Get “Patent Pending” – The Number One Reason You Need a Provisional Patent Application to Protect Your Invention (and how to use our 30-day challenge to get “patent pending”)

Inventors are intelligent and inquisitive. That’s a good thing. That’s how your invention came about in the first place.

Be careful, though, of information overload which leads to confusion or, worse, poor decisions based on misinformation from a careless mentor, unscrupulous invention help company, or “social media expert.”

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Do you develop technology as an independent contractor? Here’s how you should think about defining your IP ownership, assignments, and licenses

There are a lot of moving parts when you start working together with another party on joint research & development or in an independent contractor relationship. One of the trickiest aspects is defining who will own the IP developed during the engagement. In fact, the IP ownership question can dictate the value of the contract or, alternatively, kill the deal if the parties can’t agree on a mutually acceptable approach.

Here is a list of options to help you think about several of the ways IP can be developed, owned, assigned, and licensed during an independent contractor or joint R&D project.

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Finally, a Framework for your Vision, Purpose, and Mission.

[This post was originally published September 6, 2017, on LinkedIn by Jeff Holman.]

Have you ever tried to discuss your company’s vision, purpose, and mission? How these differ from one another usually depends on whoever is speaking. Getting a handful of executives, let alone an entire company, to come to consensus and stand behind what these should mean is nearly futile. No, it is futile, unless your team operates within a simple framework.

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Psychological Safety at Work (and everywhere)

[This post was originally published August 29, 2017, on LinkedIn by Jeff Holman.]

A friend shared an article with me about team effectiveness. It resonated with me and prompted me through a sequence of interesting articles and perspectives. So I thought sharing it might be useful to many of my friends, because it provides a framework to think and talk about effective teamwork.

At the bottom of this article are a few links to the underlying article about Google’s two-year Project Aristotle and related resources that formed the basis for these observations. I believe it’s worth the time to review these links.

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Is it Time for a New “Business Model Canvas?” An Introduction to the “Impact Business Model.”

[This post was originally published August 25, 2017, on LinkedIn by Jeff Holman.]

This world is but a canvas to our imagination. 

Henry David Thoreau

In a recent interview with HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review, Steve Blank — a founding father of lean startup methodology — enumerated the three primary contributions to lean:

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