Jane Lambert
In "Harnessing the Potential of the UK's Home Grown Inventors" - The Government's Proposed Industrial Strategy 24 Jan 2017 Inventors Club, I mentioned the government's commitment to:
"....... seek to harness the potential of the UK’s home-grown inventors and stimulate user led innovation by launching a challenge prize programme. This prize, which will be piloted through the NESTA Challenge Prize Centre, will help inform our support to the ‘everyday entrepreneurs’ operating in companies and at home – such as through supporting enabling environments, incubators and maker spaces."To my great joy and surprise, the government has already started to implement its commitment by advertising for new IP policy advisors for the North and Midlands (see Implementing the Industrial Strategy: IPO seeks new Business Support Policy Adviser 25 Jan 2017 IP North West) and by collaborating with Nesta to "pilot an ‘inventor’ prize that will inspire and harness the potential of the UK’s home-grown inventors and stimulate user-led innovation" (see Announcing the Inventor Prize 24 Jan 2017).
I was even more delighted by the compliment that Nesta paid to two Yorkshire inventors in that announcement:
"But we are also looking for everyday inventors that see a problem in their daily lives and have an idea for a way of solving it in a way that improves people’s lives. This is a search for a modern day Percy Shaw - a Yorkshireman who repaired roads in the 1930s and whose light bulb moment was the invention of the ‘cat’s eye’ that helps prevent car accidents at night. Or more recently Emily Cummins, who at 19 years old invented an award-winning solar evaporation refrigerator."Yorkshire may trail London, South East England, the South West, East of England, West Midlands, North West and Scotland in the number of patent applications but there is no denying the quality of inventions that emanate from this county.
I will do everything I can to support this initiative. One of the ways in which I can do that is through the Inventors Club, Through that website I shall try to offer a wide range of services. I can help with advice on intellectual property ("IP") and, in particular, with patents (see also my Patents FAQ and IP Glossary). To help inventors, entrepreneurs, their investors and professional advisors throughout the North West and the rest of the country I have expanded and improved my IP service (see Immediate IP First Aid Nationwide 25 Jan 2017.
If you have a new product and are wondering how best to protect it, if you are thinking of launching a new business and are thinking of registering a trade mark, if you have received a solicitor's letter accusing you of infringing someone's copyright, design, patent or trade mark, if you think someone is infringing one of your IP rights or you have any legal question relating to branding, design, technology or creative works, call me on 020 7404 5252 or send me a message through my contact form.
