Invention, intellectual property and income Class

17th Worldwide gathering for Fab Academy 2015 feat. prof. Neil Gershenfeld

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27th May

2 weeks to final project

Weeks Work

GOAL

Taking the words of our own tutor, Francisco, for this week we should build up answers to the following questions:

  1. How would you scale the production of your final project beyond producing just one sample item?
  2. Are you going to sell it? Are you going to license it?
  3. Is it a business, a product or a service?

INVENTION

First of all, building a custom made navigation aid tool for the visual impaired should never become a business per se otherwise will most definitely destroy its soul purpose. Helping people with disabilities is a noble mission but one that requires a lot of help - technical and financial - a good awareness campaign, a great team of motivated people, good will and a lot of perseverance.

Despite of being a well known weakness of spaces in the cities we live in, planning inclusively for the visual impaired is still not a priority and remains as a big gap that is yet to be filled. Enabling the free navigation of space in this cross global mobilization era is an enormous task that, if taken seriously, can't be done lightly.

This project tries to pay a modest contribution to the drawing of that path and so, at it's own scale, will try to make the difference by helping locally one person at a time.

In the words of Prof. Niel Gershenfeld READY, FIRE, AIM.

It's important to be aware of the shifts in needs, getting ready to understand them means that continuous research need to be done, improvement of skills has to be preformed daily so that we are able to fire when the challenges are presented and that in the long run we can aim towards the big goal, milestone or life achievement.





INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

For the nature of this project and for the already build predecessors filing for a Patent would not be done, making only sense to have it's source software freely distributed as an Open Source Asset under The MIT License (MIT):

  • Copyright (c) - Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sub-license, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
  • The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

  • 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 NONINFRINGEMENT. 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.

Sharing to conquer: using this kind of license, would not only allow the project to reach a bigger number of people in need of these kind of device but would also increase the possibility of finding developers interested in this kind of project whiling to help taking it further to an optimized level of functionality, that otherwise wouldn't be achievable targeting just local sources.

To confirm the power of the globally connected communities, a few minutes right after my Final Project Proposal Presentation I had a pleasant surprise e-mail from one of the tutors in the FabNetwork. Tony Canning was kind enough to share their achievements on similar project they developed for REFUGEE OPEN WARE at FabLab Strathclyde with the purpose of helping people injured in war zones in Syria. So I am very thankful to Tony and his fellow colleges for getting in touch with me so promptly sharing what they accomplish and allowing me to take this project further.

Apart from freely distributing software I would, definitely like to have the Soft-tech design Licensed under Creative Commons so that the Design itself could be acknowledged to my authorship although it would be available for consumers for non-commercial purpose.


INCOME

Regarding Income or fundings for this project I would expect it to be part of a series of other similar projects, still to come, promoted by my personal Brand and future company Non-profit dedicated.

Would like to think that this final product would be of interest to an Angel investor being this my main source for funding along with a possible crowd-funded campaign and eventually some Visually impaired/Disabled aid Foundations attributing grants for research purposes. Here are a few examples:


About it's live cycle I would considered it to be a ever evolving project that could have several iterations according to the challenges presented by different customers and their needs.

Making the project visible would be essential, so getting it to be publish on a subject dedicated Magazines (on-line and Hard-copy) would be part of the advertisement campaign plan, disseminating it trough public Talks locally or globally like at Ted or just publishing it on the social networks for general public sensitization would be mandatory as well as for rapidly building visibility worldwide for the Crowd funded campaign.


Local becomes Global


Building it self as an incubator for research based projects this future company would be by definition a platform for creative dissemination that would become known trough the services given achieving acknowledgment project by project like a kind of wave effect self-advertisement.

It's motivations both project and company are mainly based in Cultural and Social issues that I would like to see better managed and be involved in solving them as soon as possible.

Accessibility is the key word. Azores islands where I am from and where I wish to see this business growing are tremendously affected by isolation, technological development is non-existent and platforms like this would be highly appreciated. It is one of those unique examples of nature wanders lost in time. Azores need to be put in the map by its incomparable nature force, it's resilient people and its amazing geographical potential. A lot of planning ahead but I would say soon enough we would have a 100% sustainable FabLab example just in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.


Wish me luck!