Open standard · v1.0 · July 2026
The Fit Brief format.
A fit brief is the bounded document that starts a commercial conversation about a protected invention without disclosing it. Say too much and you’ve leaked the invention; say too little and nobody can route you. The format below draws the line, and it is free for anyone to use — with us or without us.
The six sections, in order.
A conforming fit brief is one page and contains exactly these sections. Every sentence should survive the test: could a competitor read this and build nothing?
1. Problem category
The domain and the problem being solved, at the level a buyer’s intake owner sorts by. “Cold-chain logistics sensing: continuous verification of temperature integrity in last-mile delivery” conforms. Anything describing how the problem is solved does not.
2. Maturity and status
Where the work actually stands: filed provisional or nonprovisional (month and year, never the number before a formal process), publication status, prototype or lab-trail status. Claim what is documented; a buyer-side process will check.
3. Protection posture
What protection exists and who owns it: filing type, entity status, sole or joint ownership, any employer or university interest. State plainly that no license or assignment is being offered in this document.
4. The disclosure boundary
An explicit list of what this brief holds back — mechanism, claims, drawings, enabling detail — and the statement that those are available only through a formal process the buyer initiates. This section is what makes the brief safe to circulate; it never gets omitted to save space.
5. The buyer hypothesis
Which kind of company, which team inside it, and why they would care — stated as a hypothesis the reader can reject. “This belongs with a packaging OEM’s advanced-materials group because their current approach carries a cost the category has publicly complained about” is the shape.
6. The requested decision
Exactly three options for the reader: reject (ideally with a reason), redirect (name a better-fitting owner), or invite a formal process under the buyer’s own confidentiality terms. Asking for anything else — a meeting, a valuation, feedback — breaks the format.
What a fit brief must never contain.
One enabling detail poisons the whole document — for the inventor, whose rights premature disclosure can destroy, and for the buyer, whose clean-room posture an unsolicited mechanism contaminates.
Never
Claim language or claim structure. Mechanisms, formulas, algorithms, or architectures. Drawings or figures. Enabling examples. Performance data traceable to a method. Application numbers outside a formal process. Anything from the filed record or the inventor’s working corpus.
Length and form
One page. Plain prose, no marketing language, no valuation claims, no urgency devices. The brief earns a decision by being easy to screen and safe to forward.
Using the format.
The format is published free and stays free. Write your own brief against it and send it yourself, or bring it to us: the Fit Brief Review ($490) checks a draft against this standard and the disclosure boundary, flags leaks, and places the brief in the routing pool for when buyer-side routing opens. Either way, the inventor approves every word before the brief goes anywhere.