The biggest mistakes made by startups and inventors? These are not patents

The biggest mistake people make with their intellectual property has nothing to do with protection. It's not about whether someone else will benefit from their brilliant idea. It's not about whether there is demand for it in the market.

Many of us are getting ahead of ourselves. We file non-provisional patent applications, build expensive prototypes, raise funds and start businesses – and then, after all that, find out if anyone really wants our product. This process is extremely expensive, time consuming and, when our assumptions are wrong, painful.

The risk of spending a lot of time and money on an idea that nobody wants exists at all levels of the innovation ecosystem, including inventors, startups, small businesses and large corporations . For example, the US National Science Foundation awards more than $200 million each year to advance the development of new ideas through its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. Startups are funded to do technical research, which is inherently risky, but market risks are more often what cause them to fail.

“The biggest risk is that they build something that no one really cares about,” program director Ben Schrag pointed out at a meeting of the Inventors Groups of America.

When choosing startups and small businesses to reward, the NSF considers how common market risks are managed and provides all winners with training on how to better understand their market and customers . The NSF also launched a program in 2011, Innovation Corps or I-Corps, which aims to teach researchers how to test the market before starting a company.

"It's so that [the company] doesn't spend a lot of money on R&D to reduce technical risk, and then realize too late that it was actually a different problem - l absence of a customer issue - which was the most significant threat of all time,” Schrag said.

There is a simple solution! You need to test the market to determine if someone really wants your imagined product or service first. Are the benefits of your product or service great enough to get potential customers to buy it?

There are many benefits to testing market demand. You can leverage market demand to bring other parties to the table. It gives you a paper trail of protection. In my experience, potential licensees are less likely to try to work with you when you have evidence of market demand. You can file better IP based on the feedback you receive by aligning your patent claims with your business goals.

You have to consider the risk that you develop an idea that no one wants before spending a lot of time and money. This is the great advantage of the strategy plan below. It's an effective way to test the benefits of your idea before building and protecting it. It allows you to refine or redesign your product and protect it accordingly, based on the feedback you receive. Ultimately, it helps you move in the right direction by providing extremely useful information.

Let the market help you determine when to file a non-provisional patent application.

Here's a simple four-step process that inventors and startups can rely on.

Step...