How to Invent and Protect Your Invention: A Guide to Patents for Scientists and Engineers

PREFACE: HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE AND FOR WHOM IT IS WRITTEN

This book is mainly for graduate students in the sciences and engineering, but can be of use to educators, non-patent attorneys, and business people.

Joseph P. Kennedy.

I am an industrial scientist/researcher transplanted to academia (a re-tread we would say in Akron). After 13 years in the polymer and petrochemical industries I came to The University of Akron, where I have been teaching and doing research for the last 40 years. I decided to join academia not because I didn't make it in industry but because I wanted to do my thing my own way. I loved industrial research and was a little sad when I came to the conclusion that the time had come to change.

When I got to the university, I knew pretty well what kind of research I wanted to do but hadn't made up my mind about the courses I wanted to teach. Because it was easy for me I decided to give a course on “Cationic Polymerizations,” a field I knew and wanted to do research in. Thus, I created a course, and the students who took it seemed interested. I noticed that the most animated questioning always arose during the presentation of industry-oriented material.

This was an eye opener and led me to the idea of writing a course of things industrial for budding mission-directed scientists on the threshold of leaving our program and entering the industrial market. To justify my course, I had to know how many of our students actually went to industry, who exactly were our ...