17. Invention, Intellectual Property and Income¶
This week we talked about how to license and market our final projects. We had a visit from Business Professor C.C. Chapman of the Wheaton Business and Management Department.
Useful links¶
Goals for the Week¶
- Created a dissemination plan for your final project
- Outlined future possibilities and described how to make them probabilities
- Prepared a draft summary slide and video
Licensing and Dissemination Plan¶
C.C. Showed us how to go through the process of creating a license for our work through the Creative Commonts License Chooser. This is an open source (yay FREE!) license. For our purposes, this is good enough. I don’t plan to mass produce and sell my Demeter’s Garden project, so this is good enough.
If you want to actually create a business you have options: * Sole proprietorship and Partnerships - these require no paperwork and we could start today! * Limited Liabiity Company - need paperwork but you also have coverage if you are sued * Corporations (inc) - you need paperwork here but also you need bylaws and a Board of Directors (which is 5+ people). This category includes 501(c)3 non profits. These are definitely NOT what we are doing, but if you have one of these people can donate and write off their donations for tax purposes.
If you do want to create a business, C.C. told us about Score, a free business advice and mentoring organization. Basically retired business folks volunteer their time to mentor people who are just starting up businesses. This is cool - a FREE resource!!
Creative Commons License Chooser¶
One of the nice things about using the Creative Commons site is that it leads you through the steps of creating a license for your product. For instance, from the very basic first question:
Your second question is about whether you want attribution - do you want people to have to include credit to you when they use your work? If not, you are letting anyone use it without acknowledging where it comes from. As you can see, once you make that selection, on the right part of the screen you start to get a recommendation for the kind of license you want.
Third question is if you want tallow others to use your work commercially - can other people make money off your work?!?!?! Heck no!! I mean, I’m sure there must be people who say yes. I wonder who. What areas would people say others could make money? I would guess others using it and not making money is one thing, but making money off your ideas!?! Oh maybe this means they can use your photos in their commercials, etc? Still, heck no! They can pay you for that. Note how the right hand side changed.
More questions: Do you want others to remix, adapt, or build upon your work. Do you want adaptations to have the same licensing? Confirm that CC licensing is appropriate by confirmig that the work is your own, etc.
Then you give details so you can receive attribution and register your work.
Finally here is what can go on my webpage:
Demeter's Garden by Rachelle DeCoste is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
And the actual license part. I think the symbols are enough. I will put them on my poster.
Dissemination Plan¶
The idea for my project came from my daughter who loves to grow plants. We kill plants. We overwater/underwater and we have no good spot in our house for natural light. So my target audience are other parents who love to grow herbs in their house with their kids. A secondary audience could be young adults living in aparments who have no good natural light. I do not know that audience since I am well-removed. So for our purposes, I focus on parents.
I would pitch my product at parents who have little time for outdoor gardening. Or little love for it. Hello, meet me and my black thumb. One time I had a garden when I was in grad school. We grew a ton of tomatoes. They all had some sort of weird fungus.
I love fresh foods, so I joined a CSA (Community Sponsored Agriculture). You pay for the season and each week you go pick up your food from the farmer. I love Farmer Joe. He and his family grow our food and we support them through our subscription to the CSA.
However, fresh herbs are a must have - even desired all year round. While Farmer Joe has lots of fresh herbs at our Tuesday pick ups, once they are cut they don’t last. Every year we try to grow a basil plant and then we kill it. But fresh tomato, mozzerella sald with fresh basil is the most delicious meal in mid-August when the fresh tomatoes taste like heaven. But having fresh basil to dress up homemade pizzas, pastas, etc is great year round. We use rosemary and sage that are dried, but having them fresh would also be awesome.
So anyway, people like me are my target audience. I would show my commercial (make a short commercial) on local parent Facebook pages. In my town we have a Mom’s page and it’s a great wealth of information. A print ad could also be published in parenting magazines. Faceboook posts in local groups are free. Facebook ads are not, but also another way to go. Print ads are probably hugely expensive.
The goal for my product is modular so that someone could order from 4 planters through say 10 or 12, depending on the arrangment. This would mean that the ordering for the product would have to give options for numbers of planters. I would probably also ask people to choose from a limited set of options on colors - if they continue to be 3d printed, there are so many different choices you could embrace.
Poster¶
I made 2 versions of my poster for this week. One is more like an advertisement. I used Canva and the images there to make the poster. It has an image of a mom with a child cooking. Then a set of neopixels as the light source and a thriving plant. I thought the little bits of text made it clear what I was advertising.
On the 2nd version I tried to make it fit more with what Fab Academy students had done in the past. In this version this is more for students of this class bc it’s got the methods I’m using to create my project. I saw on previous students’ posters that they had cute little images of the processes. So I looked for those and this is what I came up with for 3d printing, vinyl cutting and CNC machining.
The final version of my slide:
Video¶
I’m planning to make a video featuring my daughter and me making tomato mozzarella salad and not having any fresh basil! Then I will show the idea and process of creating Demeter’s Garden and the final project with all its features.
Here’s the final version: