Craftsman Seeks Innovative Tool Ideas
By Stephen Cooke
Aptly named after American inventor Thomas Edison, the Edison Project is Craftsmans answer to other tool companies’ more active means of finding new ideas for hand tools, power tools or garden tools. They want you to bring your ideas right to them!
Craftman says they want to either pay you royalties for your idea or develop “it turn” make it into a Craftsman tool. They say it doesn’t matter if you’ve patented your invention or not — though we’d advise you to at least apply before showing the idea to a major tool company.
Maybe I should submit my idea for a ray gun that turns standard fasteners into metric. And maybe they’ll treat inventors right this time ’round — better than they treated the AutoWrench inventor when he first spoke with ‘em.
Project Edison [Sears/Craftsman]
Sears Policy on Submitted Ideas [Sears/Project Edision]
Terms of Submission Agreement [Sears/Project Edision]
September 20th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
C.H. Hanson has been doing this for years and doing it well. Here is a list of those tools that have been introduced into the marketplace when inventors worked directly with Hanson, oftentimes when other “major” manufacturers wouldn’t give them the time of day.
Pivot Square
Angle Snap
Slide Square
SpeedRocker
Pencil Boy
ProSharp
PencilArmor
CrayonArmor
End-Mate
aSquare
They also provide a great primer and information for those who would like to submit product ideas:
http://www.chhanson.com/invent.html
September 20th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
From their Terms of Submission Agreement:
The Submitter agrees that:
(a) the Submitter’s ideas are submitted gratuitously
and without expectation of compensation and will automatically become the property of Sears without any compensation to Submitter; and
(b) Sears can use the ideas for any purpose and in any way and may provide the ideas to third parties without any obligation or compensation to Submitter whatsoever.
Gee thanks guys, but I think I’ll pass.
September 20th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
No kidding!
The Terms of Submission Agreement is accompanied by a Sears Policy Statement wherein the second paragraph opens with “Sears wants those individuals submitting an idea to protect his/her interests before
disclosing an idea to Sears.” The second paragraph finishes with “For this reason, Sears will not consider any idea submitted to it unless it is
submitted subject to Sears Terms of Submission Agreement.”
I interpret this as “if you have ever heard the term ‘intellectual property’, get lost!”
Given the recent trend of Sears hyping gimmicky tools around Christmas, they expect a lot of their bread and butter for free. Maybe it will only be a matter of time before the Dateline exclusive “I was the real genius behind Robogrip! ….and wait ’till you here the tawdry happenstance that gave me the idea!”
September 21st, 2007 at 7:46 am
I was speaking to an inventor about this specific issue today and the one-sided nature of their terms. They mention a $5,000 payment (if the idea is used), a 1% royalty for 3 years and Sears owns everything.
Generally a fair license agreements should run for the life of the patent (17 -21 years) and include any continuation products that come from the original patent. What’s the sense of investing in a patent if you only benefit for a short time? There’s usually some negotiation on these terms based on the value of the patent or intellectual property.
The fair, ethical and moral thing to do is allow everyone involved in the process of developing new and innovative ideas to benefit. Not exactly what their trying to accomplish with this policy!
Charlie (Product Manager - PennTek Tools)
http://www.pennunited.com/Pages/Handtool-group.html
PS. We personally knew the original patent holder for “RoboGrip” (he passed away a few years back) and I’m sure his deal was much different than their current policy.
September 23rd, 2007 at 4:05 am
I would never get involved with Sears. They will screw you if they can, like most large corporations. An inventor named Peter Roberts went to Sears with an idea for a quick-release ratchet. Sears said it was just an OK idea, but bought the rights for it anyway. The next thing you know, they are selling a ton of quick-release ratchets, more than the conventional ones by far. It’s the very mechanism we are all familiar with. It was a great idea, but Sears deliberately misrepresented the value they saw in it.
Roberts went to court and eventually won. I think it was a story on ‘60 Minutes’ or a similar program. You can find hits on the web by Googling something like ‘Peter Roberts ratchet Sears lawsuit’.