The Inventors Association of Australia (Vic) 191 Wattle Valley Rd. Camberwell

Phone 0418538604 Email: president@inventorvic.com.au

Patent and IP Tutorial Thanks to Geordie Oldfield for a great presentation to our mem-bers on patents and IP.

Main meeting

The monthly meeting incorporat-ing the AGM was chaired by presi-dent Peter O'Shannessy.

We viewed a video of a living sculpture which was a TED talk and it showed us what appeared to be an elephant that could actu-ally walk on the sand, and if the wind came, it could dig itself into the sand and protect itself from the elements. It had lots of tiny air motors for it to move about and was really what you would call a living sculpture made from plastic conduit.

Peter then went on to talk about

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Content Page

1. Sponsors, Patent Attorney, Main Meeting new rules,

2. AGM—Annual General Meeting 3. David Stuckey guest speaker/inventor 4. David Stuckey guest speaker/manufacturer

The patent and IP protection tutorial is conducted by a professional patent attorney from 6.30pm to 7.20pm

Thanks to this month’s Patent Attorney Geordie Oldfield of Dennemeyer & Associates Phone 03 8658 6090 Email goldfield@dennemeyer-law.com

Editor

Peter O’Shannessy

President

Our sponsors offer discounted services for financial members of IAA(Vic). Many inventors have been very satisfied with their services.

the proposed changes to the rules of our associa-tion.

Rules vote did not make it

Unfortunately this had not gotten up, we had only 13 votes and we needed 56 in favour. That is 75% of the membership has to agree to these rule changes before this can happen. This was not nearly enough, so we will leave it for another twelve months to get this done.

Chris Kirby was asked if he could find any more people who had voted other than the proxy votes that Peter O'Shannessy had received, and he said

he had come up with another twelve. This meant that we had 25 votes in favour, but still well short of the 56 votes needed, so it was all put on hold.

End of the year event reminder

Peter told us about the Christmas Party that would be on at the usual venue on the 2nd of De-cember. It is again just $20 per head. As always, there will be inventor of the year competition held at this time and for tickets please contact Pe-

ter O'Shannessy. This year there is just 6 inven-tors entered into the competition. If anybody would like vegetarian options or gluten free op-tions, please contact Peter about this too.

AGM

Frank Bishop chaired the annual general meeting. There were apologies from Len Williams, who is our regional committee member. Frank asked that the accounts be accepted. Rob Wallace was the mover and the seconder was Ian Watkins.

Frank outlined committee member movements during the year. They were Rob Wallace had re-signed (feasibility group), and we elected a new vice president during the year, Dr. Ian Watkins. Then Frank Bishop asked all the current commit-tee to step down that was - Andre Nathan and Chris Kirby at the front desk, Peter Barrett as Sec-retary, Frank Bishop as Treasurer, Len Williams as regional matters, Peter O'Shannessy as president and Ian Watkins, vice president.

Jack Kerrin then moved for the committee min-ute's to be accepted and this was seconded by Rod Shepard. Frank Bishop then sent around the finance report showing that we had an increase in funds of two thousand four hundred and four dol-lars. Then Frank did a review of the finances over the 10 years, and he's hoping to get to $14K in the bank with no increases in fees. From there Frank says we are able to do some really benefi-cial activities for our members. Frank asked the floor if there are any question on the financial re-port and there were none.

The move to accept the finance report was made by Andre Nathan and seconded by Ian Watkins.

Peter O'Shannessy went on then to summarize our year that was and congratulated Ian Watkins for the tours that he took members on. The 3D titanium printing labs at CSIRO and the Carbon Fibre Research labs at Deakin university. He is very pleased that we have lots of online members who have joined to look at our videos. We have one Vietnamese member, one from the USA and

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UAE and Qatar, 6 members in New South Wales, Two in Tasmania and they get the videos. There are lots of inventing newsletters too on our web-site that go back to 2007.

New members receive information about invent-ing when they join which is a pdf file written by Bill Alladyce. Peter went on also to congratulate members Rudi, Jack Kerin and John Whitehead and went through again some of the highlights of the year. The inventor of the year, the two 774 radio interviews, the gadget show, quirky.com - how not to promote your invention - insurance that we had secured - that is public liability insur-ance for inventors who attend trade shows and a write up in the Herald /Sun financial pages of Vice President Dr. Ian Watkin's new invention to save large companies lots of money on their energy bills. Peter said he enjoyed being president of the inventors although the volunteer workload was a problem. The committee, as mentioned before, was then asked to stand down and Frank Bishop read out the names of these committee mem-bers.

Committee returned

These committee members were elected unop-posed. Ian Watkins then stood up to congratulate Peter O'Shannessy on his year as president and the annual general meeting closed at 8:15pm.

Frank then showed us some graphs of a psycholo-gist's study of people's attention at meetings and it showed that when the speaker first starts there's lots of attention and as they keep talking the audience start to drift off until another speaker starts. This continued until there was a rapid sustained peak when a whole group of girls

came into the auditorium to ask if this was where the Karma Sutra lessons were being held!

Problem Corner

Jack Kerin ran problem corner and first asked were there any visitors and there were two. Jack recommended people to enter into the inventor of the year competition as that gives good feed-back for their inventors. It helps also in marketing and helping people gain confidence in talking about their invention.

There were a couple of queries, one who wanted to know if there were any phone engineers in the room and also if anybody knew how to make pro-totypes from plastic. Peter O'Shannessy said that person should do a search on the inventors Web-site and as one of our speakers was an expert in plastic prototypes who was in the room they could talk to him.

Peter also encouraged people to become inven-tors, enter the inventors of the year competition as it is very easy to do because all people have to do is tell a story about their invention. And it's the story of how it was born and made that people are most interested in.

Guest Speaker David Stuckey

David is the owner of 30+ patents in the US and Europe. He has a Bachelor of Engineering and he's an entrepreneur and inventor. One of the main items he manufacturers is Rail Signaling switches.

Indonesian driver story

He told us a story about a manager of his factory in Indonesia who had bought a new car which came with a driver. The first time the car was used to drop off this employee's wife to go shop-ping at the local mall, the driver took off with the car. The driver was unknown to the manager and he came with no fixed address. This was reported to the insurance company and they said they could not pay out when a driver steals a car but if they told the police that the car was stolen from their garage, that would be no problem. So they tried doing that but the police had said to them that they felt that they were being lied to and for $2000 they think they would be able to catch the perpetrator. David's employee handed over the $2000 and after 2 weeks where nothing had hap-pened, he called the police and asked them how

they were doing and they said they were doing very well thank you and they had employed a paranormal who knows who the driver is and where he is living and they are about to pick up the employee's car. Unfortunately, about half an hour after that, they got a call with some bad news. The police had discovered that the person who has the car also has a paranormal and they were able to see the police coming so they were not able to catch the person.

This story details some of the level of difficulty operating in Indonesia. However, David has a fac-tory of 120 people in Indonesia and has managed

to work his way around such problems.

His new product is called select IQ. This has come from customers who have complained and this is very positive for inventors because this is often how he has made lots of good products by people complaining. Also if you hear it can't be done, this is music to the ears of inventors. To design, manu-facture and have manufacturing capability, you need drive and you need to be good at it and you must attend industry functions. His main competi-tor is Siemens which is the 2nd or 3rd largest company in the world in this area of business. His belief is that you must stick to targets and mile-stones, follow them as much to the letter as you can. He has, over the years, developed an ability to sketch product by hand and he says sketching by hand is a really great skill which all inventors should think about. He said also 3D printing is ideal for inventors and it's great for prototyping and must be part of your inventing process.

Non-disclosure agreements are important

He's also a great believer on non disclosure agree-

ments with all his suppliers and sales people, eve-ryone must sign a non disclosure agreement. He makes his NDAs quite specific so no one worries about being prevented from becoming involved in that genre of business in the future. He also thinks that design patents are a great idea and as I said, he's an owner of 30+ items of IP. What he likes to do is choose a part that is most critical in a design and register that design.

Licensing tip

He also had advice for people who are licensing their product to a company that has something similar. In his experience, it means they can ac-cept your exclusive distributor agreement, not manufacture the product, not put it on the shelf, not pay you royalties and remove you as a com-petitor for their own product if you have not taken legal steps to avoid this.

Selling your invention

David feels that taking products to multinationals is extremely risky, and he has believes it is better that people employ and get good sales people to sell on their behalf.

Doing business in other countries

He finds Indonesians easy people to get along with. In fact, he finds their wages cheaper than China and they have a really good domestic mar-ket and they are our next door neighbour.

He has had some bad experiences in India, and he does not believe corruption in China is any less than Indonesia.

The meeting then finished and we congratulated David on one the best talks we have had at the inventor's association and David stayed back until 10:30pm to answer lots of inventor’s questions.

End of the Year Event

Our Christmas party and Inventor of the Year competition is on Wed Dec. 2nd.

$20 per head, food and drink supplied.

Call Peter to book, 0418538604, or pay for your tickets at the front desk next meeting Nov. 4th