GOAL

The goal of this assignment is to define a strategy for the promotion of our final project. “How would you scale the production of your final project beyond producing one of them. Are you going to sell it? Are you going to license it? Is it a business, a product or a service?”
Introduction
In order to complete all the assignments (that have to be done individually) we divided the project in different parts both mechanical and physical on which we focused separately. That said the strategy I’m going to present is my own proposal.

INVENTION

The project has to be open source. We will present our work at the Maker Faire of Rome and probably during FAB10 in Barcelona. We are also planning educational events related to the manufacturing and coding of the Drone. In this events we’ll propose some uses of the drone: from mapping to reverse engineering. We would like to present our drone not just as a simple toy but eventually as a work, design and research tool. We see it as an instrument that can be implemented according to the need of designers and users.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The project is Open Source Hardware and Software. What does it mean? Open Source is more and more an important way to share not only your ideas but also to receive feedback and implementation by the others. By sharing the Drone we are going to reach a bigger community that we’ll be hopefully involved with the upgrade of our product as well. Probably I could use the Creative Common license. “A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwisecopyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use and build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work, so they don’t have to worry about copyright infringement, as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.” Looking in the assignments of last year relative to this topic I found also a good reference in the MIT license. They make an interesting point: “the software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non infringement. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the software or the use or other dealings in the software.”

INCOME

COMPANY

I do not believe a company around a single object is actually a good idea. Our Drone will be presented as one of many tooling, visions and strategies promoted by a bigger company that I’m already running. The collection of money related to this specific project will be related to the flexibility we can add to it regarding its implementation in other fields.

Sources

The economical strategy can be the following. Keep software and hardware open source, so no income will come from those ones. We can from the other side sell an already made product in case people don’t want to do it by itself. We can also charge for advanced components (hardware / software) that can be implemented in the Drone. I refeer here to the gimball system, the gps on the many hardware and other little components. Educational events related to it will be charged as well. To support this position I can quote Francisco Sanchez’s that is giving some good explanations why an open source project can have an economical income in it as well: “a) There are lots of people (including me) that do not have time to/do not want to bother to/ do not know how to make it and they will just buy it most of the time. From us (the company who created FAB 9000) or from other vendors. Our main advantage is that since we are the developers we are supposed to have more knowledge, provide better technical support, be able to introduce changes in the design and the software according to customer feedback, etc. and it will likely increase the number of sales (at least that is what I would do if I had multiple vendor choices), and: b) We'll be also supposed to produce parts or assembled units faster and with better quality than anyone else. This would help in reducing the cost of the product to a level that, even if someone is thinking of making one for himself, it won't be worth it. Think of ordering materials, trials and errors, calibrating machinery, etc. It's free, but no one said it was easy.”

FUNDING

Crowd-founding is an option but since our goal is not to present the project as finished but as an open source tool that can be implemented I’ll discard this option now.

WHAT I LEARNED

From my experience a research project if properly done always gather interest and other work. I don’t believe that presenting a project in the market means that you’ll make automatically money out of it. The community generated around our Open Source project will generate by itself new opportunities for the project to grow in direction probably unknown right now. It will represent also a test of interest and feasibility. Educational events and public presentation will probably do the same. As well as exposing the company The economical aspect is also related to the ability to find the right balance between open source and pay services. Open source is also interesting because somehow can attach a community around a project making people dependent from the platform you provide. It’s up to the marketing strategy to understand how to balance pay/free services to avoid losing it’s community.

W19 - INVENTION INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND INCOME