Getting an Invention Off the Ground

Factual Questions
1

I have invented a great theoretical invention but don’t know the specifics of how to design it, engineer it, etc. Does anyone here know the procedure for getting an invention off the ground? Who should I contact, what grants are available from the government and how do I find them? Are there any groups of scientists and/or engineers who are willing to accept new ideas? How do I retain the rights and patents to this invention without it actually being designed and fleshed out?

Any remarks would be helpful.

2

You cannot obtain a patent for an “idea” unless you have “reduced it to practice” (this can be done “constructively” which is to say mentally) and provided (1) a written description of the invention; (2) sufficient detail to allow one of ordinary skill in the art to practice it without undue experimentation; and (3) information regarding the “best mode” known to your for practicing the invention.

Without being unduly discouraging, there are comparatively few readily-accessible sources of funding for individual inventors who have neither reduced to practice nor given an enabling description. There are however some charlatans out there who will charge you for information about how to get such funding.

The more detailed your description is, the more likely you are to get serious consideration for venture capital, etc. This will always come at a price, though.

Finally, big companies may not even be willing to listen to your proposal, as many have a formal policy of refusing even to look at unsolicited invention proposals (to avert later disputes in which it is claimed they stole your idea).

Government grant writing is a specialized skill. And the government has limited interest in funding research for an invention in which you intend to retain all proprietary rights.

This isn’t an easy row to hoe.

3

Okay, what if I went all noble and offered the government the idea with only limited benefits to myself? Is there someone I can contact who will consider the idea seriously if they will reap most of the rewards?

4

It sounds like you need someone with “the knack”.

On a more serious note, it is very important that you read and believe every word of this warning before you proceed.

Essentially, anybody that claims to be in the buisness of assisting people like you is out to scam you.

Is this something that a professor or grad student (in engineering perhaps) could work on as a research project? If so, then approaching the appropriate department at a nearby university might be a way to get something to happen with your idea without spending any money.

5

I want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Helium.

6

Wow. That article was like someone throwing a glass of ice-cold water in my face. Thank you for the warnings!

Good idea. I may try it after investigating further. :slight_smile:

7

LOL, how amusing! All the Google ads below this thread are advertising for new inventors with new idea submissions! Talk about vultures hovering over you.

8

I opened this thread to mention Don Lancaster’s “Case Against Patents” (PDF), but Kevbo beat me to it. I keep a few printed copies of it handy, and send it as a URL whenever I find myself being asked why I don’t patent the electronic devices that are my bread-and-butter output. “Everyone knows” that if you have an idea you should patent it!

[I design and build scientific instruments for a very small “niche” market, in a field in which I was once active as a researcher. When I meet someone socially and they say *“Oh, you’re an inventor!”* I usually find myself wincing slightly before politely letting them know that isn’t a term I use for self-description.]

Don Lancaster has a few other articles on the Web at his “Patent Avoidance Library”, and has put them together as a single PDF eBook, but the one at Kevbo’s link gives the gist of his arguments. Lancaster is sometimes given to hyperbole, as in his claim that “Nobody has ever ‘won’ any patent litigation” (I’d say that Gordon Gould did eventually “win” the most important of his Laser patent cases, although it took thirty years and he may have wished he had never come up with the idea!). However, I agree with most of what he writes, and the “glass of ice-cold water in the face” is the first thing that a would-be inventor really needs.

Magmachill, is there any way that you could give us an idea of the nature of your idea without going into details? Is it electronic, mechanical, chemical, or a process? Would it have “earth-shattering consequences” or is it a niche-market item (the latter has some benefits because you may end up with a market that is profitable enough to support you, but without sufficient revenue for a larger company to even consider competing with you).

The main advice that I would give is to try to become as knowledgeable as possible about what other work has been done on similar items to the one that you’ve thought of. Try to understand as much as possible of the underlying science and technology that would be required to make your idea realizable. This would get you on the road to becoming something of an expert, and as Lancaster repeatedly points out, most “inventions” are made by people who are experts in a relevant field.

Good luck!

9

Although this has a higher chance of working than approaching a for-profit company with just a bare idea, it should be noted that greed and idea-theft are not unheard of in academic environments.

I once found myself in a situation where one of my customers wanted me to co-patent (with his University) a new idea that I was working on. His claim was that an informal conversation between us had been the spark that led to the idea. From the initial meeting to look into this, it was clear that it wasn’t going to work out for me. The customer – a tenured Professor – and the University lawyers were all on salary regardless of the progress of any patent; I would clearly need to hire a lawyer to represent my own interests; and that particular University was over 800 miles from my home base. The vibe just felt bad, the professor was clearly overplaying his contribution, and I’d have been many thousands of dollars out of pocket by the time any financial benefit came through. I can see why they wanted to do it: large institutions love to collect patents, even if they provide no real-world reward. They look so good on grant proposals and annual reports!

I’m not saying that this happens with all collaborations, but be careful out there, Magmachill! There’ll be a fine line between telling them just enough about your idea to get them interested, and telling them so much that they can just steal it.

10

One further suggestion.
If you don’t know what your are doing, don’t do it.

11

I’d better not say anything about it at this time. Since I haven’t looked into the viability of the engineering issues yet, it’s possible that I would be laughed off of the message board.

Thanks! Great advice all around. :slight_smile:

12

I wouldn’t worry too much about that, unless it’s a Perpetual Motion Machine.

*Go on, tell us what it is! :wink: Your secret will be safe with us!

Okay, be like that.* :dubious:

Joking aside, there’s a little-known David Mamet play called The Water Engine. It was turned into a 1992 made-for-cable movie with William H. Macy in a rare pre-fame starring role as a man who invents – and decides to patent – an engine that uses water for fuel. Watching it pretty much destroyed any youthful ideals I may have had of inventing and patenting a “world-changing” invention:

It turns out that lots of powerful people don’t want their worlds changed.

It doesn’t appear to be available on DVD, but here is Amazon’s page for the VHS tape. One of my local libraries has the play in dead-tree format, so I guess it hasn’t completely disappeared.

13

LOL, I invented the Perpetual Motion Machine a couple years ago. That is so 2003.

14

Granted. The OP suggested that he would be willing to give away his idea to a government agency, just to see it do some good. My feeling is that government agencies are at best useless, and nominally harmful to progress, and while it is a good place to have your idea “stolen” a fair amount of progress is fostered via academia. Additionally, while the risk of loss of IP is high, the risks of losing actual capiital via acidemic channels is minimal. This is not the case with so called “inventor service agencies”.

If an “inventor” hoped to reap a profit, much less a fortune, from his idea, I agree that academia could well prove to be treacheous water. The fact of the matter is that only a small percentage of “good ideas” pan out, so the acidemia is financially lucrative in that the average inventor stands to lose the least. And , yes, the exceptional enventor stands to get shafted.
OTOH, I have observed (as an Engineer/inventor, not a patent lawer) IP dealings with Univerities (U of MI, U of AZ, U of NM) and with private companies (Honeywell, AlliedSignal (now honeywell)Sperry(now honeywell, I’ve quit four times and can’t escape the fuckers!)) And I have to say that in every case these univerisity lawyers acted with impecable integrity. In every case the the corporate lawyers acted on the principle of “how can we most effectivly fuck these guys?” AND let it be noted that the Univerities were in each case the “adversary”, and in every case the corporate folks my employer. In about half the cases I thought my employer was basically honerable, and in the other half knew in my heart they were unsalvageaable bastards. My take was that there are good companies, and there ate bad companies, but on the whole acidemia is out to promote the public good.

I get that the above paragraph should really have come cites. Sorry. My basic feeling is that the University IP lawyers operated from a positionn of “If this idea takes off, how can everybody make money?” While the corporate folks operated from the point of “Regardless, this idea takes off, how can we be sure nobody else makes any money from it?”

15

To edit that, and be fair, academic authors are out to futher thier own reputations, by advancing the state of thier disipline(s), which I feel promotes the public good. My orgional statment painted their intentions in a more honorable light than my experience supports.

16

Kevbo, I don’t see our posts as being contradictory in any way. My post #9 (“Don’t trust blindly in academics, either!”) was in response to your post #4, sure, but it was only to warn Magmachill not to lower his guard totally when dealing with academics on the grounds that they’re somehow inevitably purer than businessmen.

I suspect that you and I have a large amount of shared experience in this, although I’ve always been on the academic side or as a sole proprietor, rather than part of a larger business. In my post #9 above, the University lawyers weren’t in any way villainous: it’s just that they would have been “on the clock” at every meeting, whereas I’m self-employed and only get to pay rent when I sell stuff and get paid [and man, I wish those two were linked more deterministically than they often are in the world of the small business!]. I believe that my customer / professor overstated his claim to any part of the new idea, but I don’t even think that was malicious on his part. He did say “I guess you could use the _ _ of the Helium-Neon laser to _ _”, and when I showed up the next day with a design schematic, latched onto that one sentence of his as being proof of a co-invention, even though I eventually re-designed it while completely bypassing the concept of his quoted sentence, thus proving his contribution to be irrelevant. It’s a shame in a way: it probably ended what might have been a fruitful collaboration. In retrospect, I think of his input as being the equivalent of me sending a notarized letter to Tektronix suggesting that they should build digital oscilloscopes that have sampling rates of hundreds of Gigasamples/second rather than just the tens of Gigasamples/second that they offer now. Hey, I even included my PayPal account name so they can send me royalties when my advice pays off! :stuck_out_tongue: [History will prove me right! You’ll see!]

Back on topic: there’s one case in which an “inventor” should always approach an academic rather than a businessperson, and that’s if the “invention” is something that would be worth it for a business to suppress. In general, the “Professor of Mousetrapology” will always bite on the idea of a “Better Mousetrap”, even if it goes against all current mouse-trapping theories, because the advance in knowledge makes him the academic “Big Cheese”. On the other hand, “Consolidated Mousetraps” might well suppress the idea if it clamps down negatively on their current business model and staunches the flow of their revenue lifeblood.

On occasion, I’ve wondered what the best course of action would be for someone who stumbled on the secret of Cold Fusion, or what The Water Engine’s Charles Lang (who had a working prototype in hand!) should have done. I think I’d mail full details to a trusted academician who has nothing left to prove (preferably a Nobel Laureate) on the day preceding a major Energy Conference, then make the announcement with a demonstration (if possible) in the presence of as many government scientists as are available (although I understand your distrust of government agencies, Kevbo, I’ve worked with people from LANL, LLNL, LBL, BNL, Argonne, and the government-in-all-but-name Sandia Labs, and I would trust them at least as much as any University academic in terms of making sure that a ground-breaking idea saw the light of day).

Finally, Magmachill, you might want to look into the Gordon Gould biography Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War (2000) by Nick Taylor. It’s a grueling account of one of the most prolonged patent fights ever, and a good read even though it shows its bias (the auther clearly takes Gould’s side in the battle). Your local library may carry it. I was exhausted at the end of it, just because of the sheer number of claims and counter-claims. If Don Lancaster’s “Case Against Patents” is the two-page tract of ice-water in the face, this book is the freezing ocean. Of course, in Gould’s case, his patents paid off in the end, all thanks to a scribbled graduate-student notebook authenticated by a corner-store notary. I’ve wondered what he might have done with his life if he hadn’t had that book notebook notarized. The Laser would still have been developed along pretty much the same timeline, and Gould’s mind would have been freed up to explore other ideas.

Magmachill, come on back down if you still think it’s worth the stress! :stuck_out_tongue: