If one invents a novel product idea it is necessary to discover if the idea has already been patented and though Google has a free patent search tool it can still be costly and time consuming especially if one develops several ideas a year.
With a simple idea such as extensible auto or truck window vents to use when the car or truck is motionless and one wants to have good air ventilation in the parked vehicle (if one sleeps overnight in a car in cold weather the quart per hour water exhalation from the lungs freezes on windows and can eventually collect and ruin automobile electronics) one must think the idea through a little and arrive at a good, cheap too mass produce design.
Say one has a tent-like flap in a rectangular frame that will fit in a car window rolled half way down. Perhaps there is a rod hood on the top that will connect at the bottom of the rectangle to an isosceles triangle shaped rod at the apex when it is point away from the vehicle and snaps in place. Air can flow up the bottom and with a few Velcro fasteners holding the bottom of the nylon tent material to th triangular rod it would let go air flow into the car. A mosquito net could also be fastened into the frame.
If one were to want to produce such a low-tech product and sell it to chain store outlets it would probably be necessary to file a patent disclosure first, instead of waiting for a regular patent that costs thousands of dollars, and then catch a plane to Shanghai to locate some materials fabricator who would agree to supply the rectangle, triangle, rod, mosquito net, Velcro fasteners and cut the tent-vent to the correct size. Probably the production cost would be less than a dollar per vent and in the U.S.A. they would be sold for $5.00 at some auto supply and sporting goods outlets after one got buy contracts with product samples. Yet its all theory, and a lot of it, for just one idea. At least if one likes Chinese food the cost of a working vacation to China wouldn't be thrown away.
The one would need to produce a few thousand units to export to the U.S.A. ready to bring in finished packaged form to retail stores. If one has several ideas annually the experimental nature of the entire process is inefficient and has leaky security. In my opinion the entire system has a built in trickle up to concentrated wealth bias in it-and hence the U.S. Government has never done anything to make the patent process and production into a form better suited for native American inventors.
So I have given a little thought to how the patent process might be designed in order to accelerate through-put for the inventor and/or producer. There must be a large number of people that invent something in thought who then just let the idea perish knowing that the practical challenges to bringing the idea to market are substantial.
It could be useful to integrate several artificial-intelligence steps in the process together in stages enabling the inventor to be as free as possible from the non-idea related steps of product-development to market engineering.Perhaps the patent search system could become something much more able to recognize input from the inventor and search through records exhaustively to find anything similar that might be inc conflict or competition potentially-It might also have an inventor's idea 'thesaurus' to survey related areas.
At any stage in the process the inventor should be able to print out or suspend the search-such as if similar ideas turn up he might want to see how he might differ his product from an existing invention.
As the idea continues to be processed the materials, market and producers of inventions or related products interested in working with new inventions should be surveyed. I would guess that it might be possible to create something like an EBay for inventors that would match inventors and reliable producers together that are suitable-and the producers might have inventor ratings.
If all of this were very low cost or free the number of inventions that might be developed annually could increase as people without the means to finance their own inventions would experience the entry of their ideas to market. There is probably a social benefit in consolidating and expediting an invention concept to product development and marketing facility on-line that would enable anyone, anywhere to have an existential best-case, practical opportunity to sell anything that he or she might invent without cost.
With a simple idea such as extensible auto or truck window vents to use when the car or truck is motionless and one wants to have good air ventilation in the parked vehicle (if one sleeps overnight in a car in cold weather the quart per hour water exhalation from the lungs freezes on windows and can eventually collect and ruin automobile electronics) one must think the idea through a little and arrive at a good, cheap too mass produce design.
Say one has a tent-like flap in a rectangular frame that will fit in a car window rolled half way down. Perhaps there is a rod hood on the top that will connect at the bottom of the rectangle to an isosceles triangle shaped rod at the apex when it is point away from the vehicle and snaps in place. Air can flow up the bottom and with a few Velcro fasteners holding the bottom of the nylon tent material to th triangular rod it would let go air flow into the car. A mosquito net could also be fastened into the frame.
If one were to want to produce such a low-tech product and sell it to chain store outlets it would probably be necessary to file a patent disclosure first, instead of waiting for a regular patent that costs thousands of dollars, and then catch a plane to Shanghai to locate some materials fabricator who would agree to supply the rectangle, triangle, rod, mosquito net, Velcro fasteners and cut the tent-vent to the correct size. Probably the production cost would be less than a dollar per vent and in the U.S.A. they would be sold for $5.00 at some auto supply and sporting goods outlets after one got buy contracts with product samples. Yet its all theory, and a lot of it, for just one idea. At least if one likes Chinese food the cost of a working vacation to China wouldn't be thrown away.
The one would need to produce a few thousand units to export to the U.S.A. ready to bring in finished packaged form to retail stores. If one has several ideas annually the experimental nature of the entire process is inefficient and has leaky security. In my opinion the entire system has a built in trickle up to concentrated wealth bias in it-and hence the U.S. Government has never done anything to make the patent process and production into a form better suited for native American inventors.
So I have given a little thought to how the patent process might be designed in order to accelerate through-put for the inventor and/or producer. There must be a large number of people that invent something in thought who then just let the idea perish knowing that the practical challenges to bringing the idea to market are substantial.
It could be useful to integrate several artificial-intelligence steps in the process together in stages enabling the inventor to be as free as possible from the non-idea related steps of product-development to market engineering.Perhaps the patent search system could become something much more able to recognize input from the inventor and search through records exhaustively to find anything similar that might be inc conflict or competition potentially-It might also have an inventor's idea 'thesaurus' to survey related areas.
At any stage in the process the inventor should be able to print out or suspend the search-such as if similar ideas turn up he might want to see how he might differ his product from an existing invention.
As the idea continues to be processed the materials, market and producers of inventions or related products interested in working with new inventions should be surveyed. I would guess that it might be possible to create something like an EBay for inventors that would match inventors and reliable producers together that are suitable-and the producers might have inventor ratings.
If all of this were very low cost or free the number of inventions that might be developed annually could increase as people without the means to finance their own inventions would experience the entry of their ideas to market. There is probably a social benefit in consolidating and expediting an invention concept to product development and marketing facility on-line that would enable anyone, anywhere to have an existential best-case, practical opportunity to sell anything that he or she might invent without cost.
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