Canasia Sports

I have an idea for a new child safety product that I see a real demand for. There is nothing like it currently on the market and it respresents a substantial safety risk in every home with toddlers. My problem is that I have this great idea but I don't know what to do with it and I don't have thousands of dollars to hire a company to handle it for me or to custom manufacture a prototype. Anyone have experience with this and care to share your advice?

I have an idea for a new child safety product that I see a real demand for. There is nothing like it currently on the market and it respresents a substantial safety risk in every home with toddlers. My problem is that I have this great idea but I don't know what to do with it and I don't have thousands of dollars to hire a company to handle it for me or to custom manufacture a prototype. Anyone have experience with this and care to share your advice? Jim, Start by trying to concentrate on what you can do instead of what you can't do.  Then if you think of somethinhg you can do go ahead and do it.  Just keep working on the things you can do and ignoring the things you can't do and you will find yourself making progress.  This will work on almost anything, it may not get you all the way there but it will get you started.   And once you get started you'd be surprised at how much clearer things become. Alternately look at it the other way.  Make a long list of things you can't do.  Now waste a lot of time trying to think of ways to do the things on your list.  When you finally give up you will not have any shortage of excuses :^) Silly as it sounds that is exactly how most people have been trained to behave their entire lives. Best Regards, Jon Pirluck

I have an idea for a new child safety product that I see a real demand for. There is nothing like it currently on the market and it respresents a substantial safety risk in every home with toddlers. My problem is that I have this great idea but I don't know what to do with it and I don't have thousands of dollars to hire a company to handle it for me or to custom manufacture a prototype. Anyone have experience with this and care to share your advice? Your next step should be to develop a business plan to support the concept

I have an idea for a new child safety product that I see a real demand for. There is nothing like it currently on the market and it respresents a substantial safety risk in every home with toddlers. My problem is that I have this great idea but I don't know what to do with it and I don't have thousands of dollars to hire a company to handle it for me or to custom manufacture a prototype. Anyone have experience with this and care to share your advice? Set up an initial consultation with an experienced patent attorney to see if he believes the product might be patentable.  Just because you haven't seen anything like it on the market does not mean that it satisfies the legal requirements for patentability.  Most likely result will be that he recommends that a search for relevant prior patents and publications be conducted by a professional searcher, and the results evaluated to reach an opinion as to whether the product is patentable and if so, the maximum scope of potential patent coverage.  This can be probably be done, and a patentability opinion obtained, for about $500 or $600. If the search results are favorable, do some library research and get the information needed to flesh out a business plan for manufacturing and marketing the product in the US.  Do some market research and find out what your competition looks like.  Develop a list of US manufacturers of such products and call or write for their catalogs.  Also look into the pros and cons of the various ways to market and distribute the product, and size up related commissions and other selling expenses.  You can conduct such a project in the research department of most big-city main public libraries, and there is also a lot of good free information available on the internet.. This will give you an idea of the capital required, costs, projected cash flow, realistic pricing and potential sales volume expected profit margins, pricing and sales volume. Then put together at least an outline of a sensible business plan

Actually that $5000-$10,000 for a patent is misleading.  Since your product is probable a design patent versus something mechanical, it should be about $2500 to $5000 max. Design patents are easier to patent...<snip. I'm sure you will still want to do a Patent Search first; also patents may take as long as five years for approval. Stephan