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

3.4 INTELLECTUAL REQUIREMENTS OF INVENTING

After an extensive review of the literature and having examined many case histories on creating and inventing (including the work of Darwin, Crick and Watson, Ziegler and Natta, Staudinger, Carothers, Flory, Debye, H. C. Brown, Olah, Szwarc, and others, several of whom I knew personally quite well and have discussed their work in person), and after having analyzed the processes of how I derived my own inventions, I dare to posit that patentable creativity is not the result of some indefinable mysterious intuitive mental process or flash of genius as many authors who wrote about inventing maintain, but simply the result of keen observation by the prepared mind that recognizes a worthy need and proceeds to satisfy it. What is needed is broad and deep scientific or engineering knowledge in a technical field, logical reasoning, and experience, plus a modicum of legal knowledge of the few principles of intellectual property law presented in Chapter .

We might summarize this thought by the following equation, which is meant to illustrate the set of elements needed to produce a patentable invention:

where Ip is the patentable invention (in fact, patent), Ks/e is scientific/engineering knowledge, Et is technical experience, Ld is deductive logic, and Pl is patent law. This equation is further illustrated by the Venn diagram in Figure 3.1. The ...