Find the Right Help for Your Invention and You

Successful inventors do not work alone, they get help from professionals along the way. Finding someone good and trustworthy is obviously important. Equally important is finding the right help at the right time.

At the beginning stages, good advice from a specialist might steer you in the wrong direction - be careful about engaging a company or adviser who specializes primarily in one aspect.

For example, if your first adviser is a patent attorney, they will give you advice centered around patent protection. That’s how they see the world and that’s exactly what they should do. But if you are just beginning, a patent attorney’s view of the world also means you will likely spend more on patents than you should, at that beginning stage.

If your first adviser specializes in manufacturing, you could end up spending a lot of time and money on legal agreements, tooling and samples, for a design that is not optimized for low cost and high performance, or a design that violates the intellectual property rights of someone else, or a design that ends up selling poorly.

The same things can be said regarding advisers and companies that specialize in product design and marketing.

At the beginning stage, what you really need is advice from people who take a look at the entirety of your invention, your personal resources and the market you’re planning to enter. Ideally, you want a team with deep personal experience in every aspect of inventing, experience that includes both success and failure.

Look beyond the pretty product pictures on a page, beyond the logos of big companies and dig in to learn what the company and its people have actually done, what they’ve experienced. Have they created CAD models and working prototypes themselves or did they hire someone else? How deeply involved in the patent process? Did they ever see their own patents tested in court? Have they sourced products and run their own assembly lines? Handled importing? Have they closed successful licensing deals, met with buyers at places like Home Depot and WalMart and succeeded in getting products on mass merchant shelves? Run a Kickstarter? Done infomercials? Appeared on QVC? Created Amazon listings and run online ad campaigns? Written business plans. Pitched investors and formed companies?

It’s hard to find a team that has all of that experience. What’s important is to recognize that whoever you work with has an orientation based on their experience. Understanding that orientation will help you make better decisions for both you and your invention.

If you’re just getting started, check out Invention City. We have deep experience in all aspects of inventing and could be a great fit for you.