Safeguarding the rights to your manufacturing process or invention can be expensive but may one day save you a fortune, writes Rachel Bridge.
The Sunday Times:
You have spent the holidays dreaming up fabulous ideas for products that are going to make your fortune. But now you are terrified someone is going to pinch your idea before you have had time to do anything about it. You feel you should do something about patents but don’t know where to start.
One of the biggest things that puts people off applying for a patent is the belief that it will take thousands of pounds and many years to sort out - time and money they don’t have when starting a business.
A typical patent application, which can be for a product or process, takes two to three years to grant, with a time limit of four-and-a-half years. If you are trying to get a product or service to market quickly, the prospect of spending time and energy bogged down in meetings with patent lawyers is not a cheery one.
The good news is that applying for a patent is not an isolated task that has to be completed before anything else can be done. It can be undertaken over the 1st few years of your product’s life, while you’re developing, making and marketing it, so that hopefully by the time you need to find the money to see your patent application through, the business itself will be able to fund it.
The 1st step is to file a claim with the Patent Office. This means sending an application form, which can be downloaded from the website, together with a description of your invention, including any drawings. You need to explain the main technical features of your invention and what is novel about it, and include a 150-word summary of your invention, known as an abstract. The cost of applying for a patent is £200, including a search-and-examination fee.
At what stage should you do this? The Patent Office said: ‘As soon as your invention is at a stage where you can actually describe it. We don’t want ideas - you need to have the embodiment of the idea, how it works and how it is made.’
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