!050294 DOE/NIST will evaluate your energy inventions for free For those of you who are working on inventions dealing with energy technology, you will be interested to know about some assistance that you can get from a joint DOE/NIST effort. The effort, the Energy Related Inventions Program (ERIP), is managed by the Office of Technology Evaluation and Assessment at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Office of Technical and Financial Assistance at the US Department of Energy. For more information, write to: Office of Technology Evaluation and Assessment, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, 20899. They will send you a brochure on the program, and an application form to submit an idea. The program works as follows. You submit an energy invention idea that you are developing (at any point in the life-cycle from the pre-patent stage, to development and manufacturing). There is an application form you fill out, along with your own documentation. Within four weeks, they will tell you if your idea is acceptable for further evaluation. If it is, within 16 to 20 weeks, a first stage evaluation is performed by government scientists or special contractors. If your idea receives a "promising" rating, it goes onto a second stage evaluation lasting 8 to 11 weeks. If the "promising" rating is confirmed, your idea application is passed onto the DOE, who take over. You are invited to a Commercialization Planning Workshop to get advice. After the workshop, you are asked to submit a proposal concerning the further development of your idea, including a request for up to $100,000 from the DOE. The program is not meant for initial stage, research activities, or final stage manufacturing or licensing, but rather that middle stage of prototyping and third-party testing. You are supposed to be seeking parallel funding during the interim. The DOE and the NIST have safeguards to protect the secrecy of your invention, and do not have any claim to your intellectual property rights, except under rare conditions asking for a governmental royalty-free license. While not the swiftest of evaluation processes, it is free, and even if you don't make it all the way, favorable intermediate reviews can be useful for raising venture capital and other support. Also, the DOE/NIST are infintely more reputable than most of the Invention Development Corporations that charge you lots of money and provide only a fraction of what the DOE/NIST provides for free. I normally don't like government-as-a-venture-capitalist type programs, but I like this DOE/NIST effort. And it has helped a variety of companies bring energy technologies to the market profitably. Check it out. Greg Aharonian Internet Patent News Service