Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Speaker: The meeting was open to general questions from the new members and answers from all who could provide.

The interesting thing about the NSI organization is that possibly one half of the group are smartly dressed employed types. They are business managers, venture capitalists, inventors, students, marketers, lawyers, and administration workers. These people tend to ask more questions regarding the path they need to take to develop their ideas. The business manager inventors want to get all the pieces they know that they'll be needing, and a new inventor wants to know the steps to get that knowledge. The other half of the members appear to be more casually dressed, easy going, unemployed, eccentric types. They may be struggling inventors, or who live on the royalties that are rolling in. The eccentric types are loaded with egoism and pride in their inventions. Most of the eccentrics have strong technical knowledge in the invention creation and protection process, and they themselves have created much of the science they need for their own inventions. The eccentrics may offer an enormous value in know-how to those who would follow in their path to success.

New members included idea creators who wanted to know everything, as well as lawyers who made it known that they could be a big help to inventors with everything from Applications for Patents, to business formation and licensing contracts, to the protection and defense of intellectual property rights. Existing members included the invention development consultants, successful inventors, marketers, and model building and prototyping shops. The meeting room at Michelangelo's Restaurant in Roselle Park, NJ, made a controlled group meeting quite easy, We miss some of the large meeting rooms that NSI had several months ago, and those rooms permitted the members to be seated in rows or arcs depending upon the presentation, to have lots of elbow room, and to mill about after the program in the large space. The tight space at one or more dining tables without space for milling about tends to limit the networking of the members. I've seen other inventor's organization meetings that took place in theater auditoriums, and the networking dynamic simply wasn't there.

NSI has a better formula for the networking system. James Burrell and Stephen Shaw courteously greeted the new members, and personally explained how NSI works. The new people were given the pointers they needed for the next steps in their quests. Freely mingling is an essential part of the energy of the networking function of the NSI meetings. At the larger meeting rooms it seemed that no one was left out of conversations for long, and the sound level of all the voices would rise to the level of a concrete ceiling-ed New York City Restaurant. All would walk around, exchange ideas, and networking would win the day. Freedom of action is the way of American free-enterprise.

Ralph Hertle Secretary, NSI