Mental wrote:
AngryCorvair wrote:
how does jinxing work? i mean, i want to tell y'all what i've been working on lately (in very general terms since the patent hasn't been awarded yet), but i don't want to jinx it. in the worst case, i'll have my name on a patent and one more line on my resume. in the best case, i'll be towing my Challenge / Lemons / UTCC cars with a much nicer rig!
I think thats enough. You don't wanna jinx it, but give us enough so we can all wish the best for you. Best of luck.
oh, about that other thing i was working on:
a good friend from undergrad is now an ER doctor, and is also the director of research at his hospital. he came up with an idea for implementing a kind of therapy for patients who have been resuscitated after heart attack, but he didn't know how to turn the idea into hard parts. so we discussed it a few times, then in a couple of days we built two prototype units and a test stand, and collected some data. The data were favorable when compared to current technology for the same therapy, so we formed an LLC and got a patent attorney / intellectual property guru on board. i provided sketches, descriptions of hardware and test stand, and summary of test procedure and data, and we've got a provisional patent application in the system. we're currently working on FDA approval, looking for venture capital, and working with a medical device development company to build prototypes for clinical trials. exciting stuff, for sure. and if i hadn't been laid off, my buddy the doctor probably wouldn't have contacted me for the engineering.
the end result will be one of the following:
someone else has applied for patent on similar device earlier than us (although our searches have turned up nothing), in which case we get nothing.
we get our patent, but clinical trials show poor effectiveness or there's no cost-effective manufacturing solution. "patent holder" looks good on resume.
patent comes through, clinicals have favorable outcome, and we sell the intellectual property for a one-time payment.
same as above, but we negotiate a percentage of the revenue on every device sold, and i finally get that 280SL pagoda i've always wanted.
time will tell.