About 95 percent of all U.S. patents never earn the inventor a single dollar. The other 5 percent get there one of three ways: a license, a full buyout, or a hybrid that combines elements of both. Each path has different tax treatment, different upside, different...
Most new consumer products struggle, and the trouble usually traces back to decisions made before a single unit got tooled. A consumer product design firm exists to make those early decisions well. It is not there to draw a pretty rendering and hand you a STEP file....
An inventor asked the Enhance Innovations team a fair question last month: should he spend money with a design firm, or buy a CAD course and figure it out himself? It is the right question to ask, and most of the people asking it have already underestimated how much...
About 70% of the geometry on a design changes before the part is ready to mold. That number lands hard for inventors who assume a finished CAD model means the manufacturer will press a button and start making parts. The CAD that communicates an invention and the...
Most inventors who reach the Enhance Innovations office in Champlin, Minnesota have already shown their invention to someone they should not have. A neighbor who used to work in plastics. A cousin who runs a small ecommerce store. A person at a trade show who said...
The inventor who tells you they nailed it on the first prototype is either remembering it wrong or about to find out otherwise in tooling. Since 2010, working on consumer products out of Champlin, Minnesota, the Enhance Innovations team has rarely seen a...
Most prototype testing is the wrong kind of testing. The inventor shows the work to a friend, the friend says "neat, this is cool," and the inventor reports back to the team that the prototype tested well. Nothing has been learned. The next $20,000 in...
A 3D printer turns a CAD file into a physical part for somewhere between $5 and $200 in 4 to 48 hours. That changed the economics of physical prototyping more than any other shift in the last 30 years. It also leads inventors to print things that should not be...
Most inventors over-spec their first prototype by a wide margin. They picture machined aluminum and production-grade plastic when the question in front of them is still "does this geometry work at all," and that question gets answered on a screen, not a...
Most patent licenses are won or lost in three conversations. The first is whether the licensee wants the patent at all. The second is the term sheet. The third is the redline. Each conversation has its own rules. Inventors who treat all three the same way tend to lose...
