How to protect my idea?
I am sorry that if it is not the right place to ask this question. I want to sell my idea to a/ a few companies to improve their products. I want to ask them to hire me as this project engineer to work in the company. If my idea is not going to buy by company A, I will sell it to company B. My question is that how I should write in the email, so that they need to agree that they will not use my idea if they don't hire me?
Thanks
Note: I plan to send the idea one by one to different companies. I am not trying to sell my idea to them all at the same time.
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In my opinion, ideas are really cheap and no company will give you much value for just an Idea unless you can implement that idea. – Sourabh 12 years ago
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You should head over to the [Patent StackExchange](http://www.askpatents.com). They'll be able to advice you on the steps you'd take for patenting your idea, and help you look for prior art that would preclude your being issued a patent. – Roddy Of The Frozen Peas 12 years ago
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How would you expect a company to protect itself if you present an idea they are in the process of implementing? – Jeff O 12 years ago
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There is no way you are going to sell this by emailing people. You need to develop relationships with key people before you approach them with your idea – Susan Jones 12 years ago
3 Answers
It's going to be very difficult for you to do this. Contrary to some of the other answers, you can't patent an idea, only a design or process. And even if you turned your idea into a working prototype, the process of patenting takes many years, can be expensive, and is not guaranteed to be given. Even with a patent, trying to enforce it is next to impossible unless you are have expensive lawyers. I have a patent I am part of through a former employer, and it's been useless for me.
Companies don't often take ideas from outsiders, and even less rarely will they sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement on an unsolicited business idea. The problem is, most ideas in a business-sector have been thought of. Say you are pitching an idea to banks. There are 100,000+ people working in the banking sector in America. Your idea has probably been thought of before by one of them, even if the company decided not to go implement it.
Here's what I would suggest you do, in order of chances of success:
1) Just go ahead and do the idea yourself. If your idea is "soap, but in the shape of cute animals", go and make cute animal soap. The process of making your product might get the attention of a competitor in the space, and you could be acquired or go into a partnership with them.
2) Get hired by one of them. Sounds like you have a target list of companies in a business sector that you want to sell your idea to. Your second best plan then is to make a targeted attempt to get hired as an engineer there. Contacting their HR dept, finding friends who can get you contacts, applying for jobs posted online... If you actively seek them, you will get their attention. Having an active interest in their business and ideas for improving products are very attractive to companies when mentioned in an interview.
3) Finally, if you can't start your own company as a competitor, and don't want to get hired by them by the normal route, you could try to pitch them your idea by sending it to the head of their engineering department. But again, the chances are quite low. Its very easy for them to be able to truthfully say "we had this idea 5 years ago, but haven't implemented it yet." There is no protection from that.
best of luck.
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I agree its difficult, but patent is the only way to monetize the idea, if it is based on a product you don't own and can't afford licensing. True, patents have many short-comings, but "giving up" as you suggest doesn't really answer the question (although may provide some reality check to the OP). – Littleadv 12 years ago
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If you start now, you can have your patent application in to the patent office in about 6 months in my experience. That's how long it takes to hire a lawyer, research other patents and prior art, and go through the back-and-forth process of creating the patent. It takes about 18 months before the patent office publishes the patent. Then it takes 3 more months for your patent to be reviewed, and for you to be sent change requests by the patent office: http://www.marsdd.com/articles/patent-process-timelines/ So 2 years from first filing, $10K+ in fees, and then what do you have? – Scott Duffy 12 years ago
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You only need to submit the provisional application to begin your marketing process. Of course, it takes time. So does developing your own product. Of course it takes money, so does developing your own product, except that developing your own product takes significantly more time and more money. It takes a couple of weeks to formulate and submit a provisional application, give it another couple of weeks to find a good lawyer. Been there, done that, it works. – Littleadv 12 years ago
You first need to patent it. Then you can try and market licensing of your patent (or the patent itself).
Of course, you'll have to first implement it in order to be able to patent (don't know if they require an actual implementation, or mere details of how to do that, any time I dealt with patents I had implementations at hand already).
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this assumes that the idea is patentable. not all ideas are. e.g. software and business processes are not patentable everywhere – Adrian Howard 12 years ago
It's not wrong place to ask.
Before taking contact with the companies in your list or paying money for lawyers or patent attorneys, do some background research do check is your idea really new. Depends what kind of product idea it is, but sometimes the Google image search is very helpful. Check some area specific databases, blogs, magazines, forums, presentations, etc. And don't forget the patent databases.
Then contact with some patent attorney to consult how to present your idea.
Good luck!
