Throughout history, the spread of literacy and the advent of engineering made intellectual discovery become a significantly defined part of reality. Engineering is the root of all invention, and inventors first came along when scientific discoveries were published and printed throughout the world. At first, there weren’t many early inventors. Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Leonardo da Vinci were considered invention pioneers. However, now that the world has gotten metaphorically smaller and knowledge about the world has become larger, inventors have become much more common than they were even 100 years ago.
Even though invention has been a popular activity, about only ten percent of patentable inventions are marketed successfully. In fact, if you are considering going down the road to get a patent, you may be turned off by the idea that your invention may never be widely used. Nowadays, though, you can find an expert at just about anything by just searching for it. If you do search for someone who can help your invention become popular, you’ll likely fall upon a large list of invention companies. Invention companies claim to help your invention get off the ground. However, very often, these invention companies are only interested in getting paid money that’s not owed to them.
Usually these companies are very attractive at first. They provide colorful brochures describing what it is that they can do for you, the inventor. They list patents that they had worked on and have shown success. They offer an invention kit – which contains a summary of the services that they will offer to you – and a place where they can be reached. If you contact them with a general idea about what your invention is, they will be very quick about getting back to you with their invention marketing plan.
This is the first point in which you could get scammed. They will compliment your invention, and claim that it has enormous potential to bring in large amounts of revenue. They’ll state that they’ll help you with the patent application, which, to many new inventors, can take a load of stress off their hands. They’ll say that they will run a search for patents that are similar to yours, and will make sure that your invention will be suitable to get a patent. In order to do this, they’ll ask you to pay a fee which is usually in the hundreds of dollars. If an inventor sends in the money, it’s very likely they won’t see it again.
Some inventor marketing companies will actually do a patent search for you. However, the search will be monumentally smaller than what a patent lawyer or a respected patent search firm could accomplish for you. The company will send back to you their search results, which are usually trumped by more marketing material that claims that your invention will go far when it’s taken into their hands. They’ll ask for more money – usually around $10,000 – to file a patent application, help with licensing, and market the invention using brochures and displays at trade shows. In addition to the up-front fee, the invention marketing company will indicate that they’ll require royalty fees in the ballpark of 10-15%.
When they get paid the fee, what they will really do is list your invention on a website or in a database. They may display it at trade shows, but the trade shows will be few and far between. They will, however, send you updates about its success, and in some cases, they may spin the success to sound better than it is. In this case, they may go on to say that the invention is so good that they expect it to make an exorbitant amount of money, and they’ll need a down payment on their royalties so that they can properly market it. This down payment can also be into the many thousands of dollars, and you won’t see any return on your investment.
The web is an excellent place to check up on inventor marketing companies to see if they are scams. It’s always important to determine just how many customers they’ve had and to get customer feedback. The Better Business Bureau also has quite a bit of resources available to the inventor looking to avoid scams.
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