FAQs

Invention Factory® India is a six-week summer program in which students from across India, working in teams of three, Prototype, Pitch and Patent inventions that each team has conceived of in the program’s first intensive week. Teams compete for substantial prize money for the “Best Inventions” as determined by an illustrious panel of judges who select the inventions, with functioning prototypes, that successfully meet an important societal or consumer need. You and your partner will work on an invention that you choose, subject only to the approval of the professors as well as safety and budgetary constraints.

The program originated in the U.S. and has been run at IIT Gandhinagar during the summers of 2018 and 2019 under the name. It was run in the summer of 2022 at IIT Gandhinagar & IIT Bombay. The program will continue to run this summer at IIT Gandhinagar & IIT Bombay and will run for the first time at IIT Jammu.

Sixty students chosen from across all IITs/ NITs /BITS / Pvt Colleges / Design Schools will be selected to participate in the program. 20 students in each of the 3 locations will be assigned, based on several criteria including geographic diversity and logistics.

If you are chosen for this program, you will spend almost seven weeks at IITGN /IITB/ IITJMU. The program at IIT Gandhinagar runs from 27th May to 5th July 2023, IIT Bombay runs from 3rd June to 12th July 2023, and the program at IIT Jammu runs from 3rd June to 14th July 2023. You will report a couple of days early to the assigned institute and undergo a few orientation sessions in which you learn (or review) basic prototyping skills — 3D printing, laser cutting, and the use of simple tools. These sessions are also helpful in getting to know each other and form teams

Orientation is followed by the official six-week program.

Lodging with shared hostel room facilities and all meals will be provided for the entire duration of the program. Each team will have a budget of up to Rs. 50,000 for materials. You will have access to laser cutters, 3D printers, machine shops and machinists.

At IITGN Professors Madhu Vadali, Jaichander Swaminathan and Tarun Agarwal will work with the students during the complete duration of the program. At IITB, Professors Nishant Sharma, Chandrashekhar Yramallai would be mentoring the students throughout. At IITJMU, Professor Rakesh Singhal and Professor Ankit Mehta would be in charge for leading the programme.

Founders of Invention Factory in the U.S., Cooper Union Professors Alan Wolf and/or Eric Lima will visit all the 3 locations during the initial weeks to kickstart the programme.

Each student’s presence is required each day, Monday through Friday, 9:00– but this is the bare minimum. We expect that many of you will work late into the night, especially towards the end of the program. Breakfast, and dinner will be at the assigned student mess halls, but lunch will be served at the program work site.

By the end of the program, each of the ten teams will have filed a provisional patent application for their invention with both the Indian and the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. Professors Wolf and Lima will teach the rudiments of patent law and patent searches and will oversee the crafting and filing of provisional patent applications. As part of the program, each team will also craft a short video, demonstrating and explaining their invention. These videos will be posted on the U.S. program main website and elsewhere. Students will find these videos invaluable for securing internships and employment.

You will compete for a first prize of Rs. 2 Lakhs, a second prize of Rs. 1 Lakh and a third prize of Rs. 50,000 for the teams creating the “Best Invention”, “Second Best Invention” and “Third Best Invention.” Judging will be based upon several factors, including: how well your invention meets a need, your prototype, your “pitch” to the Judges and your provisional patent application.

All participants who successfully complete the program will receive a certificate of participation. The Invention Factory® site (InventionFactory.org) shows videos of many of the inventions created by program students at Cooper Union, Syracuse University and IITGN.

The program first ran in the summer of 2013 at an elite engineering institution in New York City – The Cooper Union. The program was founded by Professor of Physics (and U.S. Patent Attorney) Alan Wolf and Professor of Mechanical Engineering Eric Lima. In its seven years of operation at The Cooper Union, the program has given rise to several impressive, prize-winning inventions as well as inventions that are moving towards commercial development.
In the summer of 2017, the program was expanded to Syracuse University (“Invent@SU — Powered by Invention Factory”), where it came to the attention of four successful and distinguished U.S. based alumni of IIT Bombay who are the founders of Maker Bhavan Foundation (one of whom was also an alumnus of Syracuse University). The four IIT alums are making the IITB and IITGN programs possible through a generous donation, in the spirit of “giving back” for the superb education they received at IIT in the early seventies. Professors Wolf and Lima were very excited to work with the legendary students of IIT during the summers of 2018 ,2019 & 2022 and are eager to return!

By the end of the program, you will file provisional patent applications with both the Indian and the US patent offices. A provisional application is nothing more than a detailed description of your invention, including drawings. Inventions produced through the program will be the sole property of the student inventors. Your provisional application will give you limited protection of your invention for one year from the filing date of the application. If you and your partner wish to commercially exploit your invention and seek an enforceable patent, you should file a non-provisional application within the one-year window. (Don’t worry about the terminology, Professor Wolf is also a Patent Attorney in the US and will teach you a fair amount about patent law during the program).

Admission is competitive. Applications are invited for 2023.

We require all applicants to submit a video of up to 2 minutes (Describing any project or team activity and your contribution in it) and a brief (500 word maximum!) description of why you would be a good fit for the programme which would be highlighting your past experience and skills & your motivation for applying Please familiarize yourself with the type of inventions crafted in the program by watching videos at Inventionfactory.org (omit www when you type the URL).

Your online application will be reviewed by Professors Wolf and Lima in the US and faculty members of the Indian Team. We may also contact you by Skype or WhatsApp. Your grades and previous prototyping experience are not of great importance to us, so long as you are an IIT student in good standing. We have observed that students with low academic grades are sometimes great inventors.

You do NOT have to choose an invention before the start of the program. In fact, we prohibit any advance work on possible inventions, including projects you may have started in other classes or on your own. At most, you may wish to think about projects that you might be interested in working on. You are free to do internet research on such topics, but no prototyping, CAD work, etc. Most of the teams that won first or second prize in the U.S. program did not conceive of their invention until the first week of the program proper

Please look at inventions from the first seven years of Invention Factory at inventionfactory.org (do not type www before the site name.). You will choose your project (and your partner) during the first week of Invention Factory proper (not during the orientation period). A critical focus of the invention selection process is determining that your invention addresses a real need – a consumer need, a societal need, or both. We don’t want you to invent a particular widget for the reason that you CAN invent that widget – the world may not need it, and therefore may not be willing to pay for it. You will have to convince us that there is a need for your invention before we approve your project.

Another important criterion is feasibility. We want you to have or quickly develop the expertise and skills necessary to complete a working prototype of the invention within the 6-week program period. This precludes overly ambitious proposals such as tissue engineering and nanostructures. Other constraints on project selection are – no chemical inventions and nothing that would require Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval (i.e., involving human subject experimentation).

To use a little patent terminology, we are looking for inventions that can yield “utility patents” (inventions that perform a useful function, not purely ornamental creations that can receive a “design patent”). Your invention must be both “novel” and “non-obvious” – which mean, respectively, that you must be first to invent this thing, and your invention must be, in some sense, non-trivial. Your invention may be an improvement of someone else’s existing invention. Your invention may have commercial potential (“need”). Your invention must be tangible – something you can build. You will spend much of your time making, testing and refining a prototype of your invention, and demonstrating it to others. Your invention may involve software, such as an embedded software that allows your working model to operate, but it cannot consist entirely of software, such as a mobile phone app.

You are student at a premier institute in the country, who passed the world’s most gruelling entrance exam. Believe in yourself. We believe in you.

Emphatically not! There will be no writing of business plans, considerations of marketing or seeking venture capital. This is a program in inventing and working with your hands to build and test a prototype. It fits in very nicely with Prime Minister Modi’s exhortation – MAKE IN INDIA!

You will file a provisional patent application that will be backed up by a prototype developed and tested by you. The donors funding the program will pay the filing fee for your provisional application.

You will present your invention to a jury that will include engineers, patent lawyers, consumers, venture capitalists and others. Your presentation will include a short video that demonstrates your invention. The jury will select the first, second and third prize winning “Best Invention” teams.

The first prize winning team will share a prize of Rs 2 Lakhs. The second prize winning team will share a prize of Rs 1 Lakh and the third prize winning team will share Rs. 50,000. There will be three separate set of prizes at the venues (IIT Bombay and IIT Gandhinagar, IIT Jammu).

Every student completing the program will receive a participation certificate, plus an exciting all expenses paid summer experience – free room and board, endless cups of coffee, chai and occasionally pizza and samosas and a cool Invention Factory® India T-shirt. You and your partner will have an invention that you may want to bring to the market through Kickstarter or with the help of a VC. Perhaps, you will enter your invention into a larger competition abroad like the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize at MIT. You will learn enough patent law to help you protect inventions you might develop in the future.

For those of you who may want to study abroad for higher studies, participation in the Invention Factory program may strengthen your application.

By the end of the first week of Invention Factory® India proper, you will have selected your partner, identified your problem, studied the “prior art” (is your invention new? Is it in patent law parlance “obvious”?) and will have learned how to use a laser cutter and 3D printers, if you aren’t already comfortable with those tools.

By the end of week two, you should have conceptually finished the design of your invention and ordered any required components. You will likely be working on your first prototype.

Weeks two through six, will focus on building and refining prototypes, testing your invention, subjecting your prototype to critiques from other members of the program as well as outsiders. Critiques will focus on the need for your invention, whether your invention meets the need you identified, and diverse practical considerations such as safety, size, weight and cost. You will likely be taking photographs, producing short video clips, and perhaps making CAD animations for inclusion in your weekly presentations to “guest evaluators” and for the presentation to the Judges at the end of the program. There will be plenty of unstructured time for you to develop and refine your invention.

Alan Wolf was a Professor and Head of the Physics Department at Cooper Union. He is a registered patent attorney and has courses in patent law and patent litigation at Cardozo Law School and at Cooper Union. You can learn more about him and his activities at https://engfac.cooper.edu/wolf .

Eric Lima is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cooper Union and an avid DIY builder. He teaches several of the design classes in mechanical engineering department at Cooper Union. He holds several patents. You can learn more about him and some of his projects at https://engfac.cooper.edu/lima2 .

Professors Wolf and Lima are also the founders of the Invention Factory program in the U.S.

Madhu Vadali is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) in Gandhinagar, India. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses and conducts research in control systems and robotics. You can learn more about his work at https://www.iitgn.ac.in/faculty/me/madhu . His email is madhu.vadali@iitgn.ac.in

Tarun Agarwalis an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. You can learn more about his work at https://iitgn.ac.in/faculty/ee/fac-taru. His email is tagarwal@iitgn.ac.in

Ankit Dubey is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at IIT Jammu. His teaching subjects are focused on Digital Communications, Signals & Systems and many more.

You can learn more about his work at https://iitjammu.ac.in/faculty/~ankitdubey.

His email is ankit.dubey@iitjammu.ac.in