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...
The Licensing Executives Society publishes a triennial industry survey on royalty rates. The same survey reports a less-quoted statistic: roughly 35% of patent license agreements terminate before reaching their expected total royalty payment. Some terminate because...
A U.S. patent stops at the U.S. border. A Chinese factory can copy your invention, ship it to Germany, sell it to a French distributor, and your U.S. patent does nothing. The World Intellectual Property Organization processed 273,900 international patent applications...
The first ten manufacturers you pitch will pass. Possibly twenty. The pattern is so consistent that licensing professionals build it into project timelines: thirty pitches average, six serious conversations, two term sheets, one deal. A pass is not a verdict on the...
A 2023 study from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office estimated the total economic value of active U.S. patents at over $7 trillion. The median patent? Worth less than zero after maintenance fees. That gap, between trillion-dollar aggregate value and a median number...
About 30% of exclusive patent licenses include sublicensing rights. About 5% of inventors who grant those rights understand what they have given away. The gap between those two numbers is the most common reason an exclusive license that looks fine at signing produces...
