You are drinking coffee or having lunch and a ‘spark of invention’ hits you.  A burst of energy starts to take over your mind as you try and wrap your mind around all of the different characteristics and ideas for your great idea.  Of course you would love to take the rest of the day off and try to figure some things out, but we all have existing commitments.  So what do you do?  How do you document your ‘spark of invention’?  What are the first steps of an idea?

1.  Write it down!  I suggest using anything at first, a pad of paper or a post-it note.  You don’t want to forget your great idea throughout the day.  By putting your idea to paper, you allow your brain to move on from what you have ‘figured’ out and onto other aspects of the idea.

So now it has been a little bit and you still love your idea.  You have been thinking about it day and night.  It is time to upgrade your ‘write it down’ status.  You can use any bound notebook, cheap or nice.  I prefer something in the middle, around $10.  If this is something you are going to pursue, the notebook will become a bible of sorts and I always thought that a nice one was worth it.  Date, number and sign each page.  Don’t skip pages.  Don’t hold back, its time to do a complete brain dump into your new invention notebook.  As you go through your initial invention analysis record everything in your notebook, all your findings, processes and idea enhancements.

2. Google it-  Unfortunately the possibility exists that someone else has had the exact revelation that you have.  Google is your tool for finding that out.  Search for a few different keyword sets that describe your invention and go through lots of search results to make sure it isn’t buried in someone’s website.

3. Competition – Hopefully from your extensive Google search, you have a good idea of who / what  your competition is.  Competition is good.  It proves the market existence, demonstrates demand levels, showcases acceptable price points and can be great evidence as to why your product provides value to the customer (at least more than the competition).

4.  Patent Search – An in depth patent search by a non-patent agent can take weeks.  I would start asap.  A lot of this time is analyzing the claims.  Several different strategies exist, including keyword search, classifications and references cited.  Be sure to search at several different locations.  Google patent is pretty good, and is getting better all the time.  Search patent applications, the Japan Patent Office
and use the guides at the USPTO. Once you find a few relevant patents I like to use patent to pdf to get pdf versions of the patent.

More steps to come… Don’t worry we will help you build your idea into a commercial product, but work on these steps for now!

Disclaimer- We are not IP attorney’s, patent agents or tech transfer experts.  This is an explaination of a process that we have used as independant and corporate inventors prior to forming flashpoint development.