This is the 3rd of 5 posts on patenting your ideas. This episode: Non-obvious-ness.
This is a fun one. Many times, people come to me with ideas which are slightly better than something out there and ask “Is this patentable”. Of course, after novelty (can you say that what you are doing is totally new), the next gate that you have to get through is non-obviousness. My definition of that is simply “can it be said that your idea is simply an extension of another idea?” Here are some examples of obviousness, maybe you can spot the pattern: