IRWIN is always excited in new ideas and we are pleased that you have chosen us to share your idea with. Before you start to share your ideas it is important to protect your and our interest and our lawyer asks you to read and abide by our procedure and agreements.
Ideas we are interested in :
IRWIN is very interested to hear about ideas or improvements directly from our customers however, we are only able to consider ideas or improvements for products or packaging, and unfortunately, ideas for advertising or promotion material cannot be reviewed at the present.
Protection of your Idea :
Whilst we understand that these rules might appear strict, they are necessary to protect both you and IRWIN in the complex legal arena of idea submissions, which involves such matters as patent rights, trade secret ownership, trademark, copyrights, and confidential relationships. We recommend that you talk to your lawyer, and ask her/him to provide you with more information about these legal matters.
We appreciate, as an inventor, you often want to discuss your idea and get some feed back from a company with extensive knowledge in this field but this will expose your idea to unnecessary risk. We urge you not to do this and IRWIN will not discuss or accept submissions that are non patent protected.
Procedure to submit ideas :
1, Firstly we will ask you to read and accept the terms. This explains that we accept ideas only on a non-confidential basis, and that we can only evaluate ideas that are protected by a published patent application, issued utility patent or a product that is already available in the market and protected by your patent.
We appreciate that this is not easy, especially for an individual but this is the best way to protect your ideas.
2, After you have understood and accepted the IRWIN terms, we welcome you to submit your patent idea. The Information will be then forwarded to the appropriate technical team to evaluate.
Decision regarding your idea :
We aim to answer each submission as quick as possible. However, we want to assess each submission as carefully as possible and, in order to do so, many IRWIN departments are involved. As a consequence, the examination process may take some time, and as such we are unable to accept submission for examination on a fixed time scale. We thank you for your understanding.
Should we decline your submission, such decline will be based on internal consideration and therefore will not be a judgement for the value of your idea. In the case your submission is declined we are not obliged to provide an explanation.
IRWIN will keep a record of all submissions and this initial response does not mean that IRWIN will not revisit a submission at a later date.
If applicable we may contact you to review and update our records and if appropriate IRWIN may ask to re-initiate the submission process.
We appreciate all submissions, but can not correspond with those who do not follow the above process.
