Inventor Mentoring and Strengthening of Ideas

The team should consider ideas in a lateral fashion, building on previous thoughts. As a mentor, this means encouraging innovations surrounding a theme. Follow the team's thinking and find areas that as a mentor you are able to increase the teams' level of sensitivity to a design point. Select a point in the invention design that seems weak—solution aspects are broad and unclear. Ask questions around this area, causing the teams to consider points of novelty they had not yet considered in their solution sets. Once they do this, direct the teams back to the problem(s) they are trying to solve and ask each team to think in terms of “how do any new points of novelty we are considering help to solve this problem?” Encourage the teams to collaborate, while teaching them how to develop and manage their own intellectual property as assets.

Be consistent in the theme of invention by reinforcing the notion of something that “those skilled in the art” have not yet considered. Guide the teams into and through prior art searches, which will unveil aspects of their reasoning (or show them how prior art may exist and how to find it). Ask questions around these solution areas that may not be obvious but are indirectly related to the core idea. Causal impacts to the core idea are important when new lateral lines of thinking are introduced. If you see aspects of their ideas that have clear relationships to other ideas, point this out. Help the teams to collaborate in business ventures, and whenever possible, teach them how to share or manage their intellectual property in proper ways. Intellectual property asset evaluation and commercialization topics all become interesting discussions at this stage.

While inventor mentoring, always be curious. Ask many questions. Then, listen very effectively to what the individual inventors are saying. Help them to expand their thinking. Help them to see the novelty in their thinking. Help them to establish strength in the descriptions of their ideas. Always try to cross-reference any new lines of reasoning to other previously stated lines of reasoning; thus, strengthening the core of the novelty in the idea.

Strengthening ideas will often unveil new aspects of ideas not previously considered. In essence, this is a form of rapid idea generation. During this inventor mentoring process, it is common that new ideas will “starburst” into new, independent inventions. Carefully listen to each person as ideas are generated and begin to burst forth, and as the mentor, when you begin to hear something unique from their original thoughts, build upon what you are hearing. Cause conceptual graphing of sorts to occur in their minds to other new ideas. Guide the team to new discoveries of their own. Foster their innovation towards solving the problem they originally stated with a solution that is novel and that those skilled in the art have not yet considered.