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Showing posts from 2018

December 2018

Kenton Brett (granted 15 U.S. patents, see bottom of this page) displayed one of his inventions for K-5 math education and shared insights he gained from his years of innovation. Innovation takes a lot of time and money, always more than you expect. You can make things happen by sticking with an inventive project. If you think of a good idea, someone else will think of it too.  So get to the patent office and to the market first. Get unbiased validation of your idea before you spend a lot of time and money on it. You can sell just an idea, but rarely. You can get compensated for infringement of your patent by a big company.  License or sell your invention to a mid-sized company that will actively seek compensation from the big company. Get a recommendation from your potential customers. Focus on your core idea to get a cash flow that can fund the rest of your ideas. Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Mr. Brett!

October 2018

Michael Stokes (CEO, Waveform Communications ; author, The Waveform Model of Vowel Perception and Production ) summarized his progress since 2012 in developing a method of using waveforms and spectrograms to identify vowels in human speech. Mr. Stokes’ model is currently the best for describing how people recognize spoken vowels.   A distinct set of vowels characterizes each language.   For example, English has ten vowels, Spanish five.   Each vowel of a language has a characteristic sound that underlies all dialects and individual pronunciations.   That characteristic sound can be visualized as spectrograms of three sound wave frequencies.   Although unpatentable as is (patent applications 14/223304 and 13/241780 ), a computer program (Elbow) based on the model accurately predicts spoken vowels from observations of the spectrograms.   A second program (Cobweb), especially useful to athletes, uses speech patterns to diagnose concussions in real time. The model c

September 2018

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I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backways. —Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court A patent helps to secure a place in the market for an invention.   That is why many inventors take time, make an effort, and pay a significant amount of money to patent their inventions. Inventors often do not realize that grant of a U.S. patent is always conditional.   Like everyone else, patent examiners make mistakes.   The patent office (Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)) or a federal court can decide at any time during the life of a patent that the patent should never have been granted.   The result is an invalidated patent that provides no benefit to the patent owner. Truth is often hard to ascertain and reasonable individuals can disagree on what the truth is.   Does our current patent system provide enough certainty for individual inventors and investors to risk

August 2018

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Need help with designing or with building a prototype of your invention?   Or with preparing drawings for a patent application? Wade Stallings (owner, D3DTechnologies ; (463) 201-1777, d3dtechnologies@gmail.com ) in Indianapolis can help.   Using computer-aided design (SolidWorks and other CAD software) and 3-D printing with hard plastics (0.02 mm tolerances, each part as big as 8 inches high with a 7 inch x 7 inch base), Mr. Stallings (a recent graduate of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology) provides these services for $60/hour, usually with a maximum of 4 hours/project.   The total price of a project depends on the time/project and on the type and amount of plastic used in building a prototype.   Included in the price are a confidentiality agreement, all project files (CAD, pdf, etc.), and assignment of any and all patent rights to the client.

June 2018

Need help with product development?   Troy Mason (president, CEO, Impulse Product Development ) has some good advice. It’s hard to develop a popular product.   Start by setting a realistic goal for your invention. Before your spend a lot of time and effort bringing your product to market, do some high quality customer research to see if forecasted sales meet your needs.   Your product might become a best-seller, but there won’t be one in every household. Product development doesn’t start with a prototype.   Maybe you will eventually need a physical prototype, maybe you won’t.   The essence of some products can be displayed in a drawing or virtual prototype.   If you need a prototype, especially to test your product’s function as its design evolves, realize that the first prototype is never the last.   Professional help with prototyping is available, for example at Realize, Inc . Product development can be expensive.   Before you decide to develop a product, estimat

March 2018

I am strong!   And now, I am smart. — The Hominids (Saturday Night Live, 1979) The ability to adapt nature to our needs is a remarkable and inventive talent.   If you want to use that talent to earn a living, it helps to be able to adapt human nature to your needs. Matt told us about how he and four other engineers founded a company on a shoestring budget in their spare time.   The co-founders got along so well with each other that the attorney preparing the founding legal documents empowered the company instead of the co-founders.   All were equal partners and all had inventive talent but the company had nothing to sell.   Matt soon invented a marketable product that benefitted small businesses and that became the focus of the company.   He applied for a patent and, being the team player that he was, unconditionally assigned the patent rights to the company.   Customers liked the product and prospects looked so good that the company decided to sell stock to ge

February 2018

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Measure twice, cut once. Common sense tells us to test the water before jumping in.   Inventors need to know who their customers are and what their customers want before spending a lot of time and money on inventing things/services and bringing them to market. Helen Colby, PhD , (assistant professor of marketing, Indiana University Kelley School of Business) treated us to her insights on how an individual on a limited budget can conduct high quality customer research.   This brief summary of her presentation doesn’t begin to contain all of her excellent advice.   To learn more, talk with someone who was there. When should you do customer research?   Whenever the benefit is greater than the cost.   Customer research can answer questions about any aspect of marketing that is important to you (eg, what to invent, what to sell, where and when to sell it, how to advertize it, how much to charge for it). How do you conduct research?   First and most important, ask one sp