If you are at our site and searching for information regarding brining your product to market, you probably have already identified a customer need. However, inventors need to overcome their excitement and take a hard look at marketing opportunities or the lack thereof. Can the benefits be articulated to a defined target market? Can the target market be reached via a cost-effective method? Does your company have the resources to deliver the customer benefits? Will your company deliver these benefits better than potential competitors? And finally, will the financial return exceed the required threshold for investment? If those questions are honestly answered yes, than and only then should significant effort be placed into the venture.

Another key step in developing your marketing plan is ensuring that your product is limited in scope. Define your scope and limit it to satisfying your early adopters first. Do not try to convince everyone all at once. Gather raw data from your early adopters by documenting interactions between those customers and your product, and revise accordingly. Use those interactions to rank customer needs into a hierarchy to establish the relative importance of each specification.

By understanding the relative importance of each component of your product, you will be able to describe that value to future customers. Remember, your value proposition should not only be product features and pricing but services, sourcing, and distribution. Your advertising, sales force, and promotions should all be focused on your target market and value proposition.

Finally, prior implementing a marketing campaign that is focused on your target market, all entrepreneurs must remember to create a methodology that ensures that your marketing effort can be measured. Has your money provided the rate of return that you expected? Has the appropriate target market been reached? Is there another market segment that responded differently than you expected? This data will not only allow you to revise your marketing plan but also allow you to adapt your product to your customer wants. After all, adaptation will be the characteristic that will allow you to either sink or swim.

Patent for an invention is essentially the grant of property ownership of the invention to the patent owner. It is the right to exclude all other persons from using your invention. In U.S. the Patent term is 20 years from the date the application is filed in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, or from a date established earlier. A Patent obtained in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is valid for action in the U.S., so if you are interested in using it international, it is worthwhile to file application in multiple countries. You can do that by applying a PCT application and designate specific countries as receiving offices for your application. But before you start your application, you should ask yourself the below questions:

1.Can your invention be patented? Is your patent useful? U.S. government will patent anything that is considered as new and useful. The invention can be a process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement based on prior invention that is not obvious to someone skilled in that discipline. U.S. government will not granting of patent to inventions made regarding utilization of special nuclear material or atomic energy in an atomic weapon.

2.Is your patent unique? To do that, you should do a keyword research by using the USPTO website or another search engine such as Google Patent Search. You should make sure your invention is not duplicative of previous applications/inventions. And if it is, you should find out if your invention has patentable attributes that are considered as improvement on the prior patents. It is probably worthwhile to contact a patent attorney in your area, to see if your improvement would be considered as obvious.

3.Can your idea can be written down in specific terms so that a technical expert in your field can understand the purpose, methodology, and details. If so you are most likely ready to apply for a patent. You cannot patent an abstract idea.

4.This question is more of an economic analysis. Ask yourself; will this invention have any practical monetary value so that it will cover the cost of applying for a patent? Patents can be extremely expensive to apply for and maintain. So, if you haven’t looked into this question yet, it should probably apply for a provisional application versus a regular application. Provisional application is relatively cheaper. It will allow an inventor to claim the benefit of the earlier invention date should such need arise. However, this application is only valid for 12 months, after which, you will not receive a notification. The provisional application will automatically lapse and no revival method is available.

BeHeron strongly recommends that you go see a reputable patent agent in your area to apply for a patent application, as they are skilled in drafting such an application. The trick is to write an application that is broad enough that you can utilize your invention in multiple ways, but narrow enough that it gives a specific invention that is patentable. This is not to say individuals cannot write their own patent application. It is in our experience that patent attorneys generally have much more expertise in wording these applications. After all, what’s the point of spending lots of money to get a patent that is essentially not usable?