Three Habits of the Highly Successful Inventor

There are three habits that separate professional inventors from amateurs. I wanna talk about those three on this video. Hi, my name is John Ferrell. I'm a Silicon Valley patent attorney. Welcome back to my channel. The first habit of professional inventors is that pros invent with purpose. They have a methodical approach to how they think about inventions. They think of inventions in terms of solving problems and creating real value for the public. Successful professional inventors look for pictures that need hanging, not just for something to hit with their new hammer. We're seeing this now in the present day where amateur inventors are taking new tools such as artificial intelligence and trying to find problems to solve. Not every problem is usefully or valuably solved with artificial intelligence. For example, a program that would help you organize your socks in a drawer or efficiently store food in a refrigerator. These just aren't problems that a lot of people are really trying to solve. Professional inventors take note of the world around them. They often carry a small notebook and write down problems as they come across them in the real world. We often see this with music writers. When they see a turn of a phrase or a catchphrase that's just interesting, they'll pull out their notebook and write it down for possible use in a song they're working on. Professional inventors keep track of their inventing. They write down their successes and they record their failures. And the reason they memorialize their failures is so that the failures don't get repeated. In the old days, it was very common to keep lab notebooks. And mostly the reason for the lab notebooks was that it was important to authenticate the date of your invention. It was important to note when the invention was made because the inventor who could prove the earliest invention date usually was able to claim the patent in the patent office. And another way that professional inventors are often very purposeful is that they set aside regular times each day or each week or periodically just for inventing, to think about their inventions, to create, to design, to invent. The second habit of successful inventors is that they make a plan. Now this doesn't have to be a formal business plan, but it's a plan for their invention. And I see this so often. Professional inventors treat their invention like a business. They write down their invention and then they write down a plan for what they're going to do with the invention. Is there a market for the invention? What problem is the invention actually going to solve? And are people willing to pay for the solution? How much is the solution worth? What's the cost of building the product that results from the invention? Is there sufficient profit in a product to make the invention commercially worthwhile? And typically to calculate this, we look at what our expected sale price is and divide by four. And if the cost of making the product is much more than 25% of the total sales price expected for the product, then it's unlikely that this product will be commercially viable. It will just cost too much to produce relative to the expected sales price and value of the product. And importantly, and probably fitting in to what the cost of the product will be to make, is how many units can be expected to be sold per year? What is the annual demand of the product going to be? And with that information, we can have some expectation of what the commercial viability and success of the product will be. Our official inventor will want to build a prototype and want to understand what that prototype will take to build. Is it complex? What materials would be used to build it? How long will it take and how much will a prototype cost? And finally, and probably most importantly from the inventor's standpoint, is how will they commercialize this product? Is it going to be possible to find a licensee? Will it be hard to find a licensee? Is this a licensee that the inventor has worked with before or are they gonna have to go out and find some new prospects for people and manufacturers that would be interested in licensing the product from them? If they need to go out and find new manufacturers, how will they approach that and how long will the process take? The third habit of the professional inventor is that the professional inventor does more than just dream about their product. They build prototypes, models, or mock-ups of what their end product is gonna look like. This is the huge chasm that separates the professional inventor from the casual dreamer. I was visiting one of my clients last week in Europe and was invited into the design engineering department and the department was full of glass cases with plastic models organized of each of the products that the company was either selling or was planning to build. These models were maybe just a half a dozen inches in height but had been carefully rendered on a 3D printer in plastic in order to communicate to management what that future product would look like. Their philosophy was that before going into the shop and bending metal and ordering parts, they wanted to build a plastic prototype just to see what the finished industrial design would look like. And also, these 3D printed models helped communicate to the rest of the engineering design team, helped get everybody on the same page, and again, was a communication tool to management to get buy-off on the finished design. And of course, larger prototypes would follow but I just thought it was super interesting that everything started initially in a 3D printed model. One of the big advantages of building an inexpensive model is it gives you the opportunity to fail early. If from your model you decide that the product just doesn't feel right or maybe it's just ugly, then you can make changes or start completely over before you're too heavily invested in a first article. There are a lot of ways that an inventor can prototype. You can build a working prototype, completely working, and of course, this is optimal if you can do so without a huge expense of time and resources. Many inventors, however, opt initially at least for a non-working prototype. That is, a prototype that has some functionality but doesn't have the complete functionality of the finished product. And of course, if the finished article is just too complex or too difficult to prototype, then an artist's rendition can be really helpful in trying to understand what a final product will look like. Okay, those are just some observations I've made from some of the really professional inventors I've had a chance to work with over the years. I'm sure you know of people who've invented stuff but never actually gotten to the point where they've turned their invention into a finished product. And usually, if the finished product isn't realized, it's generally because one of those three habits of the professional inventor has not been practiced. That's all I have to say today about inventions and inventors. If you need help patenting your invention, or if your company needs help creating its own patent strategy, I'd love to hear from you. You can contact me at the email address below. In the meantime, please leave your comments. Thank you for watching my video. I'll see you on the next one.