Wage the Battle by Paul Nehlen

Author:Paul Nehlen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Firebrand Technologies

8

THE WAR ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON and I had just gotten off the phone with an irate customer. Our delivery for a high-capacity aquatic water filter was past due, and the customer was up against a hard deadline for opening a water park. Not good. I checked with my factory crew and found that the item that was holding up the shipment was located in a long queue. I immediately went to the sales team to see if we could sneak it up ahead of less-critical shipments with later install dates. After some phone calls and e-mails, we managed to squeak the order out on time without negatively impacting other customers.

That’s usually how it goes in business. Except that this particular component was continually a problem. While I hadn’t been with this team for very long, I’d encountered the problem before. After spending a couple of hours in the machine shop and then out in assembly, I had a brainstorm: maybe we could make a change to the part that would substantially decrease the time it took to make the final product. I pulled the electronic blueprints up on the computer, sketched some concepts in my notebook, and then made the notations on the computer.

The changes meant we’d have to reach out to a supplier who had some equipment we needed. We’d also need some prototypes built. I called a supplier we were using for similar work on another product line and discussed it with him. We got approval to get the prototype going; I’d have parts shipped from Wisconsin to Rhode Island a few weeks after the special tools were cobbled together and there was a production slot to drop them in.

Not bad for an afternoon of work.

Later that evening, it struck me: not only would this method change save us over 70 percent of the time to produce the part; it would give us capabilities that the current part didn’t offer. That’s huge. Suddenly we were talking about a patentable idea to a filter whose origins began more than a hundred years ago in America’s early machine and sheet metal fabrication plants.

It was about 8 p.m. and I still hadn’t eaten dinner, so I went back to my apartment and ate, then began poring over the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s website, searching for devices similar to the one I’d thought up earlier in the day. I was encouraged to find there were none with quite the same characteristics.

My first item of business the next morning was to see if we had a patent attorney on retainer. When I found we did, I called and spoke with him about what might be coming down the pike. He suggested I send over the sketches and the investigative work I’d done the night before.

Patentable or not, it would significantly reduce our problem with the lead time of product should the prototypes work out as I had hoped they would. We’d go down two tracks

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