Project 17: Invention, Intellectual Property and Business Models

This week we had to look at possibilities on how to disseminate our final project. How to make it available, file patents, find a market or investors and sell or produce it.

The Plan

I really like my final project and will continue to work on it and use it in my everyday life, probably also putting it to bikes of my family to protect them from being stolen. But on the other hand, I do not plan to make it a commercially available product. This is because there are already products available on the market, for both parts of my project. There are devices who charge a battery/phone by the hub dynamo and there are bike trackers with a battery that lasts around a year. So for this, I can't file a patent, because I didn't do anything new. I also don't plan to produce and sell it.

But anyways, I want to make my project available to the public, so people can rebuild it if they want or learn from my experience and built on this.


The OHSWA logo

The Open Source Hardware Association is an interesting group that supports projects with open hardware so that everybody can learn from it. Even if I would like to sell my product, I would make the hardware available here, because I believe that open hard- and software is important, as it accelerates development. The Open Source Hardware definition defines what is open source hardware and that includes, for example, the original design files, so changes can be made easily.

Platforms for publishing

For this version 1 of my final project, I will publish it only on the this FabAcademy website, as an open source project, including progress, all original design files for production and also all software.


The Instructables logo

After extensive testing, I would like to publish the next version on Instructables, as that is one of the biggest DIY tutorial platforms. So there it is more likely that somebody who is interested in my project finds this project, compared to my a different webpage/blog.

Final project slide



Final project video