Entrepreneurs and Intellectual Property

When entrepreneurs are becoming more focused on starting their own business, they need to consider protecting their intellectual property. Why should they think this way? Because they should know that someone can take their business idea and, if not patented, make it their own. That's when you will find in stores spin-offs of familiar products with odd names. These entrepreneurs took someone else's idea and had it rebranded.

Thus, if you have a great idea, you should consider filing for a patent. Patents will offer fourteen to twenty years as yours. Fourteen years is the life of a design patent, whereas twenty years is for a utility patent. However, you must remember that it could take about three years to have your patent examined. There are over 500,000 patent applications waiting to be reviewed by a patent examiner.

If you are willing to spend an extra one thousand dollars ($1,000), then you can have a decision within a year. This is considered to be a prioritized patent application. Do not forget that it is up to you, the entrepreneur to sue a potential competitor for infringing on your right to an idea. The United States Patent and Trademark Office just grants a patent, it so not defend it for you if someone else takes your idea and starts selling your product or service.

Prototypes should be carefully designed. However, you should get a confidentiality agreement in place before you start contacting a manufacturer who could build a prototype of your idea. It should be your agreement that your attorney has written in your best interest. Once you are confident you have a prototype, you should be well on your way to beginning a marketing scheme.

Next step will be to confirm your patent is accepted. This usually takes about three years, so in the mean time, hold back on running to a trade show and giving away free samples. That could destroy your patent chances.

Book Review: Risk Intelligence

Risk Intelligence: How to Live With Uncertainty by Dylan Evans, 276 pages

How do you make decisions? Do you carefully weigh all the factors, creating pro/con lists and weighing the risks inherent in choosing the wrong thing? Do you just wing it? Evans argues that good risk-takers have something called high risk intelligence, meaning that they know how to estimate probabilities accurately. A lot of us, he argues, are either underconfident or overconfident in our abilities to make these estimates.

Despite the fact that this was much more of a psychology or even math book, there is inherent uncertainty and risk involved with owning or running a business, which place it somewhere in a Venn diagram of business literature. That's certainly true, and some people may find Evans' focus on probabilities fascinating and useful. However, as someone who has been known to say that there's a 50% chance of anything happening (either it will or it won't), I was largely frustrated by this book. (And based on what Evans was saying, I think he'd be equally frustrated with me.) I enjoyed a few of the chapters, particularly about those about the tricks of the mind and being aware of what you actually know and don't know, but I didn't care for the heavy emphasis on mathematical equations. This was similar to Think Twice, which has also been reviewed on this blog; of the two, I prefer Think Twice.