Protecting Your Ideas and Innovations: Your Ideas Are Your ‘Number One Asset’.

When Robert Kiyosaki — author of the best-selling books “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and the ‘Rich Dad series — sought the legal services of Michael Lechter, a top intellectual property (IP) and patent attorney with Squire, Sanders & Dempsey in Phoenix, Arizona, he brought with him a prototype of his new board game ‘CashFlow 101’ and a steely determination not to repeat history.

Twenty years prior, Kiyosaki developed a nylon and Velcro wallet — dubbed the ‘surfer wallet’. Sales exceeded his wildest expectations. But he neglected to protect his invention by securing a patent and, three years later, when competitors stormed the marketplace with ‘knock-offs’, sales plummeted. The company folded the following year.

Lechter, who has since joined the team of Rich Dad’s Advisors and written the book “Protecting Your #1 Asset,” guided Kiyosaki through the legal maze of patent, trademark and copyright protection for the ‘Cashflow 101’ and ‘Cashflow for Kids’ games. He encourages all innovators to implement basic strategies to sustain competitive advantages, and ensure that they — as opposed to competitors — profit from their innovations.

Lechter details five key steps that every creator of a game or toy — or any product — should follow:

— Keep contemporaneous records of product development; sign and date each entry, and have it witnessed. There are a number of circumstances which might require proving what you did and when.

— Develop a protection strategy. Legal protection mechanisms (trade secrets, utility patents, design patents, trademarks, copyrights, and mask work protection) can be used sequentially and/or concurrently to protect different product aspects.

— Consider patent protection early — after you’ve gone to market is too late in most of the world! In the U.S., an inventor has one year from the first commercialization, or public disclosure of the invention in which to file a patent application. Most other countries do not have any such grace period.

— Consciously build intellectual property into your product. Any distinctive, non-utilitarian aspect of your product can become a trademark including e.g., color schemes (trade dress), non-utilitarian design elements, smell, even sound (music or voice).

— Before putting a product on the market, investigate potential adverse third party patents or trademarks. You can do a preliminary investigation online at http://www.USPTO.gov. A patent attorney should be consulted for comprehensive investigations.

For more information at http://www.MLechter.com