A patent grants the inventor the right to exclude others from making or selling the invention, which is what makes a license worth paying for, but the USPTO does not market or commercialize patented inventions for you. A first-time inventor sending cold outreach to...
A typical inventor underestimates the time cost of a do-it-yourself product launch by a factor of three. Industry surveys put the median DIY effort at 200 to 1,000 hours of unpaid work spread across 12 to 36 months. The same product run through a competent firm...
The Federal Trade Commission has filed enforcement actions against more than a dozen invention promotion outfits since 1994 under the American Inventors Protection Act. The pattern repeats: glossy marketing, vague promises, big upfront fees, and a contract that...
“Invention assistance companies” is a loose phrase. It covers patent attorneys, product design firms, prototyping shops, and marketing and licensing services, and an inventor searching the term gets all four mixed together with no map. The phrase is broad...
Most invention transactions are licenses, not buyouts, and the three structures companies use to pay inventors split between those two poles. But a meaningful share of patents, somewhere between 8 and 15 percent of completed inventor-to-company deals depending on the...
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...
