Invent help submission and promotion companies typically are not product development firms, as most do not employ product developers or engineers. Many of these companies try to sell dreams, and finance packages, and often provide little tangible results that can be used to manufacture and bring their project to market. A web search for any one of these
companies by name, with the keyword "lawsuit", and the results may be surprising.
These types of companies can have impressive office locations, high-end decor, with fancy product renderings, but often cosnsit of high pressure sales staff with little experience in actual product development, manufacturing, and engineering. These types of companies are concerned with an attempt to impress, sell, and finance the client for a large amount, and not necessarily focused on deliverable results.
Question: What is the difference between a Product Development Company and a Invention Submission or Promotion Company?
A product development company such as NPDS, with our team of engineers, develops products for market from concept to store shelf. On the other hand, the typical invention submission and company will try to sell or finance a USPTO Provisional Patent Filing that sometimes does not include a utility patent, leaving the prospective inventor in a bad place in regards to their ability to protect their product. Additionally, clients of these companies are often sold "Inventor Packages" of product renderings, mechanical drawings etc, though lacking in materials that can be used for manufacturing, or creating a manufacturable engineered product.
Frequently new prospective clients contact us, having spent a considerable amount with these types of invention submission companies. Typically these companies have filed for the inventor a provisional patent filing (that is often of little use to the client), and produced an inventor product rendering package, with mechanical drawings of their concept, sell sheets, and mockup ads. Often sadly the product concept or design was not well thought out from an engineering and manufacturing standpoint, and because of this lack of use of experienced professional product development engineers, the product is not able to move forward to prototyping, manufacturing, and market ready status without going back to the drawing board.
The inventor typically becomes aware there is a problem when these companies are asked to construct a prototype for providing proof of concept, and the aproximate manufacturing cost. These CAD files from these companies are typically created for generating product renderings to impress, and for mockup product models, but do not relate to professional product development, creating no path forward to construct a prototype, or obtain a manufacturing cost.
Generally we find a lack of manufacturable product design intent, from the very start in the CAD design process of these companies, which is a vital starting point for a new product development project to be successful.
