There is a lot of inventing going on in the world. The U.S Patent and Trademark Office granted 219 614 patents in 2010 alone. This is 602 patents a day, 25 patents and hour, one patent almost every other minute. Americans are the champions, but there are thousands of inventors from Japan, Germany, South-Korea, France, Canada, Taiwan, UK that go through the usually long and painful process of filing a patent every year.
While it probably isn't surprising that big corporations such as Sony, Samsung, Nike, Canon, the computer giants or automobile monsters have teams of experts specifying and writing hundreds of patents every day, almost third of all granted patents go to individual inventors. If I were living in San Jose, Rochester, San Francisco, New York, or Orange County, inventing something at the moment? would be my staple question while networking at conferences or helping a neighbour to move in. These are the places many inventions are coming from, according to the numbers at least. The same goes for studying either in UCLA, MIT, CIT, Stanford or Texas (the top patenting universities in the U.S).
Then again, if you are reading this and work in semiconductor, transistor, internal-combustion engines, optical systems, metal working or land vehicles industries, you likely have a patent or two on your name already and are familiar with the process.
For those concepting the new wheel, the long, often painful (and expensive!) sequence of activities looks something like this: you describe your invention, do a patent analysis to make sure no one else has already come up with the same idea, draw a picture of your product, apparatus, device, system, article, process or method, write up the list of claims about your invention, let the patent attorney formalize the application and file it. Then hold your breath for a year or two and if all goes as planned, eventually have a patent infringement-free sleep.
The good news (or where GrabCAD is making the inventors and patent lawyers' lives easier, if just a little bit) - we do proper patent drawings based on any sketches or ones that might have already been included in the provisional patent applications. Simply go to the ordering page and get the technical drawings needed in 48 hours.
Naturally, we care about the quality and confidentiality and how to best guarantee them. To have the most frequent questions answered, read more on our FAQ page.
