2 ms·
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.
by FiatLuxDave 11y ago
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. ;)