invention, intellectual property and income

This weeks individual assignment:

  • develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
  • prepare drafts of your summary slide and video clip

This weeks learnings:

This week I learned that after 19 weeks, it's really hard to find motivation for things that don't immediately help me move forward. This week's topic is rather soft, with no right or wrong. So I admittedly haven't learned much here.

dissemination plan

Overall, it's always nice when ideas spread. While my idea isn't in any case necessary, it would certainly be nice here as well. I now quickly see this as a given or even possible at the local level; after I built the last beer pong table (about 5 years ago), I even received an inquiry from the Bavaria area. The fascination with this game clearly extends beyond the region, so there probably is, or even would be, a market for it. I can already foresee that I won't be able to fully develop my idea within the FabAcademy. As things stand, however, with less time pressure, I would be quite motivated to continue working on it, professionalizing the whole thing, and optimizing it for replication.

Traditionally, it makes sense to involve potential users early on in product development. Fortunately, in my case, this is very straightforward and would be one of the first steps I would take. If I develop the confidence that I can create a stable, functional version – independent of external influences – I could imagine placing the project on Kickstarter or something similar.

I would therefore tend to use the project commercially myself later on and maintain a high level of repairability by users. Conversely, I've also learned from my beer pong table that it's not always beneficial to share knowledge – unfortunately, some people do things with it that aren't necessarily appropriate. However, in the spirit of co-engineering – i.e., being involved in the process – I could also imagine sharing it with certain communities at any time.

In my opinion, such projects, which are colorfully flashing, typically used with alcohol, and mostly in a party context, always have a good chance of being disseminated via social media, so that could also be a sensible approach – should it ever come to that. Typically, this would probably involve short video clips and colorful images.

There is no timeline for this, however, and there never will be one. I would like to have a fixed time budget that I could dedicate to further developing the project, but in practice, I would have to find that – so everything remains to be seen.

presentation slide

Naturally, I was highly motivated to create a slide for my project. So motivated that I wanted to use a beautiful background. Knowing my design skills, I did some intensive internet research, which ultimately led me to this template: Free Dark Gradient Presentation Template.

So, with my two remaining brain cells, I cobbled together the slide above. It could only have been better if my brain cells hadn't lost contact with each other weeks ago. Enjoy!

video

Of course, I also edited a video from the footage I remembered to shoot. Have fun with that one, too!