INVENTORS and companies like to court each other. Inventors need companies to move their ideas forward, and companies need inventions to help their businesses grow. But suitors sometimes have trouble finding that perfect partner. Now a Web-based service under development, the USA National Innovation Marketplace, offers a new tool intended to help with the matchmaking.
The marketplace is an online registry that will have descriptions of inventions for browsing by prospective buyers. But it will have an unusual twist: before inventions are listed, the registry will provide in-person or online workshops to help inventors recast their often technical prose in jargon-free descriptions for the business and industrial customers that are expected to shop at the site.
The registry and its translation service are the brainchild of Doug Hall, chief executive of Eureka Ranch Technology, a consulting firm in Cincinnati. It has developed workshops over the last five years for transforming the language of patent abstracts and other arcana into simpler prose.
Mr. Hall said listings for the marketplace would have prose makeovers to ensure quick, easy perusal by the intended readership. “Most people in business simply don’t have the time and resources to translate the language of difficult-to-understand technologies into real products that consumers will buy,” he said. “It’s one of the business buyer’s biggest problems.”
