Inventor Page for Boat Building Industry

Boating Inventor &
Boating Inventions Corner

Commercialization process for independent inventors trying to market or license their inventions in the boat building and boating industries by Polson Enterprises. This page specifically addresses boating inventions. Please also see our Invention Information Center which covers inventions of all types and often contains more recent tips and tools.

RBBI Inventions Page

We've had some ideas ourselves we think could be of benefit to the industry. We are posting them on our "RBBI Inventions Page." Some firms or individual inventors might want to try developing some of these ideas.

   
Top Ten Scam Warnings from U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

The suggestions below are to be taken at your own risk and are being provided as information, NOT as professional advice. We encourage you to seek professional advice from several qualified individuals as you develop your invention.


How to Develop a Boating Invention

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Note! This is a good time to point out this is a very brutal industry from the individual inventors perspective. If you look at our Patents Folder you will see a number patent lawsuits filed between the industry and individual inventors or between each other. The big boys can smash you even if you have a patent. They steal your patented product idea and produce it, your lawyer sends them a "cease and desist letter" telling them you think their product infringes on your patent and they should "cease and desist" marketing the product or you will sue them for infringement. They may respond with a "weenie offer" of pennies on the dollar of what a normal license fee for them might be and tell you if you don't sign up they will file a suit against the validity of your patent. If you get in a patent suit you better have over $150,000 in the bank. Since most of us don't you either take the "weenie offer" or just let them alone. They begin mass production and with their large established marketing organization they squash you in a couple months. Not a pretty picture.

I'm not saying all the big players do this, I'm just pointing out that they can do this to you pretty much "at will". If you haven't read, "The Invention of the Stern Drive", yet, this would be a good time. Note how many years it took that product to come to the surface and all of the behind the scenes actions going on the scenes actions going on. As long as you are reading - check out the Steve Lough vs. Brunswick Corp patent suit Court of Appeals final report in the FTP section.For one thing, this case certainly shows the importance of keeping good documents and seriously controlling any experiments.

If your product is a low cost, easy to produce idea, such as "the club" (use in locking automotive steering wheels to prevent car theft) even if you have a patent, every body under a rock overseas will be dumping "knock off" products here. In this particular case the manufacture has a large crew of lawyers, "cease and desist" letters in several languages, and budgets in the hundreds thousands of dollars a year to protect themselves against "knockoffs". You will not have this option. If you have a good idea, they will swarm you and you will be gone.

There is an excellent article titled, "How to Skin a Copycat" in the 1996 Enterprise Edition of Business Week on pages ENT4 to ENT6 in the Legal Affairs section. It contains stories of the efforts of several, including the "club" to reduce losses to copycats. As you read these techniques, image what they cost.

The only people able to protect an idea in this industry are the big boys. They threaten each other and have informal "give and take" agreements to bring stability to their new product operations. Foreign operations can be stopped by them at the ports because they come from a limited number large well known firms.

We might also point out here that a U.S. patent only gives you the right to sue to those who produce the product in the U.S. or sell the product in the U.S. You will be swarmed overseas by everybody and many foreign companies have even less scruples than U.S. companies.

In addition to the competitive problem you will have a very, very difficult or impossible time of trying to get the major players to look at your invention. They have the NIH (Not Invented Here) disease and a history of almost never dealing with individual inventors.

If you do license your great idea to someone, you can't just set back and count your money. They may not actively market your product and cause it to "die on the vine". They may just be busy fighting other fires in their company or just not really be interested in your product. You have the fire and conviction of the idea. They are looking at this weeks shipments vs. last years shipments and whipping people to make quotas. Your new product can get lost in their large system.

These difficulties make it nearly impossible for individuals to profit from boating inventions. I have had a few myself and seeing the difficulties I have just posted them on the RBBI Inventions Page for the world to see. If the ideas are used, hopefully, they will be a minor stimulation to our economy and I will have the knowledge of where they came from. If you would like to do the same, we can group them on this site for all to see.

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Some of the very basic problems encountered by all are:

I suggest you do some real soul searching about:

Take the above two groups of questions, think about them, and take them with you when you go somewhere for assistance. You need to find the answers to these questions for your specific situation. Some resources can be found in our Inventor Links in our Other Useful Links section.


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