Turn Ideas Into Patents: for Beginners

Many scientists and engineers do not have patents not due to lack of inventive ideas, but because they do not have previous experience with applications for patents. Similar to the book writers, who get royalties from publishing their books, inventors are entitled for remuneration. Many institutes and universities do not provide format trainings for their students and research on how to draft and file patents. Institutes provide conditions, lab space, equipment and funding to conduct research. Students, engineers, postdocs and professors working at institutions must prepare their patents at their institutions. Typically, any profit from patents is to be split between the employer and the employee. If inventions are open to the public, published in academic or popular journal, presented in a talk, printed on a poster, it is accepted as state-of-the-art. In this case an invention cannot be patented. Firstly, inventors should determine whether a patent can be granted. Before starting a patent application researchers should determine if their inventive idea is new. Several requirements include novelty, utility, enablement, non-obviousness and patentable subject matter. Fortunately, to search for state-of-the-art or prior-art inventors are not longer required to go to a patent library and study similar patents manually (to determine if an idea has been already patented).  This course teaches how to use electronic patents database available to the public for free.