Setting My Own Inventing Goals
This blog was started not because I wanted to write about other inventors and inventions, but because I want to start inventing myself. I thought that this would be a great way to learn about the process while sharing it with anyone else who is interested. The other and perhaps most important aspect of the learning process is to go out and actually invent something. So it is time to set some goals and get started.
The major goal is to patent my own invention and make money from the product. I initially thought that patenting an invention would be a sufficient long term/major goal, and I would wait on setting the sale of the invention as a goal until after I have a patent. However, I looked to
At this point in the game I don’t know all of the steps to get from an idea to the sale of a patented invention. Seeking out and learning the steps will be part of the process, and as I learn these things I will be posting the process on the blog. The first major step in the process is picking one idea to run with. I’ve broken it down into two parts, coming up with ideas, and then narrowing down those ideas to the one with the most potential.
For the next two weeks I’ll be focusing on generating different ideas that I could potentially work with. I have a notebook which I am writing/drawing each idea along with some basic details on how these things should work. Hopefully by the end of these two weeks I will have a couple dozen well thought out plans to choose from.
In two weeks I’ll talk about the criteria and process that I will use to select one idea to put all of my work and energy into. In the meantime, since it has been on my mind, an article on methods for coming up with invention ideas is in the works.
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June 11th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
[...] you have been following along with my inventing goals, you already know that I am currently working on generating a list of potential invention ideas. [...]
June 30th, 2008 at 3:06 am
i have multiple ideas but don’t know where to begin. i don’t trust sites like inventhelp and other similar sites. any leads would be appreciated. thanks.
June 30th, 2008 at 4:01 am
hayden,
I would start at edisonnation.com, it is a community of professional and amateur inventors, that has a lot of good information on turning an idea into reality. In particular I would recommend reading this http://www.edisonnation.com/education/inventing_abcs first.
It has some good tips about avoiding sites like invent help, documenting your ideas, doing a patent search, creating a prototype/model, and who to see once you have a solid idea.
My progress has been a bit delayed, but my next step will be deciding upon one idea to focus on. I would suggest starting with patent searches on your ideas at http://www.uspto.gov to ensure that you invest your time in an original idea. Once you have selected one idea, build a simple model or prototype. Remember document everything, point 2 of the Edison Nation article has good info about what is important to document. In the very near future I will be writing articles on both patent searches and prototypes, so check back and learn as I do.
July 21st, 2008 at 8:46 pm
[...] ago I gave my readers 7 Ways to Come up with a Billion Dollar Idea as I was preparing to start the inventing process myself. Since that post I have come up with a number of good ideas, and I thought that I would share a [...]