Gaylene Anderson Talk

This talk was very interesting and contained a lot of helpful information I hope to remember and use if I need to.

To begin with, I feel that knowing how to make a patent and the steps to go through in order to make one was very important to learn since as students we are working on projects and who knows if we might just design the next best thing and in return we might want to or need to protect our ideas in order to make money off of them.  A part of the patenting process I thought was also good to know is the concept of liscencing out product which is where other companies pay us to use our idea.  I feel that this would be a cool route to go through if I was to design a product.

I also am glad she talked about the importance of documenting everything and creating Confidentiality agreements.  I knew that if you are to talk about something that could make you or someone a lot of money, odds are people are going to try to steel the idea, and I was also not aware of the time frame you have to work with once you talk about your product before you are out of luck patenting it.  No instead of making someone sign something because you dont trust them to not steel your idea, you can say you have to do that in order to legally patent it.  This could be useful during our entire careers as Mechancial Engineers if we ever design something worthwhile.

Also lastly, something very worthwhile while a student at the University would be to patent a cool item that consumers would want because while you are a student and if it relates to your field of study, or if you did it while working with school items and proffs then you can go through the school to get your item patented.  This is very worthwhile since you dont have to pay the patent fee's or go through the hassels of submitting everything since the office Gaylene works in will take care of it for you.  In the end you still make plenty of money off of it, 40%, another 40% goes to her office so they can pay to submit more patents and such, and the last 20% goes to your college to help them out with more research.

This was a very great presentation and I learned a lot that I hope to be able to use someday.