AboutPenny Ballou Expertise The Invention Process; Royalties; Licensing Inventions/Products; Pricing; Direct to Market; Marketing/Promotions; Patent Searching; DIY patent writing; Types of patents/costs/how to's; Funding (grants and Angel investors); Prototyping; Off-Shore sourcing.
Experience I am founder of an inventors group; Advisory Board President of www.inventored.org; former Licensing Executive Society member; researcher for www.piausa.org and a consultant; plus moderate and contribute to several online inventor discussion groups.
Publications Enter my email address into any search engine to find them.
Education/Credentials Invention development: well-studied and applied in all aspects of the process and an inventor myself with one invention in patent pending and others ramping up. Lived and attended schools in Mainland China and the UK.
Question hi, i have a couple invention ideas. right now it is just an idea. should i create a prototype first before i try to pitch my idea? and also do you know of any reputable invention companies that will help me develop and market my product.
Answer Hi James;
You wrote: I have a couple invention ideas. right now it is just an idea. should i create a prototype first before i try to pitch my idea?
a) It really depends on just how novel, useful and unobvious what you have is and/or how much money you have to get it to market and other elements. There are several levels of protos. It doensn't hurt to work out the bugs and figure out how to expand the proto to make it useful in more than one market segment. Even a model at this stage would be okay.
b) Is it potentially patentable or do you care? If so, other steps must be done first before a proto such as determining what prior art could defeat your invention or require it be tweaked to get around it (were it patented).
Let me know the answer to (b) then we'll take a slightly different direction. And by the way, have you gathered any market research about the product category (pricing/competition/customer profiles, etc)? If so, what?
2. ...and also do you know of any reputable invention companies that will help me develop and market my product.
a) I know a ton that "appear" reputable, for sure. It really depends what your product category is as to how I answer that question. Keep away from 1-800 number invention companies as seen on TV. Typically one business model used to get inventors to order their version of a what I personally deem a backroom useless patent search providing as evidence of why it's patentable and more likely marketable). PLus they supply along with the search worthless staledated market research they glam-up using it as the hook to reel inventors into Phase 2 - $6,500-$30,000. Some take payments and one even funds the above - with interest, of course.
Send me a private email or contact me off-line. My contact info is all over the web. Ignore some of the crap written by anonymous invention companies about me and a lawyer. They don't like their names mentioned by me. One lawyer who writes "under the table" for an invention company has even started a blog and built a twitter page (which I got removed). Too bad, so sad.
