Expert advice from IP lawyer Shireen Smith A highly recommended free publication is IP mistakes business people make when trying to make money from their big idea, by Shireen Smith of Intellectual Property Lawyers Azrights. Get your copy from http://www.ip-brands.com/. IPMBPMWTTMMFTBI (if asked, we might have argued for a snappier title) is aimed primarily at businesses but inventors can learn much from it too. And it’s an easy, well-written read, which always helps. The [...]
NESTA survives Tory cash grab – but for how long? The good news: the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) has been abolished! Thus spake a government news release of 19 Jan 2012. The bad news: despite that word ‘abolish’, NESTA lives on. It has merely been evicted from its cosy government berth to float off as a private sector charity. And with the interest from its hefty £250m endowment – courtesy [...]
Trouble at t’ US invention millInventors and bar-room brawl aficionados could do worse than look in on this discussion forum – at the time of writing, 258 comments and rising fast – where several members of the United States inventor community are busy smashing furniture and filling the air with oaths, accusations, passion, libel, illiteracy and incoherence. The title of the discussion – reproduced here exactly as written – is: Would You Call DAVIDSON INVENTION [...]
When should inventors use NDAs? Basically, only when they’re absolutely necessary, otherwise they can hinder rather than help the development of invention ideas or projects. We cover NDAs in A Better Mousetrap, but happily draw your attention to this horse’s mouth blog from early-stage investment adviser Aristos Peters. It’s called ‘Why I don’t sign NDAs (usually)’ and we wouldn’t argue with any of it. It isn’t specifically about inventors and inventions but that doesn’t matter [...]
Bruised but not batteredSimon Brown’s emailed cri de coeur yesterday is, one trusts, a merely temporary expression of extreme frustration. For those who don’t know what we’re talking about, Simon is the extraordinarily energetic inventor who earlier this year set up the United Innovators Association UK. Its aim was (still is) to be both a representative body for UK inventors and a self-help platform enabling inventors, service providers (like us), investors and businesses to work [...]
A common problem when you’re trying to market an invention – or rather the product made from an invention idea – is how to publicise it without breaking the bank. All the wisdom now is that you have to use social media to get your message across, and if you don’t make heavy use of Facebook and Twitter, and to some extent LinkedIn, you’re doomed. But how useful are social media for generating business? First [...]
One inventor-entrepreneur’s experience of trying to get his invention made in Britain Inventors need manufacturers, and for the sake of UK invention and the UK economy, it would help if more of those manufacturers were British. The shine is starting to wear off China as the default choice for getting things done cheaply, as costs rise and both performance and business ethics tend to be distinctly patchy. But to put the shine back on UK [...]
Invention help topic 5 This is a touchy subject but it’ll probably be familiar to anyone who deals with inventors. It’s about the difference between real inventors and people who like to think they’re inventors. At abettermousetrap.co.uk that difference is revealed most starkly in the messages we get via our enquiry webform. When we put that form there, we lived in hope of intelligent questions about invention, patenting, marketing or whatever, from intelligent people. And [...]
A few thoughts on improving the patent system. OK, so most of us agree that the patent system is a mess. It’s overloaded with poor quality and questionable patents, it’s too complex and cumbersome, and it doesn’t actually protect anything unless you have extremely deep pockets. That’s the moaning, but what about the mending? Here, for what they’re worth – and as they’re the product of not more than about an hour’s thought, I’ll happy [...]
Invention Help Topic 3. You don’t have to spend much time with inventors before hearing about the ‘not invented here’ syndrome. A company will reject a great invention idea, so the NIH argument runs, simply because it didn’t originate with them. Rather than take on an inventor’s idea and make millions, they go into a jealous sulk and show the inventor the door. But is there any real substance to ‘not invented here’? Leaving aside [...]
