This topic is for all of those out there (both those whom I have met in my travels personally, and those whom I have never met in the field, but are certain to have innovative ideas due to the nature of the work we all do and how it so often demands the "modify" or "design" portion of the skill set).
WARNING: Before I solicit your brain, I must state that I know certain of you out there have signed intellectual property releases and could be held legally accountable/liable for any specifics you mention here about specific ideas. Please be EXTREMELY careful about what you say in relation to who you may be working for presently and how it could affect your bottom line.
The goal here is not to solicit your ideas (there are already at least two fly-by-night companies out there who solicit specific ideas, promise to help you market them for a small unrealistic fee, and then you never see your idea again). The goal of the topic is to find out if any of you, while not otherwise obligated to keep your ideas to yourself, have become familiar with the U. S. /International patent process. If so, any and all credible testimony about the process itself would be good to add here.
The US patent office website has lots of information, and so does the Small Business Administration. But information does not help the thousands of us out there who know that the quickest way to find out the reality about a particular problem is to avoid reinventing the wheel and ask the expert. Sure you could wade through the information and even pay the examination fees and other miscellaneous fees associated with your idea, only to find out that patent number (xx-xxxxxxxx-xxx) already supercedes your idea, or something of the like.
So how about it? We don't steal anyone's ideas, we just empower one another here to take the ideas and develop them in the name of innovation (and yes let's be honest. . . legacy, nationalistic pride, increasing PMEL on the map as a group of intellectual assassins spanning many countries, and elevating the glory of our professional culture to something that can't be bought or trivialized with peanuts and a 27" television in the breakroom).
Certainly there are those who come here who manage labs, run companies, fulfill military missions, etc. , who may be offended by the idea that someone would want to sow the seeds of "divide and conquer" among their technicians. THAT IS NOT WHAT I AM DOING by posting this here. Heck, if you are a manager and your techs are bound and gagged by IP clauses, then they are probably also bound by the beating drum of the production wolves, and cannot walk away from their permanent posting at the MMS long enough to think about anything but stick attenuators anyway, so you have nothing to worry about. This is for the people who have fantastic ideas, lots of experience and insight, are not bound by IP clauses. It is for those who are ready to take their game to the next level by making a truly innovative idea the property of the many. Remember, don't leak your idea. If you have knowledge of the process, then your idea will always be yours. Let's solve this problem and get those ideas in play quickly.
Remember. . . no specific ideas. You have your idea, and it should be coveted and kept secret unless you choose your own partner/team and develop the idea in the basement. We just need to master the process itself here.
Just a bit of updated reporting here about what has been discovered in the absence of any input from the masses. Once you are free of your IP clause with your current employer, one thing you can do is prepare a "confidentiality agreement". This can be one you draft yourself with the help of a semi-knowledgible legal type, or you can simply select one from one of several different ".org" inventors' sites. The important thing to remember it seems, is that the "confidentiality agreement" be tailored to the company you most believe will be interested in your idea.
This is all experimental, and if this advice or report of findings was worth anything near what one would hope it would be, then eventually it will pan out and result in a very rewarding result for me (the gopher digging it up), and for you (the one skeptically dismissing the value of this thread, as any sane person should do until something tangible appears to come from it).
Now, the idea behind the "confidentiality agreement" is that you are afforded the opportunity to market or "sell" your idea to a company with the investment capital to produce it, without paying the roughly $575 minimum to the U.S. patent office only to find out that it either wasn't approved, or that you fall into the category of the 97% of all inventors who received a patent but never made any money for yourself. With the confidentiality agreement, you have obtained a signed legal instrument that gives you limited protection from some corporate thief who wanted to hear you out, refuse your idea, then develop it anyway (cutting you, the "ignorant statistic" out of the profits). It is my understanding that one can also file for a provisional utility patent for about $75 and obtain a year of protection from the feds, without the need for an individual confidentiality agreement (which many companies don't necessarily want to sign according to the several reports I have read thus far).
I'm not pretending to know what I'm doing here. If I were that much of an expert, I would have met with success already, and been sitting pretty on the royalties of all that success. However, I am highly knowledgible, highly dedicated and persistent, not presently bound by corporate gag orders, and most importantly...I have something to prove to myself and to my peers. Take it to the bank.
So here goes...I have a prototype, I have selected my confidentiality agreement, and I have selected my first target company (all without spending one cent, save the ink I used to print out the confidentialty agreement and the cost savings data to the consumer for my prototype). In my next post, what you'll most likely read, is that I made my proposition to the company, and they thought I was an escapee from the institution. We'll see.
Any updates?
Alright, I'm a little bit stuck right now. I actually had two companies picked out who I thought would have at least raised their eyebrows a little about my idea, but it turns out that they not only won't sign my confidentiality agreement, but they have lengthy disclaimers they wanted me to read about what exonerates them from litigation. To understand the implications of that, you have to know a little bit about what they put in their disclaimers/liability releases. In summary, the one company's disclaimer was three full pages long, and the other company's disclaimer was only slightly shorter at 2.5 pages. Both disclaimers were generally the same. In summary, they went into all kinds of detail about how "...[most people think their idea is novel, non-obvious, and useful to socirty when in fact, in the majority of cases our genius-level engineers have already thought of this idea, patented it, and locked it away in the corporate vault a long time ago]..." I used the brackets, because when you cut through all the legal CRAPPOLA they put in there, what their rying to get [me] to believe, is that, whatever idea I give them, they are going to try and make the case that they had that idea in their corporate treasure chest already. As long as they never made the idea public, they can sit on it (if they had made it public, even via "leaking" it inadvertently, they would only have one year from that point to try and get patent protection for it). I found it instructive that both company A and company B had this clause toward the end of the disclaimer about something called an "honorarium". This is a dollar amount "ceiling" that they are willing to pay you if they end up using your idea, and it wasn't already in their braintrust file to begin with. They put the ceiling value (both companies) at $5000. So, I definitely know I'm not selling out my idea for a meager $5000. I mean, if I could get approximately 6 people to buy one of these things I made, they would each save about $400-$700 a year in fixed monthly living expenses. Almost everyone I know would jump on it, especially since the price of my most advanced functional prototype is only about $75.
So that's where I'm at. Not gonna do it for 5K, which means I'm going to have to either try some smaller companies with the confidentiality agreement, or I'm going to have to get a $75 patent pending protection for a year and try to manufacture some hoopties for sale (marketing on my own dime, and suing copycats on my own time). Invention on a budget. Gimmie summo Gimmie summo. I'm thinking maybe I could try and sell the item, and get the customer to sign a non-disclosure agreement, but that's not really practical because if you have guests over, somebody is going to leak the info and it will spread uncontrollably in that way. What to do...
I would definitely get the Patent It can't hurt especially if it only costs $75 . Good luck hope you make a Million bucks