Week 5: Rejection Challenge

Last week we did an exercise in which we received a little plastic box valued at 50 cents. The objective was to trade the box for other items with higher value. We were able to continuously trade for a big set of items. We changed the box for two pens, and those pens for a nice water bottle. We kept trading items until we got a set of color pens, a helium balloon, a box of chocolates, and some other items.

This was a good exercise to bond more in the team. It was a good way of being more confortable working with each other. We know each other better now. I also think that it is a good way of getting out there and start talking with the people. Soon, we will have to talk with potential customers.

Soon things will start getting harder. We still have some problems talking with the creators of the patent. I hope we get to work with it.

See you soon!

Week 4: Market Needs

As I mentioned in the previous post, our ideal patent is "Decoding Heard Speech And Imagined Speech From Human Brain Signals". The team is really excited about the idea. This post will help as a wrap up of the work mentioned during the last weeks related to this patent.

The potential market is huge and new, with a potential revenue of $500 million. We couldn't talk with the proffesor yet, so we don't have an estimate of the cost of the product yet, but that is something that will influence in this. The market is open to people with full paralysis (around 500,000 in the U.S.) and people with serious speech disorders (1.5 million people). This means a huge market.

Obviously, one thing is the potential market. Another thing is how things actually work. We need to carefully study the possibility of making it a non-implanted device. If it will be implanted, there might be a lot of issues that will clearly cut the scope of the MVP. There is no competition in this market, and this technology is really new. We will need to study carefully how to introduce this new technology to it because it.

Week 3: About Patent Selection and my Team

Hi everybody. This is our third week in the class, and, this time, I'm going to talk about patent selection. The good part is that I'm really liking my team. I think that the miscellaneous skills and backgrounds in our team, plus the high interest in the patent we selected (more on that soon), will help us bring a really interesting project towards the end of the semester.

We talked about different patents and discusses their possible impact in the market. Two of them sounded interesting to me: one was "Decoding Heard Speech And Imagined Speech From Human Brain Signals", which pretty much allows a device to decode what you're thinking into text. Crazy! The other patent that seems interesting is "Low Cost Highly Accurate Traffic Monitoring System". The problem with this second patent is that there is already a lot of competition and it would be hard to get a user base.

I think that Decode, the patent that allows to decode brain signals, has a lot of market potential, and can improve the life quality of the people. A thing that I consider that is really important is that every member of the team is really excited about this project, so I really hope that we get to use this patent.

Yesterday we had a meeting to go over the patents, and I like the team dynamic. It will be interesting to see how the team develops during the next weeks.

See you soon!