personal characteristics that make a successful inventor, you should consider the following list. It’s incomplete, in that there are surely others. But it is also instructive, in that if you don’t see yourself in most of them, you are probably better off with your day job:

1. Self-confidence - in the face of things going wrong and others continually telling you that you’re wasting your time, it helps to be supremely confident. Not that you are confident that you’re right all the time, but that you know that somehow or other you can find the answer.

2. Perceptivity - perceptivity is the precursor of creativity; it involves seeing that there is a problem in the first place. You would be surprised how many problems people deal with every day without even realizing that there must be a better way.

3. Creativity - certainly you need to be creative; it’s the essence of invention. This is how you can see a solution to the common problem that others missed. But be prepared for rejection, since creative people think outside the box, and that can cause anxiety in more conventional people.

4. Persistence - this personality trait helps you cope with all of the setbacks and criticism that is bound to come your way, by continuing on your chosen path in spite of it all. Persistence is also needed when you discover another inventor independently pursuing your same goal.

5. Diligence - according to current law, all other things being equal, if you are not diligent in your efforts and someone else files before you, you can lose the race to patentability. This means that once you start on the path to an invention, you should keep at it. As we will see later on, while the law now gives priority to the first to invent, the law may be changed to give the legal nod to the first to file. This change would place even more emphasis on diligence.

6. Toughness - you can be persistent and still be affected by the nay-sayers. Having a tough skin helps to let criticism roll off without driving you to abandon your invention before it is complete.

7. Commitment - some people with whom you will come into contact react negatively to change and will try to subvert your progress. Being committed means focusing on the end-game and not letting any obstacles deter you.

8. Independent - inventors are typically independent people who like to work by themselves, noodling through problems. This doesn’t mean that they are antisocial recluses but rather that they are driven by inner urges that are independent of their work environment.

9. Detail-oriented - turning an idea into an invention involves a huge amount of detail. There are technical, marketing, business, legal and countless other details to worry about. If you are the kind of person who abhors detail, then you will have a real problem in being a successful inventor because the devil really is in the details.

10. Boldness - being an inventor is not for the faint of heart. The very idea of creativity carries with it the concept of, and the need for, boldness - striking out in ways that others haven’t.

11. Jack of all trades - independent inventors, those who are working for themselves, do not have the supporting resources that an inventor working in an industrial setting does. They have to be engineer, draftsman, salesman, businessman, financier and lawyer all in one. This can be a daunting assignment. The true inventor does not shrink from the task but welcomes it.

12. Risk-taker - an inventor can be bold in his design concepts, yet not be a risk taker when it comes to putting it all on the line. It is the inventor who is truly committed to his invention who signs his house over to the mortgage company for the money to buy the necessary equipment or materials, or to hire that key person. This is a huge personal risk that not everyone can or should take. People who are comfortable working in a sheltered industrial environment do not understand this commitment and the risk it entails.

13. Lover of mysteries - the path to invention is a long and varied one that can contain many difficult, even unique problems that must be solved. Some people become frustrated and angry at these diversions from their otherwise orderly path. The true inventor recognizes problems as an integral part of the process and looks forward to dealing with them.

14. Optimistic - an inventor must be optimistic, even though that can be hard when things are crumbling at every turn. Even though it is a hackneyed phrase, an inventor really must have the optimism to believe that every problem is an opportunity in disguise.

15. Iconoclastic - it’s the nature of inventors to think outside the lines and do things in ways that others disdain or do not think useful. The person who only marches by the usual route is not likely to be a successful independent inventor. The proof is that those that were conventional in their approach were exposed to the same opportunity, and yet they missed the inventor’s solution.

16. Luck - yes, there is an element of luck in invention. It is not a completely rational process, where an objective step-by-step procedure always gets the job done. There are cases when in spite of your best efforts, it is the method or material that you stumble on that solves the problem. Thomas Edison was right that invention is 98% perspiration, but even he took advantage of lucky breaks when they occurred.

17. Technical skill - the inventor who must rely on others to reduce his idea to practice is not likely to be very successful. No one knows or loves your baby as much as you do. Others will see it as a job, when you may see it as a lifetime opportunity. The only way to make sure it is done right is for you to know enough about whatever technology is involved to be able to contribute intelligently, if not to do it yourself.

18. Vision - this is the ability to think outside the box, seeing things differently from others and thus opening up new possibilities.

19. Impatience - there are time pressures placed on inventors by patent law, by competition and by the inventor’s general desire to get the project finished. There is much to get done, and most of it is beyond the inventor’s control. The supplier or tradesman never has the same schedule that you do, and when they aren’t making the progress that you think they should, sometimes impatience and even anger are the only ways to get someone else off dead center.

20. Realism - sometimes, in spite of your best efforts, things just don’t go well. Perhaps you discovered that someone else invented essentially the same thing years ago, and your invention isn’t enough different to be attractive in the marketplace. Or maybe you came across an unanticipated and impossible technical barrier. Whatever the reason, you are faced with the decision to quit now, or continue to bull ahead. There are times when stopping is the best course. It is a difficult decision but one that a good inventor knows when to make.

21. Delegation - because independent inventors are used to working alone, it is tempting for them to try to do everything. Just as in any work situation, it can be the best thing for the project for the leader to know his limitations and delegate some of the work to others. As a result, things that should have had an expert hand or even just another perspective can get done improperly.

If after all this, you are still not sure whether you have what it takes, you might want to visit a local inventor’s club and talk with them. And if you aren’t computer literate, you need to become so. Meanwhile, find some 10 year olds - they will be.

Rules of Thumb

As in any field of endeavor, there is a set of rules of thumb that should govern your behavior as you develop your invention. They are derived from the personal characteristics presented above:

1. Don’t be too serious - this ought to be fun, too. Lighten up every now and then. It’s not the end of the world if this idea bombs. If you’re a good inventor, there’ll be another good one coming along soon enough.

2. Don’t be too secretive - inventors tend to keep everything very close to the chest, fearing (not without good reason) that someone will steal their idea. However, you can carry that idea to an extreme to your detriment. In order to refine your invention, you should be exposing it