How to Make Profit From My Own Inventions

Make money from your inventions.

There are few different ways to make a profit from your own inventions. The road you take will depend on how much money you wish to invest in your invention and how much time you want to put into promoting it. Before you sell, assign or license your invention, you should protect it for the first year with a provisional patent application.

Things You'll Need

• Paper
• Pencil
• Prototype
• Computer with Internet connection

Instructions

1. Draw your invention and label the parts on a piece of paper.

2. Fill out and submit a provisional patent application to the US Patent & Trademark Office. The cost is about $110 and it allows you to label your invention "patent pending" for one year.

3. Make a physical model of your invention, which is known as a prototype. You can do this yourself or pay someone to help you with it, such as a machine shop or manufacturer.

4. Decide the route you want to go. You can submit your idea to a large company for licensing or assignment. If you license your invention to a company, they have use of your invention idea for a set amount of time during which they pay you royalty payments. After the predetermined period of time has elapsed, the rights to the invention revert back to you. Another option is to permanently assign the rights to your invention over to a company and receive a set amount of money in return. The terms of licensing and assignment agreements are negotiable. The third option is to bring the invention to market yourself, which requires the most amount of time and capital but usually has the greatest profit potential.

5. Conduct a cost analysis of your invention to determine what it will cost to manufacture, what it will sell for and what your profit will be.

6. Manufacture your invention. See thomasnet.com for a list of manufacturers and their specialties in the US.

7. Set up a website and sell your invention online or sell it directly to retail stores if you decide to market the invention yourself. You can also sell it on auction websites like eBay.

Tips & Warnings

• If you have trouble breaking into the retail market, you may want to consider offering your invention on consignment to retail stores.

• Check out edisonnation.com and innocentive.com to find out what type of products they are looking for. Perhaps your invention will fulfill one of their categories.

References

• Edison Nation
• Innocentive
• USPTO

Resources

• Thomas Net