Two of the tenants at The Innovation Hub, Trydian Interactive and Smit & Van Wyk Patent Attorneys, recently partnered towards the conceptualisation and design a novel patent toolkit which provides inventors who wish to file provisional patent applications themselves with all the tools they need to ensure that their ideas are properly protected.
According to Carel Smit of Smit & Van Wyk, inventors have always had only two options available for filing a provisional patent application: Hiring patent attorneys to draft the application at a cost of R5 000 to R10 000 or more, or filing on their own without any guidance, which more often than not resulted in inadequate protection and the loss of their rights to the invention.
"Most people just don't have the funds to throw at an untested idea, with no guarantee of success," says Smit. The patent toolkit offers inventors an affordable "do-it-yourself" solution with an introductory booklet on drafting patent specifications, and numerous practical examples of best practise and common errors.
As expert knowledge partners in this joint venture project, Smit & Van Wyk provided the content for the toolkit, which also includes the template used by attorneys to draw up a patent specification and all the forms needed to file an application. All of these components are combined with multimedia elements in order to bring the content "to life".
According to Trydian MD, Janhendrik Oosthuizen, the challenge was to incorporate multimedia with their instructional design methodology to make the content understandable, interesting and applicable for a target market with absolutely no legal background".
According to Smit, the number of people wanting to file their own provisional patent application will grow and awareness needs to be raised across all spheres. "We want to see buy-in from more individuals in the local intellectual property system because intellectual property really is a mainstay of the economy", he said.
For more information on the Patent Toolkit, visit www.trydian.com/patent.
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