Calling all young inventors!

The next big thing: Will one of your Scouts invent it?

Encourage that future Ford, Fulton, or Bell to enter the Boy Scouts of America and Edison Nation Challenge, where creative thinkers could get help turning their ideas into products.

Edison Nation, an “idea-to-shelf product developer,” has teamed up with the BSA to promote this challenge. But despite the collaboration, the challenge is open to boys and girls ages 7 to 21, regardless of BSA membership.

Couple this news with the recent release of the Inventing merit badge, and there’s no better time to get your Scouts to think about their new ideas.

Here’s how it works:

Inventors submit their ideas by Monday, May 7, 2012, at 11:59 p.m. PST.
Edison Nation will select winning inventors and invest up to $1 million to develop the selected ideas and help bring them to market.
Selected ideas will receive a $2,500 minimum advance on 20 years percentage of sales. Plus, Edison Nation will split the royalties 50-50 with inventors on the products they select.
Selected inventors will be named the “inventor” on any issued patents and will have an opportunity to appear on the award-winning Everyday Edisons television series on PBS.
It’s $25 to submit an idea (or $10 for current BSA members).
Ideas should be “well-communicated” and include sketches, images, or other media to support them.

Click here for more information and to get started.

Some day soon, perhaps one of these inventions will appear in Scouting magazine’s Great Gear section. How cool would that be?

Check out this video for more details:

2 thoughts on “Calling all young inventors!”

Bryan, when I did a quick read of the submission agreement for the contest, I didn’t see anything indicating that Edison Nation would hold the submissions confidential. If I remember my patent law correctly (I’m a retired Registered Patent Agent), disclosing an invention without an agreement that the recipient of the information would keep the information about the patent confidential, would render the invention unpatentable under 35USC§102(a) (A person shall be entitled to a patent unless—the invention was known or used by others in this country….). Hope I missed something. I have the same issue with requirement 6 of Inventing merit badge if the counselor isn’t a patent professional. Obviously, if the Scout has filed a patent application it doesn’t matter in either case.