Educating the Inventor Community

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has provided education and outreach to independent inventors for many years and has recently expanded this role to include education and assistance to other members of the inventor community. Our outreach effort addresses the inventor community as two basic segments. The first of these segments is the individual inventor along with small, and micro-sized businesses and the second is non-profits and the university community. The USPTO has been providing different outreach and education to these two basic segments for a number of years. The following is an overview of some of those efforts that have shown success. We will emphasize the increased effort over the past three to four years working with the university community and ways that the USPTO has increased its outreach effort to the independent inventor community.