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welcome to Innovation Cafe I’m your friendly neighborhood inventor Gary Schuster and today we’re going to have a brief talk about a patent that never issued for me I couldn’t get it issued and that’s okay so what happened I was at a formal event with my then three and a half four-year-old daughter and she would love to take off running so if I turn my head for a second she would run and she ran into a parking lot and I quickly chased her down but it got me thinking that could have been really bad and a lot of parents have this so I thought well what would be a good thing to do for a toddler well you want to disrupt their running if something weird happens they’re going to stop that’s how toddlers are they’re naturally curious and they’re naturally going to stop when something interesting is going on so I came up with a proximity detection system where the parent has a transmitter the shoes each have a receiver when the signal gets Beyond a
certain level of weakness it means that the kid and the receiver are too far apart and probably the kid is taking off and it’ll cause the shoes to vibrate and that should be enough to stop a kid from doing it now why didn’t I get a patent on it it’s pretty simple um they did that to catch prisoners who were running away and there were already some patented um technology for that and so there was just too much prior art there were some things that would distinguish my invention from the prior art but ultimately I wouldn’t be able to get broad enough claims issued to make it worth it and so I walked away and that’s a huge trick for inventors it’s skill it’s almost impossible inventors tend to fall in love with their inventions and I loved this one I thought we could really keep some kids safe maybe even save some lives but I also had to be realistic if I couldn’t get a patent on it I couldn’t get a patent on it I mean it’s it’s that simple why throw money at the patent office and at lawyers if
you’re not going to be able to get some kind of payoff or at least if the cost benefit is positive here the cost benefit was really high costs almost zero benefit so the best thing you can do is take the win in the sense that someone else thought it was valuable someone else patented it someone else was using it and then you came up with it and what does that mean that means that you came up with a really good idea and so just take that pat yourself on the back a little bit say I did it well that time maybe next time I’ll come up with something that hasn’t already been invented and move on don’t waste money don’t waste time on something that has already been patented that you can’t monetize and that that being said you could obviously if you think it’s a good thing for Humanity you could go and publish at different places and promote it so that’s my didn’t get patented way to stop toddlers from running away story and from beautiful downtown Vancouver inside of my living
room this has been Gary Schuster your friendly neighborhood inventor with Innovation Cafe and asking you give a like give a subscribe maybe tell some friends make a comment and I’ll see you next time thanks