Patents

Some useful lessons in patents, trademarks and design registraion can be learnt from this post on Steve Van Dulken's Patent Blog.
I'll reproduce it in full below:

The Tangle Teezer®

Dragons' Den is an entertaining TV programme as so often those asking for cash for their ideas are naive, but sometimes the experts do get it wrong. Shaun Pulfrey's Tangle Teezer® is an example.

A year ago he asked for £85,000 in return for a 15% stake in his new hairbrush. Its teeth are designed to flex just the right amount to minimise tugging while smoothing the cuticles, says a story on the invention. An experienced London hairdresser, Pulfrey had thought of the idea 15 years ago but only made a prototype in 2004. All the dragons dismissed it.

A few weeks ago, Boots agreed to stock the product at 600 stores. Turnover (largely on the Internet, at £9.95) is already £800,000 annually, a quarter of which is profit. It looks as if the dragons missed out on a nice profit.

I had a look at the intellectual property behind the idea. In March 2005 Pulfrey applied for a European Community trade mark for the name, probably his most powerful selling tool.

In March 2007 he applied for a British patent, which was published a week ago as a Hair care device.

Then in April 2007 he applied for a Community design, one of the drawings of which is shown here.

In October 2007 he applied for design protection in the USA with American "design patent" D576804.

Finally in January 2008 he filed for a US trade mark/ trademark for the name. There may be other applications waiting publication, such as, perhaps, an American patent application.

The difference between designs and patents is, broadly speaking, that the former protects the appearance while the latter protects how it works. He used Marks & Clerk, a firm of patent attorneys, to advise him on his strategy and to write the applications.

A problem for anyone interesting in foreign protection is that this must be sought within 12 months of filing for a patent, or within 6 months of filing for a design. "Filing out of convention" by missing those deadlines means that your own domestic filings can be used to show that the idea is not new. Many who might be interested in filing abroad do not (yet) have the finance, or are not certain of product appeal, and therefore decide not to gamble on filing. Failure to file in a country means that the idea can be used there by others.

Feedback

Getting feedback from your customer can be tricky. We are all told that market research is important in writing your business plan for start-up. But what about on-going feedback about your product or service?

photo from urban mixer

Comments on a blog such as those below (!) can be useful, but how many of us really have time to formulate and then type in our ideas? How about a poll? Blogger allows me to include a poll in my blog template (see top left) but how useful are the results?

There are plenty of survey websites and online polling such as Survey Monkey, NTU's own Autoform (used by our SPUR researcher Sara Chamberlain) and I found this one recently- Poll Daddy

The first two rely on you having access to the target group, as you have to direct people to the survey. There may be random people out there who do online surveys for fun, but let's face it, would you trust their answers? Maybe you would... Anyhow, Poll Daddy seems to allow you to survey people who visit your website, so as long as you get the traffic, maybe you'll get results.

What do you think, what ways of market research work best for you? Comment below!

Researching your idea

Neil Infield's blog 'In through the outfield' can be hard work sometimes, in fact I subscribed to it thinking that the reference to the 'outfield' meant there would be more cricket talk and less business! Ho hum, nothing so far

Anyhow recently he reproduced this great post on background research which I thought really insightful, so here it is...

...Information expert Karen Blakeman of RBA Information Services publishes a list of top business research tips on her blog at the end of each of her Business Information workshops.

This is the list generated by the researchers attending her workshop in April. As you may have spotted the 10 has grown to 15 in this instance.

1. FITA Import Export Business and International Trade Leeds. http://www.fita.org/. The “Really Useful Links”in the menu on the left hand side of the screen takes you to a range of international sources on business information. One participant of this workshop found the “Doing business”, and in particular in the Middle East, especially useful.
2. Nationmaster http://www.nationmaster.com/.An interface to a plethora of statistics on web sites world wide. Some of the statistics are 2-3 years old but there are links to the original site so that you can search for more up to date information. Several participants suggested that this site is a good ‘index’ of where data is likely to be found.
3. Blogpulse http://www.blogpulse.com/.One of several blog search engines, but this was singled out for its Trends graphs. These show how often your search terms are mentioned in posts over a selected period of time. In a business context the occurrences will usually match reports in the mainstream media. When they don’t, click on the peaks in the graph to see what is going on behind the scenes. Superb for picking up on rumours and gossip.
4. Yahoo Finance. Go to any Yahoo and click on the Finance link. For the UK version go to http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/. Yahoo Finance provides basic information on stock exchange quoted companies on the major stock exchanges around the world. Information includes current share price information (delayed by 15-30 minutes) provided by the stock exchanges;
   company profiles; charts in which you can compare the company share price with another company, the sector and an index such as the FTSE 100; current news on the company and focussing on the regulatory news; and daily historical share prices as figures that can be downloaded to spreadsheets.
5. Freepint Bar http://www.freepint.com/.Head for the discussion area, labelled as the Bar, where you can post your query and tap into the knowledge of regular ‘tipplers’
6. Silobreaker.http://www.silobreaker.com/. A new site pulling news from
   the usual newspapers and journals, but also blogs, video and audio. In
   addition It offers geographical hotspots, trends and a network visualisation tool, which was singled out by one participant.
7. Contact a relevant research, trade or professional body for help inlocating experts. sources of information and reports. They may not have anything on their web site but there may something ‘on file’ that they are willing to supply free of charge or for which they are prepared to negotiate a fee.
8. Intelways. http://www.intelways.com/. An interface to many search tools grouped by type e.g. news, video, image. Type your search terms in once and click on the different search tools one by one. A reminder of the different types of information that you should be looking at and of the wide range of search engines that are out there.
9. Click on the Advanced Search option for any of the tools that you encounter, be it Google et al or a web site’s own search option. They offer great ways of focussing your search by date, file format, site, author etc.
10. RBA Business Sources. http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/.Selected sources of business information organised by type e.g. statistics, share prices, company registers. Yes, it is my own site [blush] but they did insist!
11. Phil Bradley’s web site and blog. http://www.philb.com/ and http://philbradley.typepad.com/. Excellent sources of information on Web 2.0 ’stuff’ and search tools. In particular, his blog has no-nonsense reviews of new search tools that claim they will change the world of search.
12. Intute. http://www.intute.ac.uk/. Forget about the ac.uk label.This is an excellent starting point for anyone working in business and wanting to identify quality resources on a wide range of subjects and industries.
13. Hometrack. http://www.hometrack.co.uk/.This site provides key statistics and data on the UK housing market and financing of that market. Especially relevant in the current economic climate.
14. Alacrasearch. http://www.alacra.com/alacrasearch.A Google custom search engine that focuses on business sites selected by Alacra. [A personal note: this is in my top 5 favourite search tools].
15. CIA World Factbook - country profiles. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/.Key statistics on every country. For those of you of a more adventurous disposition when it comes to travel, it even includes the number of airports with unpaved runways!