This book is intended to be a practical guide to all those inventors, actual or would-be, those who have yet to take their first real steps toward making their new product or service dreams come true. The Wessex Round Table of Inventors (WRTI) is an inventors club based at Southampton Solent University. It exists as a mutual forum to help like-minded individuals with their inventions. This book contains articles from several of its experienced members plus other selected expert contributors. The book tries to cover the entire spectrum of the new product development or inventing cycle, from the encouragement of the earliest thoughts and ideas, through the development and prototyping phases, covering protection of your intellectual property to raising investment funding in order to make the dreams become reality – and goes right through to selling the resulting invention and bringing it to market successfully. Inventing is rarely as easy a process as many people believe – we hope that you find this book interesting and useful.
Description
Content
- Developing Ideas – the thinking process
- Validating the business potential – will it sell?
- Searching – for prior art & conducting research
- Protecting Ideas & Intellectual Property – the foundations of success
- Business Planning – planning the commercialisation of your ideas
- Raising funds – obtaining the money to make it all happen
- Making Prototypes – an activity which feeds back into improved design
- Independent Testing of Prototypes – Crucial test results to show to investors
- Bringing Inventions to Market – Doing it alone, manufacturing, JVs, franchising
- Bringing Inventions to Market – Licensing
- CE Marking – ensuring your design conforms to standards & is manufacturable
- Marketing Communications & Publicity – Why? To whom? How?
- Sales
- Knowing when to let go – achieving your life’s goals
- Further Reading
- Acknowledgements of Contributing Authors