How to Market and Protect Your New Ideas

Learn how to market and protect your new ideas and inventions.

The intellectual property transfer market is now estimated to be worth over $100 billion. If you have a new idea, a patent or an invention, you may be able to license it or sell it for millions of dollars.

Many Fortune 500 companies are now making their intellectual property available for sale or licensing at new online intellectual-property exchanges. These companies are trying to maximize their return on research and development investment and generate a new source of revenue by licensing their unused and underutilized inventions to others.

A number of online forums, including Minnesota-based NewIdeaTrade.com
(http://www.newideatrade.com), California-based Pl-x.com (http://www.pl-x.com), and Connecticut-based PatentTriage.com (http://www.patenttriage.com) now link buyers and sellers of intellectual property. The traditional transfer of intellectual property is complicated, costly, and can take up to one year. However, these online forums simplify and speed up the process for transfer of new ideas.

The Internet currently reaches more than 560 million users around the world. This makes innovators potential for exposure much higher than with traditional forms of media. The worldwide online commerce has reached $2.2 trillion in 2002 and is expected to reach $6.8 trillion by 2004. The innovators today can leverage the massive reach of the Internet and promote their new ideas to the global market without substantial marketing costs.

By publishing an idea on an online forum, the sellers receive automatic copyright protection provided under federal law. In addition, official copyright registration and patent rights can be obtained from appropriate authorities. A directory of Patent and Copyright Offices around the world is available at http://www.newideatrade.com/government_patent_copyright_offices.htm . When a potential buyer contacts the seller for more information about the intellectual property, the seller should require the buyer to sign a non-disclosure agreement before revealing the details. Additional information on how to obtain a patent is available at http://www.newideatrade.com/inventions.htm