One of the heart-breaking things about running the She’s Ingenious! network is the number of new members who join us late in the day, often having spent a few thousand pounds without getting anywhere with their product idea or invention.

Very often, they’ve taken business advisers’ advice at face value, or just searched the web for help. And It’s taken them straight into the arms of a minority of industry professionals whose practices leave a lot to be desired.

Here are my top five practices for newbie inventor-entrepreneurs to steer well clear of:

1) Fancy Product Design Drawings

Some unscrupulous product designers are onto a nice little earner offering product illustrations or CAD (Computer Aided Design) drawings and photo realistic “beauty boards”. Their claim: you’ll need these to sell your idea to investors or buyers.

It’s thrilling to see life breathed into your concept, but the £1000 upward charged for these boards rarely reaps a reward. Investors and distributors or retailers aren’t interested unless you have a well-researched proposition and a technically proven prototype that can be manufactured cost effectively.

Make no mistake, these drawings are most often an artist’s impression and have not been designed with real production and commercialisation in mind.

2) The Market Research Report

It’s not surprising that some entrepreneurs fall for the idea of a market report for their idea. A few hundred £££ seems a good price to pay to avoid the confusion of researching the market yourself.

Although the neatly bound report looks the part, often it is rarely more than some Googled website results that you or I could put together in the blink of an eye, padded out with some standard info that goes into everyone’s report.

3) The Over-Eager Patent Attorney

It’s standard for business advisers to pack you off to a patent attorney as a first step. Their claim: You need to protect your idea before you can discuss it with anyone. And of course the patent attorney, who pockets a few thousand £££, happily obliges regardless of whether you’ve done enough research to check it makes commercial sense.

Result: The clock is set ticking on the patent process before you’re ready. And as you go on to research the market and create a working prototype, the specification or design changes substantially at best making the patent claims irrelevant, at worst, creating prior art that prevents you filing for a new patent.

Shame they don’t tell you a simple confidentiality agreement would cover you at this early stage.

4) Designers Who Claim Your Intellectual Property

You’d be forgiven for thinking that, having commissioned and paid a product design house to realize your concept according to your specifications, you’d own the designs to do with as you wish. Not always the case. Some unscrupulous design houses will lay claim to original intellectual property created in the process, and if you haven’t read the small print carefully upfront, you could find you only have rights to use the designs in a limited way.

Not an enormous problem, until you try to sell on the business or license the product idea on.

5) Over-Inflated Preliminary Patent Search Fees

You want to establish the originality of your idea or business name. And you know the patent or trademark databases need to be checked to make sure no-one has registered before you. But you haven’t read this on the Business Link website “Be aware that there are businesses that take advantage of inventors by offering a patents search service for thousands of pounds, when in reality they are only searching the databases that are freely available to the general public.”

It’s always a good idea to search the Esp@cenet database yourself first athttp://gb.espacenet.com, but if you do want a professional on the job, the staff at The British Library’s Business & IP Centre charge just a couple of hundred pounds to carry out expert preliminary searches that might otherwise cost you thousands.

It would be harsh to label any of these common industry practices an actual scam. And sometimes, doubtless, there will be happy results and satisfied customers. But it’s as well to remember that for the first steps developing your new product or invention, TIME is the only thing you need to spend a lot of.

Cally Robson founded She’s Ingenious! in 2009 to connect women who are developing and commercialising new product ideas and innovative business concepts. The website has loads of practical info to show you how to go about researching, prototyping and taking your new idea to market, and a lively forum and online meetings where you can ask questions and meet other ingenious women. www.ShesIngenious.org