Penny for your (original) thoughts

Do you think you’ve got the next great original idea or invention?  This is more difficult than one thinks.  If you think it’s easy, just try to come up with a unique name for a business or website.  Chances are, if you have thought of the next best product, website, retail idea or invention, someone else has too.  I’ve thought I’ve had some one-of-a-kind ideas and talked to people that also have, only to find out upon further research that there is sometimes the exact name or identical product already out there.

It can really be discouraging to the potential business owner to find out another person had their great business name, idea or product that he or she was going to make or sell and become a household name.  The good news is that there are some free tools you can use to search patents, trademarks, business names and more.

• Washington State Trade Name Search:  Before you license a business in Washington, you should verify that the trade name is available.
• Here’s an excellent page on Patents, Trademarks and Copyrights – Business.Gov/Intellectual Property
• Free patent search US Government Patent Office or Google Patent Search. Read more about the US Patent Process.  Be wary of these websites that offer assistance with ‘free patents’, they could be too good to be true.
• Free trademark search:  US Government Trademark Home Page
• Find out if you need a copyright for that blog, movie, book, etc. US Copyright Office.  There is an excellent FAQ page.
• There are numerous free website domain name searches available.  Two that I’ve used are godaddy.com and networksolutions.com.

These links are just a starting point when it comes to innovation and business assistance.  What are your favorite websites for business resources?

One of our Entrepreneur Network strategies for 2010 is to identify and assist Yakima Valley entrepreneurs, inventors and emerging businesses.  We realize that we can’t recruit a large 500-employer company to the region every year and are making a concentrated effort to ‘grow our own’ companies.  If we can assist ten emerging companies that will grow to 10, 20 or 100+ employees, it will only help to diversify and stabilize our economy.

Stay tuned for more on assisting inventors and entrepreneurs and for more exciting news on our first business plan competition this fall – we’ll have details soon.