It is good that there is a day for remembering mothers – May 10th is Mother’s Day. A good day to take a close look at the women inventors as a whole.

Overall, the percentage of women inventors is very less. Many reasons are attributed to this. One major reason in the early days was the fact that until around 1850, anything which a woman invented belonged to her husband, according to the law! The law is no longer there, but still, only 11% of US patents were awarded to women in 2002. So, there is a lot of improvement needed in this area. Read the rest of this entry »

The first four points were published in a previous article How To Be A Successful Inventor – Part 1. Read it if you have not already done so.

5. Do a patent search

So, you have done the market research, and the idea sounds promising. Before you go ahead and spent hundreds of hours on building a prototype, spend some time to do a thorough patent search. You do not want to build something expending months of effort, only to find out at the end that someone had already filed a similar patent. You can do a patent search at USPTO Patent Search .

6. Build a prototype

Remember one thing – ideas cannot be patented, usually. Read the rest of this entry »