About Us

We have a number of ongoing customers that we have helped over the years. These folks have a lot of experience on what it takes for a small business to successfully perform new product development. One of them was gracious enough to provide us with a guide for product development for small business. We highly recommend that you read this and take the message to heart before proceeding. If you like this brief guide, you will enjoy a longer guide from inventor Chris Hawker. If you liked these two guides, you will love the book "Will It Sell? How To Determine If Your Invention Is Profitably Marketable (Before Wasting Money On A Patent)" by James E. White which is available on Amazon.com among other places. Another excellent book to read before spending serious time or money on new product development is "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton M. Christensen, also available from Amazon.com. This book expands on the product development notions briefly touched on in the guide. If you read the guide and get a copy of the books to read, you can avoid wasting time and money on products which will not pan out for you. The books also will give you some good leads on how to improve your odds of succeeding.

To Patent or Not To Patent

Another very important point to consider is whether you should patent your product idea, when you should do it and how. The large majority of utility patents filed by individuals NEVER produce any return on the rather large investment required to obtain them. This is no small point because it may cost more than $20,000 to obtain a US patent. Make sure that you have a reasonable expectation of making money from the patent before you invest in it, unless you don't mind wasting money. Read the guide for product development and do not patent until you are well on the way to demonstrating that your product idea will be able to be successfully marketed. For a good discussion about whether to patent or not, go to this website. For further information, you might want to consider networking with other inventors by going here.

In-Depth IP Protection

Assuming that you have determined that your new product idea will have a profitable market and you will proceed to either make and sell or license the product, then you will need intellectual property protection for your new product. This is a bit of a problem for the small business person because it costs money to defend your IP, and a larger competitor can most likely outspend you. An approach used by more than one accomplished inventor is a defense in depth; put as many IP fences in front of your competitors as possible. The angry bull of a competitor may be able to rip through one or two such fences, but there is a fair chance that he won't continue to rip through all of the stops you put in his path. Even the angriest of bulls gets tired.

So, what are the barricades you can use? Here they are:

Trade Secrets

This is normally used as an integral part of manufacturing and is a secret formula or process. It gives you an economic advantage over your competition and should not be easy to reverse engineer from the product itself. An example is the formula for Coke®. These cost nothing to enforce except for measures to keep the secret secret such as contracts with employees that have knowledge of the secret as well as using locks to protect the paperwork or hardware associated with the secret.

Copyrights

Written and graphical information (and songs) can be copyrighted. This can be done by the inventor for a nominal fee with the Copyright Office. It can be well worth the minimal fee to keep a competitor from duplicating the look of your product or copying any of the written information for your product. Awards for copyright infringement can be substantial.

Trademarks

Trademarks are unique names or graphical information which identifies your product as unique. For example, the look of a Coke® bottle is unique to Coke®. Of course, so is the name which is a registered trademark. This would normally be used if you were manufacturing or marketing the new product rather than licensing it to a second party. You may trademark a product by simply designating it as a trademark, but for the most protection you will need to register that trademark with the Trademark Office of the federal government.

Design Patents

This is another type of patent. It covers the external look of the product and prevents a competitor from using that same look. This is somewhat restricted, but it can be very powerful if the external look of the product is important for aesthetics or functionality. These are often used for automotive designs as well as consumer product designs. These are obtained through the US Patent Office for a fee in the neighborhood of $2000. Awards for violating this type of patent can also be very substantial.

Utility Patents

This is what is normally thought of as a patent. This is a detailed description of how a product works along with a complete listing of claims for the product as compared and contrasted with other similar products. You must be able to convince the patent examiner that your product is enough different from other similar products to be worthy of getting patent protection. If you are willing to write, you can do much of the boilerplate writing of your patent, but this should be considered to be a rough draft which needs to be reviewed by your patent attorney, perhaps several times. Patent figures can also be expensive to farm out to others, so you may want to do them as well. Much of the work in obtaining a patent can be done by the inventor and that will help to minimize the cost, but a patent attorney must be used to make sure that the patent is as complete and as powerful as you can make it. You eventually must work with the US Patent Office to get a patent and it will be expensive--more than $20,000 by the time you are done with all of the lawyer and Patent Office fees and if you do little of the patent writing work yourself.

If you plan on selling or licensing overseas you may want to patent your product there as well. Discuss this with a good patent attorney before opening your checkbook.

For more complete descriptions as well as when to apply these, contact a good patent attorney such as any of the attorneys at this office. You can view a primer on all types of IP from them in the attached presentation.

Emulate Bill Gates

An important point for new potential entrepreneurs is that in order for you to make progress toward making money from your new product ideas, you will need to share your ideas with others. A lot of potential entrepreneurs have good ideas but when they get to this point they decide to keep them secret, with the result that they never get to the marketplace and never make themselves any money. DO share your ideas with others but only after putting a confidential disclosure agreement (CDA) in place, and then you will emulate Bill Gates (but not necessarily get wealthy like him!). Having a CDA makes it clear to the person you talk with that you are very serious about protecting your ideas, and it protects your ability to patent your ideas, should you eventually decide to do that. Having a CDA in place also provides grist for your lawyer in case the person you disclosed to chooses to try to steal your idea. Make sure that you only divulge your patentable ideas to someone else under a signed confidential disclosure agreement with them such as this one. And make sure that you have something to gain by this disclosure--don't disclose your ideas if there isn't something potentially good for you to come from doing this.

If and when you are ready to file for a patent, if you want to save money, use LegalZoom (or your own boilerplate) to create the rough draft of your patent. Then hire a patent lawyer that you know, and trust, to review your patent rough draft to suggest ways to improve coverage and other aspects that actually make use of the lawyer's critical knowledge. You can edit that document a lot cheaper than a lawyer will. Good patent lawyers will be happy to work with you in this, and here is an excellent patent lawyer company's website. I've worked with this lawyer from that company and I highly recommend him and his fellow lawyers. They are in business to help you make money, so listen to their counsel.

Use Project Management

Over the years I have found that project management is a necessary tool for all projects which aren't very short duration jobs. Certainly, if a project will take at least a month to complete, there should be a detailed project plan to start with listing all major activities, costs and durations. This makes it clear to both the customer and to the work provider exactly what will be done. If either party refuses to provide/pay for project management, then you would be well advised to walk away from the project. Twice I have done projects for customers who refused to pay for project management as part of the contract, and in both cases there was ill will by the end of the project. So you should want to use project management if you are the work provider. If you are the customer, having good project management means that you will always know where the project is in time, expenses and task completions, and that will let you sleep at night as well as get to market in a timely fashion. A complete project plan will highlight costs and timeline and all of the potential obstacles so that everyone involved has a clear idea what the project entails. Always insist on project management unless you are dealing with a very short project such as something that can be finished in a week or less.

When In Doubt, Use A Performance Contract

If you have ANY doubts about the capability of a supplier to deliver what they say they can (for example, anything having to do with sales), always have a performance contract with them so that you can quickly end an engagement which turns out badly. (This can happen even with the best of friends). A performance contract can be quite simple, specifying how long the supplier has to accomplish a given amount of work. For example, identifying a capable marketing partner and getting them to sign a contract could be the first key performance objective to be accomplished within a reasonable time period to be specified in the contract. Failure in that would result in termination of the work contract so that a better provider may be sought. This is especially important if several partners are involved in overseeing the overall project.

Avoid Legal Liability With Patents

One further idea concerning patents is to have a correct list of inventors on the patent. Make sure that your patent has all of the inventors listed on the patent and make sure that no one else is listed there. This is not the place to reward your ego or to reward your friends; it is a legal document and it must be accurate. A patent with the wrong list of inventors may be challenged and overturned in court, so this is a very important consideration. If your patent is very valuable, as it should be before you do it, then this is an exposure that you don't want to have.

Entrepreneurs who hire a contract product development team to create a new product from a basic idea of theirs, or more often from an observation that a new product is needed to solve a particular problem, should make sure to have the team members listed who contributed to the invention--who created the means of making your new product concept work as a product. You should be able to get this information from the team leader quite easily when you are preparing the patent disclosure. If you wanted something done, but didn't participate in the development process in a direct way, you likely are not an inventor and should not be listed on the patent.

In any case, a simple contract (such as this) is sufficient to have the inventors turn the rights to the invention over to you if you paid for the development and there was an agreement that you would get the rights to the invention after payment for the work. A sample contractor agreement that covers this is shown here.

Do not let pride, or the fact that you paid for the patent legal work, delude you into claiming that you were the sole inventor if you were not. Remember that product development teams develop their reputation by how many valuable patents they have contributed to, so it is very valuable to them to be listed on a patent. Don't alienate them by wrongly claiming sole inventorship, because you need to protect your reputation and you might want to use such a good development team on future products. That isn't very likely to happen if you steal their IP authorship.

General Business Guidance

Here is another very useful article for all entrepreneurs to read to avoid trouble.

Helpful Presentations

Here is a presentation given to the local IEEE Consultants Network meeting on June 6, 2011. This may be of some help if you are thinking of becoming a consulting engineer.