Innovator’s Summary Guide

This guide is for: professional inventors, engineers, scientists, technical developers, business managers, marketing specialists, engineering managers, entrepreneurs, and anyone with a bright idea that has commercial merit.

Welcome! Whether you’re a professional inventor or just someone with a good product or business idea, trademark or creative work, you’ve come to the right place. There are two distinct aspects to innovating; the art and the business. This guide is about the business, we leave the art or creative side to others. You want to make money with innovative ideas. Our objective, then, is to show you how to do that. We deal with the relationship between the technical, legal, market, financial and business aspects in the commercialization of innovations. Knowing how this relationship works will enable you to optimize your objectives quickly, safely and without significant cost.

This may sound like a big deal, but it can be remarkably simple once you get the hang of it.

Although this guide is extensive, it is a programmed text. You may read it through in just a few minutes to obtain an overview of the subject. You may also click on any underlined text as you go along, to delve deeper.

Legal protection through patents, trademarks and copyrights is not essential to commercial success. However, often it is the protection vehicle itself that is of primary business value to the innovator. Therefore, first lets determine which types of protection, if any, are appropriate to your innovation. The following should give you a good idea:

Trademarks, including service marks, are the names of products and services. They serve to enable those seeking your products or services to identify the genuine article rather than an imposter. Marks may consist of words and/or images known as logos. They also can be sounds, colors, shapes or any feature of a product that is distinctive. Marks, of course, may be reserved and registered with the United States Patent & Trademark office, but this is not essential to gaining ownership. Rather, use in business is the key for developing reputation or brand recognition as well as legal ownership.

Copyrights are acquired by merely authoring a creative work such as a novel, play, dance choreography, poem, graphical art work, song, and so on. Such creative works are not protectable by patents or trademarks. Under copyright law, any creative work automatically legally belongs to its creator and does not require registration with the United States Copyright Office for ownership.

Although machines, devices, material compositions, as well as certain methods, are no doubt creative, they have industrial applicability and are therefore protectable by patents. Included in this class of protection, are the construction details, the manner of working, and even the appearance of such items. Patentable items absolutely do require registration to acquire ownership. The mere creation of such items does not provide legal ownership no matter what records you keep. Recent patent law changes, and their implications, are not well understood by the general public, but should be.

The foregoing three types of protection comprise the primary methods of acquiring ownership of what is generally referred to as “intellectual property.” Such properties are commonly purchased, sold and used in business deals to the advantage of all concerned.

A fourth category of intellectual property is referred to as “trade secrets.” Trade secrets are generally applied to items that might also be the subject of a patent. However, if the nature of an innovation cannot be determined through examination, or if a process or method is used only in private, one may successfully maintain it as a secret. This has advantages and disadvantages. A vast number of industrial methods and formulas are held as trade secrets, as are many customer lists and other important business information, data, and software algorithms.

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I assume that you have a novel idea that may be protected by at least one of the above intellectual property types, and you believe that your idea has commercial potential, i.e., can generate revenue. Clearly, you must find out if the idea is actually worth pursuing, you must gain ownership of the idea, and you must prepare a successful promotion strategy. Doing these things is called Commercial Preparation. Please take our advice that Commercial Preparation is absolutely necessary. To approach the business community with only a raw idea is not wise and almost never beneficial to the innovator.