The Pocket Invention Record

Over the years, several clients have asked me to provide them with an invention disclosure form that they could make available to their inventive personnel for recording inventions. It’s a relatively routine question and I’ve got a favorite generic disclosure form that I’ve given to several folks over the years.

Recently, a client reminded me of an old post I wrote on Promote the Progress about Thoughts on techniques to increase invention disclosures. The client is struggling with the exact problem I described in that post – their current administrative process associated with completing an invention disclosure is intimidating and appears to be censoring the inventors. The end result – inventions are going undocumented.

This, of course, is tragic!

While the client was intrigued by the tech-centric solution I offered way back in 2004, he asked if I’d be willing to help them with a no-tech solution – a new invention disclosure form – that would make it easier for the inventors to document their work. The client even challenged me to make the inventors enjoy the process.

Now that was something I couldn’t pass up.

These were my marching orders: “I want you to think out of the box. I want you to abandon all convention here and create a form that gives us (meaning the patent group) the information we need but that the engineers don’t hate and avoid.”

A few weeks went by and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had a few silly ideas like “just get everything on one page” and “add some fun design elements that ease the pain a bit.” Finally I told myself I was thinking way too small. The client had instructed me to “abandon all convention.”

So I did.

I looked at my standard from and immediately understood “the pain.” An inventor ready and willing to disclose his invention wants to do exactly that – a brief note about what it is that he invented. Maybe a sketch or two. That’s it….that’s all he wants to do. But the form asks for all sorts of painful legal information (”list the closest prior art of which you are aware…list all dates on which the idea has been disclosed to persons outside the company, and the names of the people receiving the information”). Sure, this is important and critical information for the patent attorney to have, but couldn’t it be collected at a later point in the process? Maybe while interviewing the inventor during preparation of the application?

Hmmm…now I was getting somewhere. I thought that if I did two things, I might be able to create a form that achieves the stated goals. First, I would strip out all of the information that doesn’t relate directly to the inventor’s idea. The ‘painful legal information’ could be collected later. Second, I would design a form that collects the remaining, essential information in a fun, easy-to-use manner.

And that’s how The Pocket Invention Record was born.

Check it out:

The PIR is printed on heavy, non-coated 3 x 5 cards – perfect for carrying around and keeping ‘at the ready’. The design provides copious space for a sketch (on the front) and a brief description (on the back). There is space for the absolutely necessary legal information – date, inventors, and a signature. A title can be added, but is purely optional (some inventors tell me they hate assigning titles to their ideas…they feel it blocks them from thinking about it in different ways later).

I even added two organizational hacks on the side – those white boxes you see are for a ‘category’ and ‘priority’ system that the inventor and/or legal department might implement. They’re simple to use – darken the box that corresponds to the category and priority of the invention being disclosed. For example, the first box in the category series might correspond to “snow-making machines,” the second “ice melt spray,” and so on.

To appreciate the beauty of this hack, you’ve got to see a series of the cards lined up in a box or drawer. I’ve reproduced the effect digitally below, but it really doesn’t do it justice. You can immediately get a sense of what you (or they) have worked on recently. You can even quickly retrieve the inventions relating to a particular category.

I can’t take credit for this hack – the idea comes from the Pile of Index Cards organization system. Check out the PoIC wiki for a great picture of this system in use.

The inventors have worked with the cards for some time now. They took some getting used to, but the use rate is, so far, higher than we expected. The card has not replaced the tried and true (and scary) Invention Disclosure Form for this client, but the client remains hopeful that it will. I tend to think that the best approach – the one that will ensure the highest documentation rate – is to provide a toolbox full of several documentation options and to let each inventor choose the one that works best for him or her.

The best part of this story is this – I worked with the client to ensure that the card can be used by others. So, now I’m able to provide these to anyone that would like them. I’m sending them to several of my key inventors this holiday season (thus explaining the timing of this post). If you’d like to give them a try, or if you know of someone who would, contact me at matt@bipo.us and I’ll send some out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 11:49 am and is filed under idea management and tagged with Pocket Invention Record. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.