17. Invention, intellectual property & income
The goal this week is to prepare a possible dissemination plan for my project, answering aspects such as who is it for, how is it going to be funded, what licensing will be chosen, will it need a business plan, etc.
Scenario 1: use of the model for educational purposes
During the development of my final project, I am still learning a lot from others. One of the futures that I like most is using it just for educational purposes.
Since at the moment I am teaching three design related classes at URJC, this project could be use to illustrate how to use rapid prototiping techniques in product design. The device should go through further iterations, to better answer the questions that arise with every step.
It then follows that I should not only document the how, but also the why. The project should fork in different directions everytime there is a design requirement that can be acomplished in more than one obvious way, and explore as many of them.
In this scenario, the target audience are college level design students. The funding needed to further develop the project, which is not high in the material side, could be provided by the Arts & Humanities department of the URJC. The work required could be covered by at least another two teachers besides me and two lab technicians.
The physical part of the project would become less relevant than the documenting of it. As for the licensing, I would use a Creative Commons Attributtion Share Alike 4.0 International, to minimize restrictions in use and at the same time broadening the possible scope of the project in the future. One key aspect I find of great interest is the attribution: it reminds everybody that all of us stand on the shoulders of giants: we must keep it going.
A next step would be to move this type of project out of the URJC, and reach a broather audience. Week long summer courses are a great opportunity to explore, and could engage people for this activities. Nevertheless, in my opinion directly this object might not be of interest for the masses..
Scenario 2: develop the object for commercial use
In this second scenario, the first thing I would do is stablish if there is interest in such a device. I would scout through kitchen studios and cabinet makers within my reach. I know that there is a bottleneck when installing a kitchen: The counter is never measured and cut before the cabinets are in place. That means that once the cabinet maker has installed the cabinets, a different trade comes in, measures goes back to their shop and cut to measure. If the woobly wall-er works as expected, the cabinet maker could run it, and send the data directly to the counter maker, saving time and avoiding innacuracies.
Given there is a market for the device, I would plot a business plan: How deep is the market? What is the state of the art? What is the competence doing? What price tag is the prospect willing to consider? I would also consider selling not the object, but the service. That means contacting key players, such as Cosentino, who could cascade the project down to its affiliates.
In this scenario, the project would need at least three or four iterations, so the following requirementes for actual use are met:
- Accuracy - repeatibility
- Connectivity
- Guide system in place deployement
Most likely, the stepper would be dismissed, and I would explore using some sort of encoder, so the device knows its positiona along the rail.
I would not apply for any pattent, and just use a MIT like license, under which I allow use, but retain copyright.
Financing this scenario is what I find most difficult: there are still a huge load of working hours needed to develop something viable. I do not think the market is deep enough to go the VC route, so in the end it would be selling the product as service, and establishing a payment plan to satisfy the project needs.
Scenario 3: casual & hobbyist use
This scnario actually could be considered a mix of the former two: the project will be used by hobbyist, who mostly like to learn while they are doing.
Dissemiation plan would consist of publishing in Instructables, Thingiverse and Git Lab, or another equivalent DevOps platform.
The project should live in a blog style web site, with articles explaining how systems work, different processes to make it and forked projects. At the moment, there is a legion of makers, youtubers, vbloggers in a mixed up enviroment. My guess is that making meaningful income out of it is next to impossible.
If any traction is detected, a small kit shop could be the next step, selling parts for building this or similar devices. For now, I know next to nothing in this area, but I can imagine that competence is fierce, and prices are just another race to the bottom.
So honestly, I am quite pesimistic about making any icome directly out of this project. Nevertheless, indirectly, the income I am still achieving is inmense, in the form of experience and knowledge.