Does Your Idea Have a Chance?

Many inventors often hesitate entering into the expensive invention market because they are worried that their product is already out on the market or that there may be obstacles that they will run into. With a little effort on your part, you can investigate on a preliminary basis whether or not your product will succeed, and while it is not a one night project you should be able to complete the project in 30 days. I think every inventor should do this to ascertain whether or not the product has a chance at success before spending a lot of money.

Start with a search at Google Patents

Goggle Patents has a feature called prior art searching. Typically, patents are granted only if the invention is new and not obvious, which means in patent language, that there isn't prior art, which simply means the product hasn't been publicly disclosed previously either in a patent, by being sold, or in some other fashion. The Prior Art Finder makes it easy to search multiple sources simultaneously for prior art. You can experiment with it by clicking on the "Find Prior Art" button from a patent's main page, or on the "Related" link in patent search results.

The Prior Art Finder identifies key phrases from EPO (European Patent Office) and post-1976 US patent documents, combines them into a search query, and displays the results from Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the rest of the web.

The key to being successful with a preliminary prior art search is to use multiple search terms that are broader than your idea. For example, let's say you have plastic bag with a zipper to keep your shirts from getting wrinkled on an airplane. You might search for wrinkle free clothes bag, plastic enclosures for traveling, vacuum sealed bag for traveling, and bags for enclosure in travel suitcases or carriers.

Competition

You want to list competition and its sales price. Competition doesn't have to be just like your product, but it has to achieve the same goal. For example if your product minces garlic, competition would be any type of product that minces garlic. You want competition so you can show your product along with competitive products to at least a few potential users so you can get their feedback on whether or not you have a saleable product.

The best way to get competitive information is from product directories that are published in industry trade magazines or industry trade shows. You might find these with a Google search, for example housewares trade magazine. But they can sometimes be hard to find. Larger libraries will have a reference source called Gales' Source of Publications and Broadcast Media. That reference has a section called trade magazines where you can typically find the trade magazines for any industry. Once you have the name you should be able to find the source with Google and see if the magazine publishes an annual product directory.