The following article is written by Don Kesinger, President of the Rocky Mountain Inventors Congress (RMIC*). This article is Reprinted with permission.

1. The first commandment for inventors is, find a problem and solve it creatively.
2. Next document your intellectual property. Draw and write in an inventors notebook about your invention, then have an impartial witness sign and date it. This means no relatives or business partners should be a witness.
3. Consider a patent search, either in the library, or on the Internet and ultimately the Patent office in Washington D.C. This could save you a lot of grief. It will show if your invention is patentable or if you are infringing on someone else’s patent.
4. Next you have several choices:

1. Have everyone who sees your invention sign a confidential disclosure statement, which is difficult to do.

Or, you can file a provisional patent application for as little as $75. This gives you one year of protection until you have to file it as a utility patent, or do nothing!

5. Next, make a sample or build a prototype of your invention. These can be expensive, but in some cases are an absolute necessity. They can be used for:

1. Proof of concept
2. Cost analysis
3. Endurance testing
4. Market analysis
5. Selling to potential customers or licensees

6. Decision Time. You have three basic choices:

1. Go into production yourself. Do you have the necessary skills, money, and time? This option takes the most work, money, and time.
2. Contract out the production and you do the financing, marketing, and managing. This method is not quite as much work and doesn’t take quite as much money.
3. License it to some large company and you draw the royalties. This is my favorite.

"I have done all of these and none of them are easy. So don’t quit your job too soon."