New Ideas wanted!
I am looking for a new idea, an idea that will make me rich and successful. I’m sure you have had this experience. You think of an idea and then you wonder if it’s been done before you or not. You search online to find out if anyone has applied for a patent on your idea and found that they haven’t yet. So why don’t we just go ahead with the application? After all, it can only be rejected once we’ve filed it! Well, no actually… In this article I’ll explain why you should never apply for a patent without first doing some research into what other people have done in the area that interests you so much (or at least something similar).
I want to protect my idea, let’s do it or not?
It is important to remember that patents are public documents. Therefore, anyone can search for your patent and read it. Hence, if you have not set the strategy right, you may be hazarding your own business journey ahead. Thus, making sure how the IP and patent strategy aligns with your business model is very important. To also make sure the patents is the right choice, there are other IP tools such as designs and trade secrets.
If someone has already patented an idea similar to yours before you do so, then there’s nothing much that you can do about it other than change some things up in order to make sure that what is being done is different from what has been patented before (and hopefully still meets all the requirements).
The most useful thing about patent searching is that it tells you what not to do
It is unlikely that you will find a patent that exactly matches what you want to do, but the search can help you avoid making the same mistakes as other people. By searching for similar patents and seeing what problems they had with their invention, you can figure out how to avoid those issues yourself. The learnings to gather from patents is immense, a pure goldmine of information at hand and now more easily access by AI analysis facilitate both exploring and reading of the complex literature.
If you can’t find any references to your idea then you have a better chance of protecting it
It is worth noting that if you are unable to find any references to your idea, it does not mean that no one has done something similar before. You should also bear in mind that many small innovations have been made by people who have gone about their work without considering whether their ideas were protected first .Or it may be hidden in other sources of information, and then always follow up with search on internet or in related technical literature.
