
“You Can't Sell a Notebook” – Why I Keep Secrets as a “Wannabe Inventor” - 6stringmerc
https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/why-i-keep-secrets-as-a-wannabe-inventor-cc06886147d3
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FiatLuxDave
The important thing is to keep secrets at the correct level of detail. 'What
an invention does' is generally what you should be okay telling just about
anyone. 'How it does it' is where you keep it secret or get patent protection.

Reducing it to practice is the function of the inventor. That is the
difference between a wannabe inventor and an inventor. In short, if you don't
yet know 'how it does it', you don't really have anything to keep secret yet.
Now sure, some ideas are so simple that once you know what it is, figuring out
how to do it is child's play. But I note that you didn't reveal an example of
a new eating utensil (which could be really cool), but instead you revealed a
type-on-air keyboard which probably has non-trivial development costs and
risks. How it works is worth protecting in that case.

Investment has different levels of risk and reward. Inventions which have not
yet been reduced to practice are very high risk. If you can't attract
investment at the current level of perceived risk, you ought to do what you
can to drive out risk or show that the risk is lower than perceived. This
usually means doing much of the development on your own (typical garage
inventor) or establishing a good business case for paying the development
costs (finding the customer before development).

I don't know if creativity can be taught or not. I have had classes on
creativity, and some of the people who come out of those classes are quite
creative. On the other hand, I have also had classes on math, and a few of the
people who come out of those classes can do math. I'm still not sure if math
can be taught, much less creativity. ;)

