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 seven mistakes Shireen Smith identifies are:

1  Revealing your big idea too soon.
2  Not understanding the importance of a strong brand.
3  Not budgeting for intellectual property help and advice.
4  Relying only on creatives for branding and marketing advice.
5  Seeing IP as a cost rather than an investment.
6  DIY legal advice.
7  Assuming a patent is all you need to succeed with your big idea.

Pre-business stage inventors will find plenty of useful tips here, especially if they plan to market their own inventions.

For example, if you have a business website, always register the domain name yourself:

Domains are owned contractually by the person named as the registrant – so, if your web designer registers your website’s domain, they are the owner. The domain renewal notice will go to them. If the renewal notice is overlooked, typically because it is sent to your web designer, or to an employee who has left your company, you won’t know the domain needs to be renewed. To risk the loss of your domain name and website is a costly mistake.

Too right. We know of more than one inventor-led business that hit a rock because it relied on someone else, not always still around or still friendly, to set them up with a website.

And there is a very useful section on managing risk when having products made abroad. Especially in China. Because, as Shireen Smith diplomatically puts it: ‘safeguards abroad are not always in line with what you might expect’.

(And while we’re at it, let’s say it again – there are some great small manufacturers in the UK, increasingly competitive and with the big advantages of language, shared jurisdiction and relative proximity.)

Quibbles? Hardly any. We might mutter that Mistake 5: Seeing IP as a cost rather than an investment is all very well but for inventors and start-ups operating on a shoestring, seeing it as anything other than a cost might take some doing.

And while IP Mistakes… gets a big round of applause from us for Mistake 7, Assuming a patent is all you need to succeed with your big idea, we’d take minor issue with the example of Daisuke Inoue, who invented the karaoke machine but didn’t patent it. Shireen Smith says: ‘Had he done so it could have made him millions’. We say it might equally have cost him millions defending a shaky patent, as in technology terms the karaoke machine didn’t amount to much – a view perhaps shared by Mr Inoue himself, who is reported  as saying: ’I simply put things that already exist together’. (And it seems he did OK from his business anyway.)

But never mind. IP Mistakes… is a highly useful publication from someone who obviously cares. And it’s free. So get your copy now.

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 of the National Lottery – for sustenance, it could survive for some time as perhaps the UK’s most useless yet most lavishly funded organisation.

For those new to invention, some background: NESTA’s founding purpose, under the terms of the National Lottery Act 1998, included:

(a) helping talented individuals (or groups of such individuals) in the fields of science, technology and the arts to achieve their potential

(b) helping persons to turn inventions or ideas in the fields of science, technology and the arts into products or services.

In other words, it was set up by law to help inventors. Yet within a few years NESTA decided that inventors were the scum of the earth, so it wasn’t going to help them any more. And nobody in government or the media appeared to give a damn. But read on…

Where did all the money go?

One big question now is how much NESTA will have to cut its cloth to suit a time of austerity. It will clearly be some time before NESTA volunteers are rattling collecting buckets outside Sainsburys. Maybe NESTA can continue to spend £29m or so annually when its ‘proper’ income rarely exceeds £3m. Maybe it can continue to spend £3m a year on ‘publications, events and communications’, and £6m or so on management pay and perks. We shall have to see.

Another big question is: what happened to over ten years of largely vanished investment? The NESTA website lists some of its beneficiaries but we’re told nothing about how those investments are performing.

For example, what happened to the £3m given in 08/09 to investment company MTI Partners – one of whom was on the NESTA Investment Committee in 2006, stood down briefly owing to ‘a potential conflict of interest’, and was reinstated in 2007? Why were NESTA funds farmed out to a private investment company? What did they invest in? Was there any payback to NESTA? Does anyone know?

Cheques and balances

As a charity, NESTA will now presumably have the Charity Commissioners to satisfy, so some of the old spendthrift habits and opacity may have to go. And despite independence, it will certainly have the Conservative Party breathing hard down its neck. For thanks to political blogger Milo Yiannopoulos, we now know about a past attempt by the Tories to scrap NESTA altogether and grab its money.

In his excellent piece David Cameron’s secret war on NESTA, Yiannopoulos discloses how NESTA’s £250m pot of gold was targeted – unsuccessfully – by the cash-hungry Cameron government.

What makes his account remarkable is not the £75,000 (at least) spent by the Tories on lawyers’ fees, but the damning analysis of NESTA performance that justified the attempted take-down. The Cameroons wanted NESTA’s money not just for its own sake but because they thought NESTA didn’t deserve to keep it.

Choice quotes from Milo Yiannopoulos:

The Tory argument was that NESTA published too many lofty reports and did too little to help enterprise in a practical way. An organisation with such terrific financial resources could not be justified in an era of austerity when its primary output was high-level, self-justifying strategy documents. 

There were too many meetings with public relations companies and management consultants and not enough with entrepreneurs. Too few investments were being made, by inadequately qualified people and for too little money. NESTA had quietly become a ineffectual research body. It had to go.

Perpetual motion machine

We couldn’t put this better ourselves. To us, the cunning in the NESTA game plan always lay in its gradual movement out of projects whose success or failure were measurable – they either made money or they didn’t – and into more smoke-and-mirrors ventures where it was possible to trumpet success no matter what the outcome. NESTA invented its own perpetual motion machine, endlessly generating a form of energy that no one except itself valued or could use.

Now wiser and poorer from failing to get its hands legally on the NESTA millions, the government may have its revenge. They apparently hope that new CEO Geoff Mulgan, past founder of think-tank Demos, will re-engineer NESTA to more closely resemble the organisation it was meant to be – a champion of bread-and-butter innovation and not ‘wow factor’ froth.

Will he succeed? Will NESTA ever win respect from the innovation community? Will it revert to helping inventors?  The odds may be against the lot, but abettermousetrap.co.uk will do its best to press the case for supporting invention.

Milo Yiannopoulos doesn’t seem over-optimistic either. He ends:

Whether entrepreneurs have gained a more helpful, more enterprise-focused and more pragmatic body as a result – even if, strictly speaking, it will shortly be a charity – remains to be seen.

That seems a good enough place for us to sign off too. So all you inventors and entrepreneurs out there – no holding of breath, do you hear?

Inventors 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 SUBMISSION COMPANY..” One Of Your OWN “. And Praise Them For Biulding A Cool Place With Inventor RIP OFF MONEY.

Explanation follows, but the capitals alone give some sense of the pressure about to blow.

The focus of it all is Mark Reyland, CEO of the United Inventors Association of America. He wrote a blog piece praising well-known US inventor services outfit Davison (not Davidson). They, it appears, are not held in high esteem by inventor John Young, who then kicked off the discussion. Hence the title.

But forget Davison. John Young’s main target is Mark Reyland. Why? The precise reason is unclear to say the least, but the direction of travel of John’s loathing is beyond doubt. And it’s evidently shared by other US inventors.

Inventors united against United Inventors

We can’t say we’re too surprised at the strength of feeling. Mark Reyland has recent form in the UK thanks to his worthless and time-wasting (non)sponsorship of Simon Brown’s Inventor Forum (see earlier post).

What seems to be happening now is that several US inventors who also have a bone to pick with Reyland are jointly challenging him to justify his claim to be a big wheel in the US inventor services world, and to respond to a number of allegations of sharp practice.

To give Reyland his due, he’s willing to answer back: but in more than one name, never to the point, and in an irrational and provocatively ad hominem manner that merely adds fuel to the fire.

Unfortunately – or fortunately, if it’s entertainment you’re after – several of his adversaries can easily match his inflammatory ramblings and taunts with their own, which makes the ‘discussion’ somewhat difficult to follow. (An honourable exception is inventor and entrepreneur Nancy Tedeschi, who is doing her patient best to get answers from Mark Reyland by asking nicely. With no success whatsoever.)

Inventor services company in name only? 

Throwing all legal caution to the winds (when in Rome…), our own take on the shenanigans is this:

First, the United Inventors Association of America may be more smoke and mirrors than reality. Despite its ‘board of directors’ we’d bet that for all practical purposes UIA is Mark Reyland and no one else.

Second, Mark Reyland is a paranoid fantasist who mistakenly thinks he’s very clever in his use of multiple personalities and other forms of fakery to keep his plates spinning.

Yes, it’s that bad.

One can speculate on how many screws might be loose, but our guess is that for Mr Reyland the priority is seeking attention, not making money. And boy, is he getting a lot of attention right now. That probably makes him a happy, if disturbed, bunny while leaving his more mercurial adversaries raging and frothing impotently. Thus, stalemate rather than checkmate.

Our own ten pennorth of advice was to have UIA tax returns checked for any irregularities. That’s how they got Al Capone, after all. But Capone had assets. We suspect that any serious investigation of UIA will discover that it has no real substance, which might account for the inability so far for critics to deliver a knockout blow.

Other than that, starving the man of attention will probably have more effect than feeding him yet more of the oxygen of publicity that he craves. But as other posters seem unable to get that message, fat chance of a speedy end to all the increasingly futile exchanges. This show will run and run!

Do we have an equivalent situation in the UK? Not that we know of. But when it comes to unanswered questions there is always Nesta, which will be the subject of our next post…

UPDATE: As of 26 January the LinkedIn discussion thread seems to have vanished, after more than 500 posts. Probably for the best as it was all getting absolutely nowhere, but it still leaves a very large question mark hanging over the integrity of UIA and the people who run it.

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 – the advice applies to anyone wanting someone else’s help with a business idea. And that’s what inventors are, even though they may not appreciate it. A serious invention project is a business opportunity, so business criteria apply to the presentation of information about it.

In a business context, too many inventors overuse NDAs. In A Better Mousetrap we give the example of a major company that won’t sign NDAs at a first meeting. Their argument is that they take NDAs seriously, so don’t want to sign one just to find out 30 seconds later that they have no interest in the invention idea that is then unveiled. If they are interested an NDA may be justified – but at a later stage, when both parties to the developing relationship need protecting.

Aristos Peters expands considerably on this theme. His blog speaks for itself, but a few of his main points are worth summarising:

•  Investors who receive many submissions simply don’t have the time to wade through every clause of every NDA.

•  Don’t NDA someone who is trying to raise money for you and your invention – it can hamper their efforts on your behalf.

•  If your business idea has what Peters calls ‘secret sauce’ – and if it’s an invention project, it will – then avoid the need for an NDA by simply removing from your business plan or presentation all significant detail about that ‘secret sauce’. As long as the recipient understands the investment proposition, sensitive detail can be left out until such time as an NDA is genuinely justified.

•  No self-respecting investor or company will sign an NDA just to read a business plan.

•  Inventors who insist on an NDA to disclose anything at all about their invention project risk looking amateurish or arrogant.

Peters’ sign-off sums it all up for inventors:

‘NDAs do have a use in the investment landscape and I have signed a few in my time, but knowing when and how to submit them is the trick.’

So if you’re an inventor with an investment-ready invention project and are raring to go, let’s sum up the golden rules: first, avoid the need for NDAs by describing your invention idea only in general terms; and second, an NDA is a valuable tool for invention development and intellectual property protection, but use it only when both parties accept that it is necessary.

Simon 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 collaboratively. He did it without a penny of funding from anyone except himself, and he made huge strides in a matter of weeks because everyone in the know recognised that UIAUK filled a yawning gap in the market.

UIAUK is now back to its original name of Inventor Forum – and thereby hangs the start of our tale.

When setting up Inventor Forum Mk1, Simon was contacted by the United Inventors Association of the USA, an outfit started in 1990 and with an apparently good reputation. UIA(US) offered to sponsor Simon’s fledgling organisation to get it off the ground and enable UK inventors to benefit from commercial contacts in the States. A legally binding agreement was signed and as a courtesy, Simon adopted a new name and website design similar to that of UIA(US).

In fairly short order, the sponsorship deal proved worthless and UIA(US) started to implode. It became clear – not least from its CEO’s expletive-laden emails – that all was not well within UIA(US) and perhaps never had been.

Simon moved quickly to distance UIAUK as far as possible from UIA(US). This included dropping the name and completely redesigning the website – a time-consuming distraction that Simon could definitely have done without.

While the UIA(US) ash cloud was still in the air, Simon was approached by another US inventor help organisation. (Named in Simon’s email but we’ll refrain.) Its CEO commiserated, confirmed suspicions about UIA(US) and other US inventor help companies, and offered Simon a ‘clean’ version of basically the same sponsorship deal. Another legal agreement was signed.

It now appears that this deal too was worthless. Thus, Simon has been messed around by two US inventor help organisations in quick succession. Hardly a surprise then that he’s annoyed and upset. He’d need to be a saint not to be.

This whole saga raises a number of issues.

First, are there any US invention services companies at all that can be trusted? Simon’s experience suggests not, and in over 25 years of involvement with invention, we at abettermousetrap.co.uk don’t know of any that we’d feel safe recommending to UK inventors.

Second, there would be far less need to consider US sponsorship deals if there were more public support for UK inventors – a recurring theme of this blog. No one is asking for the moon, but when George Osborne announces that he wants to see more ‘invented in Britain’, it’s not unreasonable to ask for some rearrangement of the enterprise support furniture to make it happen. It seems you can get help for almost anything to do with innovation and enterprise except invention. That’s got to change.

Third – what now for Inventor Forum? Onwards and upwards, basically. The need for a single body to properly represent UK inventors is still there. So too is a need for a social media platform that local groups of inventors and innovators can use, either as an add-on to an existing inventors’ club, or as a wholly online club. The sad fact is that the number of inventors’ clubs that hold regular meetings is dwindling, which means that virtual meeting places such as Inventor Forum will soon be the only practical option for exchanges of local news and information.

Fourth – inventors have to accept that help and advice is never free, even if it isn’t charged for. Inventor Forum has to pay its way if it is to remain an asset for inventors. (As does abettermousetrap.co.uk for that matter.) A lot of people used Inventor Forum to get free advice, and it’s now perfectly understandable that this has to stop. So pay to use its services, partly because they’re a bargain and partly because if they wither and disappear, a lot of experience and expertise goes with them.

But how useful are social media for generating business?

First off, social media accounts are free, so there’s no point in not using them to promote your invention or product. Nor is there any shortage of social media gurus handing out free advice. (Try Renée Quinn. Her blog posts are more informative than most.)

But what matters to businesses is not attention but profit. Does all the effort you put into social media pay off? We talk to lots of mainly small businesses and most are sceptical. The prevailing view of the people who count the pennies in and out is that Facebook and Twitter may help with visibility but don’t produce much actual business. The term ‘emperor’s new clothes’ crops up with some frequency.

(Google Adwords also tends to be sniffed at. Better SEO, rising per-click costs and a browsing public that increasingly skips ‘paid for’ search results are all reducing its importance.)

So what does work for skint inventors with a new product to promote? The answer is: good old news releases and contact with journalists. Nearly every inventor we know who has tried it has been amazed by the results. (The most recent was just a few days ago, which prompted us to write this piece.)

What you don’t do is write a press release and blitz every paper and magazine in the land. Results from that are usually dismal, as you just go on to every journalist’s slush pile.

Instead, start small. What you need is contact with a local or regional business journal, newsletter or supplement – typically, the sort of never-heard-of-it-before publication you find strewn around the reception area of a large company or organisation. Their editors are always on the look-out for relevant stories, and often they don’t carry many of them, so your chances of standing out are high.

At this modest level you may have more going for you than you think. You’re an inventor bravely starting a new business based on your invention – that’s newsworthy. You’ve turned a quirky invention into a great new product – that’s newsworthy, especially if there’s a ‘wow’ or feelgood factor. You’re based locally, using local people and resources – that’s newsworthy. Always acknowledge any help you’ve had from local companies, enterprise agencies, universities etc. If they can use your story to publicise their own activities, you may get several bites at the same cherry.

The readership of that first publication may be small, but no matter. Other journalists will read it. If you’ve got something genuinely interesting to show or say, they will pick up on you. That first mention in Potato Peeler Monthly or Small Business Igniter can generate interest from bigger and better-known titles, even nationals, and often radio and TV too. And it’s those widening ripples that start bringing in the calls from businesses interested in talking to you about selling your product, or investors interested in helping you to grow.

Be aware though that it won’t last. The ‘15 minutes of fame’ dictum applies, so you won’t be newsworthy for long. Maybe ten days and it’ll all be over. But while it lasts, expect to be busy fielding phone calls – so be fully prepared to make the most of it.

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 manufacture, a few things need to change. One of them is the attitude of many UK companies to new business, some of which comes from inventors.

To be clear, we’re not talking here about inventors looking for companies to license their invention ideas. We’re talking about inventor-entrepreneurs looking for companies to manufacture their products in return for payment. In short, purchasers looking for suppliers.

And we’re mainly talking about SMEs, as they’re usually better suited to the relatively small initial volumes needed for a product new to the market.

There’s no doubt that UK manufacturing SMEs have the technical skills, care about quality and customer service, and are increasingly competitive on price. But too often, something equally important is missing. The testimony of UK inventor-entrepreneur Alan King (real words but not his real name, so don’t go Googling) speaks for itself.

Alan needed to find four suppliers for his product, aimed at the outdoor market. He wanted to use UK manufacturers and had £150,000 of his own money to spend.

‘Our greatest disappointment has been British manufacturers. In general, SMEs have reacted to a new business enquiry with a complete lack of enthusiasm and even apathy.

In 2010 we sent out over 200 new business enquiries. The rough breakdown is: 20 companies replied within a day, 20 within 3 days, 20 within a week, 20 within 2 weeks, 20 within a month. The remaining 100 never replied at all.

Of those who came back reasonably promptly, several backed off as soon as they found out we were a start-up – even though we had plenty of finance and knew how to present ourselves professionally. You don’t get this level of suspicion from most non-UK companies. 

In four months we visited over 40 manufacturers and to be fair we found a few who were professional, helpful and positive, but they were few and very far between.

A few examples: 

- One company agreed to see us but within minutes told us we’d have to pay for every single component before manufacture, which would then take at least three months and maybe longer at busy times. We already had a quote from a company in the Far East, who only wanted a small deposit and could deliver to the UK weeks earlier than the UK supplier, even with a month’s shipping.

- The CEO of a £7m turnover company spent nearly all our meeting moaning about his competition and how tough times were, and how his business only survived by making 200% profit from his best customer! We couldn’t get out fast enough.

- On the phone, the boss of a company that was a perfect match for our needs recommended two other companies instead. When we insisted, he said: ‘If you really want to see me, I may be able to meet you in a couple of weeks’. 

- Another company said they might be able to help us in their slow season, but couldn’t make any promises!

We eventually found three fab UK suppliers but still need one more to make our business work. We’d also prefer to have some back-up suppliers but that seems a forlorn hope.

So what’s wrong with UK SMEs?

I think most are too busy trying to deal with today’s clients to have time to look at new business, even if it knocks on their door. Most are dreadfully inefficient. Very few have dedicated new business staff, so new enquiries are dealt with by people who are too busy with other things to give you much attention.

You often have to deal with reps who appear to spend all day driving and don’t return calls or emails. Or if they do, you find they have little product or company knowledge. Busy fools comes to mind.

After months of trying to give UK manufacturers my business, I’m disappointed or disgusted with the majority of them and now fully understand why so many customers go overseas. The minute you do go overseas – even across the Channel – attitudes are very different. I just don’t understand why it should be so dreadfully difficult to get anything done in UK Plc.’

Unfortunately, Alan’s experience is not unusual. Nor are his complaints, or his analysis of the problem.  What makes him different is the scale of his search – 200 companies approached! Forty visited! Most inventor-entrepreneurs of our acquaintance would give up and source overseas much sooner.

So if UK manufacturers want to improve their prospects, they’ve got to improve their act when it comes to seeking and welcoming new business. The brick walls that Alan encountered don’t just affect inventor-entrepreneurs, but it’s probably at the interface between innovation and manufacture that SME failings are most exposed.

For what our opinion is worth, we think that one root cause of the problem is an inability of UK SMEs to think in terms of partnership. Elsewhere it’s taken for granted that a supply chain isn’t just a collection of disparate companies operating on ‘every man for himself’ lines. Elsewhere it’s also taken for granted that supply chains are international – something an insular culture like ours may still struggle with. It’s nothing to do with language – it’s a state of mind.

The fact remains though that new business is tomorrow’s business, whether it stems from invention or not. Whatever inventor-entrepreneurs like Alan can’t get in the UK, they can very quickly get elsewhere. A more positive attitude toward new customers should cost nothing. But if it isn’t there, it could end up costing UK manufacturers everything.

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 indeed we do get intelligent questions from intelligent people. But we also get lots of time-wasting drivel, from ‘inventors’ who seem to have no idea how to communicate.

So curt and poorly written are their messages – they clearly get exhausted after about four lines – that it seems they want us not only to supply an answer, but the question too. And it’s nearly always a variant of: ‘I’ve got this invention. I’m poor and helpless. What can you do for me?’

The only sensible answer is: ‘Read the website you’ve just sent your message from. It’s all there. If you want us to help with your invention, you need to become a client. And that means spending a bit of money.’

Sometimes we reply with a longer and more tactful version of that message. But our reservoir of sweetness and light is running dry and we now increasingly ignore them. Because, to reverse the L’Oréal advertising slogan, they’re not worth it. Experience teaches that at the first suggestion of paying for a professional invention service they vanish, presumably to move on and pester someone else.

Why are they so annoying? Because they poison the pool. They make it less easy for real inventors to be welcomed and taken seriously by businesses and organisations not used to dealing with inventors.

And they get up the nose of people and organisations like us, who do understand invention and really can help, but can’t do it for nothing or they’d starve. They don’t comprehend that calling yourself an inventor does not impose a moral obligation on others to help.

They’re what we at abettermousetrap.co.uk call ‘magic wand inventors’. Because what they really want is a magician – and a free magician at that – to transform their fortunes without it costing them any effort.

So what’s all our frothing at the mouth leading up to?

Only this. That the first big self-examination question for any inventor should be: are you serious about inventing, or are you just out to waste other people’s time?

It’s a harsh question but a valid one. As we try to explain in A Better Mousetrap, invention is primarily about creating a new business opportunity, not a new product. Like it or not, the market is always going to be the judge of what is or is not a great invention. And the market isn’t a holiday camp.

So if you want to be serious about your invention idea, you have to be serious in two stages.

First: serious about researching its prospects. No matter if it turns out that it’s unlikely to fly. You’ve handled the exercise with diligence and responsibility, and that earns you respect.

Second: if your invention idea passes the fundamental test of originality and market potential, you have to be serious about turning it into commercial reality. Other people will help, but only if you can prove your own commitment to your own invention project.

Invention can be rewarding, challenging, absorbing, frustrating, exciting. And that makes it emphatically not a game for internet slackers and dreamers.

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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 negotiate on their value – are my thoughts on what can be done to change the patent system.

What it needs is revolutionising, not tinkering with à la Hargreaves and others. So:

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The bones of it

Original ideas are ten a penny. Anyone can sit down for a couple of hours and come up with several. Having an idea isn’t the hard part. So my new patent system will not protect ideas at all. Shock horror.

An immediate benefit will be a drastically reduced number of patent applications. There will be far less dead wood in the patent system because a lot of it won’t get there in the first place.

Instead of protecting the idea, my new patent system will protect only the work done on the idea. This could be done at two levels:

1   A completed work patent. (Not a great name but descriptive.) Valid for 10 years. No renewal fees. ‘Completed work’ could be either a market-ready product or a prototype ready for licensing – the applicant would choose which to go for. The application would include evidence of dates of origin and evidence of development. It would also include claims for novelty – but with the benefit that they can be final, accurate and demonstrable.

2   An incomplete work patent. A sort of consolation patent for ideas substantially developed, but abandoned or set aside for some reason. (Inventor running out of money isn’t too far fetched.) Valid for perhaps five years. Patent protection would allow it to be resurrected during that five-year period, giving it a chance to progress and upgrade to ‘completed work’ status.

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Benefits

The result should be a slimmed down patent system containing patents of higher quality because the idea has already been ‘worked’ to a significant degree. The emphasis will have shifted from invention to innovation. From giving birth to upbringing.

•…Patents would be more in line with copyright, which primarily protects completed work.

•…Workloads on patent offices should reduce, so application-to-grant periods should be shorter.

•…Litigation costs ought to be a lot lower. Settlement should be easier as courts will look at solid evidence of work done and when done, and not have to argue excruciatingly fine points of claims.

•…Infringement ought to be much more clear cut. For example, it might be difficult for a reverse engineer to produce evidence of prior development work.

•…It ought to be easier for a small business with a prototype or product to defend itself against a bigger company, because the evidence requirement would be much simpler. Evidence would either be plainly there or plainly not there – a much more transparent and rational state of affairs than we seem to have at present.

It could be argued that inventors less able to develop ideas quickly might be at a disadvantage. But if they’re able to develop them at all, the evidence will be there, which in many cases will be to their advantage. And let’s face it, private inventors are at several pretty hefty disadvantages under the present system, so the philosophical position ought to be that fewer rather than no disadvantages is still a win for them.

And that’s it so far. It may need a few more coats of paint on it, but it’s workable.

Any comments?

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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 a tiny minority of firms run by genuinely stupid people, is this how grown-up organisations really behave?

It doesn’t make any sense that a company would look at a great idea, recognise its profit potential, then reject it just because it came from outside the company. And by rejecting it open up the possibility that a rival snaps it up.

It’s not impossible but it has to be highly unlikely. A weak manager might do it out of fear for his or her career prospects, but that would be the individual’s doing, not the company’s.

In our experience, there’s usually a rational and often positive explanation for what looks like NIH.

Companies with in-house R&D resources may shun external ideas out of loyalty to their R&D people. As the IP manager of one well-known company put it to us: ‘We employ many designers and engineers whose job is to keep us ahead of the field, and they’ve never let us down. If we started taking in ideas from outside, it would look as though we’d lost faith in them.’

Another company offered broadly the same explanation, but with a different slant: ‘The specialised R&D people we need are in short supply, so it’s important to retain them once we’ve got them. To do that we’ll sometimes help them develop their own ideas even if they’re not part of our core business. Given all that, the chances of us giving priority to an idea from a total outsider are just about zero. We’ll give advice if we can, but we’ve got no resources left over for them.’

Companies that do a lot of R&D may have a further concern. It applies mainly to inventors who (logically enough) take their invention ideas to companies who already sell similar products. But precisely because of that ‘fit’, the company may already be working on a similar idea, and justifiably fears future litigation if it isn’t crystal clear who invented what first.

Some companies tackle this problem by looking only at ideas protected by a patent application, which is one way of legally establishing a date of origin. Others play safer still and refuse to look at any external ideas. Either way, there’s an understandable reluctance to let inventors put them in legal jeopardy.

What the grumblings about NIH do perhaps expose is an uneasy relationship between businesses and inventors. Many companies feel they’re caught between the devil and the deep blue sea when they try to help inventors. They don’t want to discourage them and will often be generous with invention advice. But they just haven’t the time or resources to help the inventor who needs a lot of support to develop his or her invention idea to a point where the company could take it on. Some inventors grasp this, some don’t. And those who don’t are, we suggest, the source of most of the NIH complaints.

So what can inventors do to improve their relationship with companies? Plenty, but these strategies are close to the top of the list:

•…Find out if the company is likely to be interested at all in your invention idea. Send a very brief letter or email – a couple of well-crafted paragraphs – stating what your idea does and its potential benefits. (If you’re not confident of your ability to do this, get our help.) Ask if they’re interested in knowing more. If they say no, that’s the end of it. Don’t waste any more of their time or yours.

•…Don’t look just at market-leading companies in your field of invention. This applies particularly if you offer a company an improvement to one of its own products. That’s often a hiding to nothing. Unless they’re deeply complacent, they’ll be working on their own improvements and probably won’t need what you’ve got. Focus instead on smaller or less successful companies who might see your idea as a way of competing with the market leaders.

•…Always act in a businesslike, professional way. In person, in documentation, the lot. Prove that you can be useful to a company and not a disruptive or distracting element. In short, act as little like an inventor as possible!