If you want to understand how companies can have incentives to produce new products I think it’s worth to read startup literature like Eric Ries “The Lean Startup”.
It seems like a common situation, someone puts a lot of money into popularizing some innovation, but because it’s an obvious innovation, they can’t protect it, and you’ll find it on aliexpress for like $3.50.
A small startup is unlikely to successfully run a patent battle in China. Having a patent won’t protect the company from getting copied.
Let’s look at an example. In the Quantified Self field, it would be nice to have a toilet that regularly does urine analysis and gives me data. In 1988 someone filed a patent for a toilet in which that’s directly build. That doesn’t mean that any such product hit the market. Did that original company produce a product for the European or US market? No, there’s no toilet that you can buy from the original company. On the other hand, if another person would have tried to put something on the market they could have been sued. There’s no company that produced a product that can be easily brought.
Most startups fail and when startups who filled patents fail, the patents are often brought by other parties who then use the patents to sue and do patent trolling.
China provides interesting opportunities. It’s cheaper for someone to ship an item from China via Aliexpress to me than it is for someone to ship the same item to me from an Amazon Fulfillment Center. I can buy a 0.70 cent free shipping item from Aliexpress while I can’t buy that from Amazon.
It’s cheap to run a Kickstarter campaign and let a Chinese company produce your product. Doing this usually means that employees from the company are going to pass your design around and your product will get sold in an unbranded version on Aliexpress.
This means that the dream that Kickstarter promised where everybody can produce his idea and bring it to market comes with the side problem of copycat products being produced but that’s still much better than it was in the past. It’s also worth noting that you could in theory build your product in the US and not have factory employees pass the design around but given that the Chinese factories are so efficient the Kickstarter inventors still go and let a Chinese company produce their products.
That a bit sad but 10 years ago the same person had no way to bring their product to market at all.
If you want to understand how companies can have incentives to produce new products I think it’s worth to read startup literature like Eric Ries “The Lean Startup”.
A small startup is unlikely to successfully run a patent battle in China. Having a patent won’t protect the company from getting copied.
Let’s look at an example. In the Quantified Self field, it would be nice to have a toilet that regularly does urine analysis and gives me data. In 1988 someone filed a patent for a toilet in which that’s directly build. That doesn’t mean that any such product hit the market. Did that original company produce a product for the European or US market? No, there’s no toilet that you can buy from the original company. On the other hand, if another person would have tried to put something on the market they could have been sued. There’s no company that produced a product that can be easily brought.
Most startups fail and when startups who filled patents fail, the patents are often brought by other parties who then use the patents to sue and do patent trolling.
China provides interesting opportunities. It’s cheaper for someone to ship an item from China via Aliexpress to me than it is for someone to ship the same item to me from an Amazon Fulfillment Center. I can buy a 0.70 cent free shipping item from Aliexpress while I can’t buy that from Amazon.
It’s cheap to run a Kickstarter campaign and let a Chinese company produce your product. Doing this usually means that employees from the company are going to pass your design around and your product will get sold in an unbranded version on Aliexpress.
This means that the dream that Kickstarter promised where everybody can produce his idea and bring it to market comes with the side problem of copycat products being produced but that’s still much better than it was in the past. It’s also worth noting that you could in theory build your product in the US and not have factory employees pass the design around but given that the Chinese factories are so efficient the Kickstarter inventors still go and let a Chinese company produce their products.
That a bit sad but 10 years ago the same person had no way to bring their product to market at all.