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Patents While You Wait

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Newsletter - January 2014

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What to do while waiting for your patent

Anyone familiar with patents knows that it takes a long time to got one and the process can get quite complex and convoluted. What should and inventor do while they wait for their patent to issue? The answer is a lot. Lets talk about what those things you should be doing while you are waiting for your patent to be published and eventually to issue.

Many of those things are activities that you should be doing anyway to advance your business but some of them have a particular relevance to Intellectual Property concerns. Along with Market Research and Fund Raising you need to take those actions that will keep your patent application going and prevent it from stalling out or forcing you into crises decisions later on.

Part of what you do depends on the kind of patent filing you made. For example, if you filed a provisional patent you have one year to file its non-provisional equivalent. During that time you will need to prepare the materials needed for the non-provisional application and since it takes an attorney several weeks to prepare an application you need to be working with the attorney at least two months from the expiration date of the provisional application. Of course if you don't have an attorney or agent you will need to add in the time to find one.

If you filed a full (non-provisional) application your first possible action will be when you receive your first "Office Action" from the US Patent Office, which usually but not always occurs around the application publishing date or 18 months from filing. When you file either a provisional or non provisional application you can delair your invention to be "patent pending". That means that you have put potential infringers on notice that you will eventually be able to force them to pay royalties if they copy you. It also means that you can now : Publicly disclose it or offer it for sale. If you do either of those things before you file for a patent you loose all rights to patent it later.

Along with your patent application you might be considering building a brand, in which case you may want to use a trademark or register one. You may have written software or some other part of your invention that should be copyrighted.

Things get more complicated if you are filing patents abroad, using for example a World Patent Application or WIPO requires you to file something called a PCT. That allows you to at a later date file an application in any of the countries you selected and gives you 30 months to do it in.

Another thing you might want to give attention to is the eventual ownership of the patent that you will receive. If you are the sole inventor that is no problem, but if you have co-inventors or intend a corporation to own the patent there are many issues to consider. To give you and idea of how complex this can get you might want to view this video

TheSocialNetwork_V1.1

about the IP aspects of the founding of Facebook. The video shows some of the problems you can get into when inventing with others if you don't negotiate an agreement with them as to who will own rights to any eventual patents.

To learn more about this issue and others discussed in this article just contact us. Write to

rblazey@businessmetamorphosis.com or give us a call at (585) 520-3539

The Little Red Hen

Many years ago I wrote a parody of the Nursery story "The Little Red Hen" where the hen was represented by an inventor who wanted to sell their invention "to industry". Like the hen in the story the inventor was dismayed to find that she was constantly turned away by companies who ought to have been delighted to commercialize her idea. And also, like the hen, the inventor persevered and continued to work on the "bread" that she was baking until one day it was almost ready to eat. And, as in the story all those animals who had turned the hen away when the bread (invention) was half baked, were now quite willing to help eat it.

I wrote this story from the point of view of the hen, but now after representing many inventors who also have "half baked" ideas , I better understand the point of view of the potential buyers. In both cases the central issue is risk. Both sides, hen and diner are trying to get the other side to assume the risk.

The additional work that an inventor puts into developing his/her invention reduces the risk to the eventual buyer and thus increases its salablity and value. That is one of the reasons that ITTr created the ROTH scoring matrix.

The ROTH is a great tool for quickly determining how developed your idea is. It also points out what areas might need work. The more "baked" your invention is the easier it will be to sell and the more money you can expect to get from selling or licensing it.

ITTr is working on offering a premium version of the ROTH. The original version will still exist as a free service but the new version will offer help in improving your ROTH score for a nominal price.

To help you decide among your options please contact ITTr. Just send an email to rblazey@ittrifecta.com or phone me at (585) 520-3539

Calling Scripts

Penguin Logo

Penguin's Trade Show Followup and Market Sonar products

both make use of callers to solicit market information from potential prospects and customers. To make these calls consistent and to obtain the maximum amount of useful information from a call we employ call scripts.

The creation of these scripts is an art in itself. They can be simple or complex, tree structured or open ended. The scripts we use in Market Sonar may be more open ended than those used for Trade Show followup, as we are seeking original customer input for the former , more so than the latter.

For Trade Show followup calls we are simply trying to gather information for our clients to determine which of the parties they met at a show are interested in going further with them to understand their products and services and what their particular goals might be.

For Market Sonar we are often trying to access the degree of interest in a new product or services and what features of that item the customer is most interested in and finds most valuable.

Thus the script for TSF is more likely to be of the "Tree Structured" variety which is a series of questions with Yes/No answers with each Yes or No leading to another questions in the Script Tree. But even in such a more structured script we still leave room to capture original comments from the prospect.

If you need help in contacting customers or would like to discuss the issue of scripts and what kind might be best suited to solve your market research problem just contact me at the addresses following.

Please email me at rblazey@businessmetamorphosis.com or call (585) 520-3539.

We appreciate your responses to our newsletters. Please send us your comments. We are always interested in what you want to know.

Sincerely,

Richard Blazey
Business Metamorphosis LLC

Disclaimers

Please realize that this newsletter contains only our opinions on patent matters. We are not authorized to give legal advice. If you are seeking such advice please contact an attorney.

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