How To Seek Investment Using Patents?

=== Myth: Having a patent is enough to seek investment! ===
==== The Hard Truth: Sorry to break this to you but a patent alone cannot get you an investment. In the absence of a proven business, it does not make sense for the investor to risk his money. ====
When you seek investment the most common questions asked by a probable investor are:
* What are your sales?
* How much does it cost you to make that product?
* What are your margins?
* Is your product unique? Do you have a patent?
* Why do you need the money?
The purpose of all these questions is to find out if their investment can earn them good returns or not.
If you have a revenue stream that can show sales, it’s really easy for investors to value a business. It’s just a function of some sort of multiple on earnings or some sort of anticipated growth in the market. Most investors are very well equipped to understand something like that.
But, when you don’t have a prototype, sales or anything like that and you simply have a patent seeking investment, it is a much more difficult task. Because a patent is only the right to exclude somebody from doing what’s covered in the patent. You have to convince somebody that doing it perhaps exclusively has value and because the patent has so much value that even licensing the patent shall fetch them a good amount of money.
=== Seeking Investment Using Patents | Look For A Strategic Partner ===
When you only have a patent, what you need is a strategic partner not an investor. Your strategic partner is a business which gets into an agreement with you where they are as much a partner to you as they are an investor. The usual investor is only interested in profits whereas a strategic partner will continue reading...