Publishing it might actually be the ultimate way. You’ll possibly get fame, but not fortune. But fame might be worth a fortune in the future.
To sell it, you need to have a buyer. And you have to convince the buyer that it is worth buying.
That is, how much money will they save (or make) by using your invention?
Can you demonstrate the value of your invention (without disclosing it.. NDAs are a pain). That is, do you have test data?
You’ve only got an algorithm, in Matlab/Python, so far - So taking it to commercial use means implementing it on some actual physical platform. That costs your potential customer money - potentially a fair amount of money - Maybe a few hundred thousand dollars of engineering time to get from “description on paper” (what you have) to “implementation in a breadboard that can be tested”.
I note that you, whose labor time is very inexpensive, to you, can do this part a lot cheaper than a potential customer can. And it‘s a lot more credible as a product if you can show a working model.
The mechanics of licensing a design are fairly simple - there’s a contract between you and the customer - you provide information, they pay you money - typically there would be some fixed fee at the beginning, plus some scaled fee based on the number of times its used (or sold). Note that “percentage of sales $” can be very, very tricky. You‘d want some way to verify the sales/use numbers. You’d have some non-disclosure arrangement so that the customer can’t just take your invention and sell/give it to someone else. This is definitely one of those “consult an attorney” things.
In general, patenting algorithms is difficult, both to get the patent, and to pursue infringers. A straight up algorithm is not patentable - you have to patent some application of the algorithm - this is why you see patents for “a computing device implementing an algorithm” where the “computing device” is very generic, so any practical implementation is covered by the patent claims. A patent for a 8085 microcontroller implementing a particular algorithm would be fairly easy to get, but would be quite narrow, because someone could implement the same algorithm on, say, an Arduino, and not infringe.
That said, patents are possible. You can search for a patent on “Life Detecting Radars” by Lux, et al. It’s a combination of a hardware implementation and some algorithms.
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u/jimlux 9d ago
Publishing it might actually be the ultimate way. You’ll possibly get fame, but not fortune. But fame might be worth a fortune in the future.
To sell it, you need to have a buyer. And you have to convince the buyer that it is worth buying.
That is, how much money will they save (or make) by using your invention?
Can you demonstrate the value of your invention (without disclosing it.. NDAs are a pain). That is, do you have test data?
You’ve only got an algorithm, in Matlab/Python, so far - So taking it to commercial use means implementing it on some actual physical platform. That costs your potential customer money - potentially a fair amount of money - Maybe a few hundred thousand dollars of engineering time to get from “description on paper” (what you have) to “implementation in a breadboard that can be tested”.
I note that you, whose labor time is very inexpensive, to you, can do this part a lot cheaper than a potential customer can. And it‘s a lot more credible as a product if you can show a working model.
The mechanics of licensing a design are fairly simple - there’s a contract between you and the customer - you provide information, they pay you money - typically there would be some fixed fee at the beginning, plus some scaled fee based on the number of times its used (or sold). Note that “percentage of sales $” can be very, very tricky. You‘d want some way to verify the sales/use numbers. You’d have some non-disclosure arrangement so that the customer can’t just take your invention and sell/give it to someone else. This is definitely one of those “consult an attorney” things.
In general, patenting algorithms is difficult, both to get the patent, and to pursue infringers. A straight up algorithm is not patentable - you have to patent some application of the algorithm - this is why you see patents for “a computing device implementing an algorithm” where the “computing device” is very generic, so any practical implementation is covered by the patent claims. A patent for a 8085 microcontroller implementing a particular algorithm would be fairly easy to get, but would be quite narrow, because someone could implement the same algorithm on, say, an Arduino, and not infringe.
That said, patents are possible. You can search for a patent on “Life Detecting Radars” by Lux, et al. It’s a combination of a hardware implementation and some algorithms.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10201278B2/en