Week 17
Invention, Intellectually Property & Income
The options I considered for protecting the intellectual property in my work were:
Patent
The scale of my project in terms what I am proposing, and the specialised but worldwide market, make this a poor option for protecting my intellectual property. A patent is relatively expensive to file and would mean me showing in detail how my product was different. Effectively this is disclosing my intellectual property on the basis that if anyone tried to copy it, I would defend it by taking them to court. Apart from the fact that I couldnÕt afford to do that even in one country, I felt that this would actually be counter-productive, and that a better strategy would be to develop my product my product fully and keep ahead of the competition by offering a strong combination of innovative design, performance, and low cost.
Trademark
I have chosen the brand ÒBalancer ProÓ which is reasonably generic. I feel that the strength of my project is in design and innovation rather than branding, so have not focussed a lot on this aspect. It is more likely that my product would be taken over by one of the bigger manufacturers than me being able to develop a big standalone brand.
Licenses
The license I have chosen is;
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The licences like Creative Commons are designed to manage the use of my intellectual property by others. Because my product is very specialised I see the future development path as being controlled completely by me or making an agreement directly with one of the other specialist manufacturers (or my ideas could be an entry point to being employed by one of those manufacturers). But in saying this I believe there is a lot of development that needs to be done to this prototype and that I am more than happy for people to take my design and manipulate it but not sell it for commercial use.
Copyright
Copyright is simple because it is a common law protection that just needs me to make it clear that I am protecting my work. It would do this reasonably well in most western countries. My strategy is therefore to protect intellectual property by asserting copyright whenever my designs are published or made available to others. With the way new projects are often developed through crowd funding, building up a group of ÔsupportersÕ through crowd funding could also be helpful in protecting intellectual property.
Commercialisation
My product, or the further development of it, has good commercial potential. The field of stabilised photography and videography is evolving rapidly and many new options focussed on light weight, lower cost, and higher performance are coming on to the market.
I plan to access funding for further development through crowdsourced funding, i.e. Indiegogo or Kickstarter.. I followed several and contributed to some of these to see how the process works. The critical factors for success that I can see are areas such as:
- A strong idea that captures the imagination
- Seeking funding at the right stage of the project: not too early (where there are hurdles that might be hard to overcome and allow delivery) but soon enough to push development along with extra funding
- Professional web design and graphics
- Often a personal pitch from the inventor or owner
- Not over promising on delivery schedules for first batch production
- Not setting early purchase prices too low, there needs to be an incentive but also a margin
- Keeping your investors well informed of progress and any problems
- Being very clear on deliverables and meeting them.
Structure
At the stage my business is now, I do not feel that a formal structure is necessary, so I will continue as a sole trader. The main advantages of having say a company would be financial protection from personal liability, but I do not feel this is an issue at this stage of development (and I will make sure I have disclaimers on my website).
If I wanted to I could still register for Goods and Services Tax (to be able to claim that tax back on inputs) but at this stage I donÕt think that is worthwhile for the compliance costs involved. Some of my raw materials will also be coming from overseas and if this is less than $400 per shipment GST does not apply.
Dissemination
The two ways I would be able to reach my target market are through specialised websites and crowdsourced funding. There is now an international community that has a high interest in the latest innovative ideas and is also looking for investment opportunities. Key websites that look for what is new and publish it are:
- Gizmag
Because these sites are hungry for new things it is possible to get published on them, but this needs to be at the right stage of development.
The second method of dissemination is crowdsourcing. This is also an area where there are people looking for and interested in new ideas to support. Crowdsourcing means that as well as raising money you can connect directly with a community who like your idea and are willing to invest a small amount in it in return for getting a new product when it is first released.