**Preface to "Low-Cost Inventions and Patents"**

Today, there are marketable solutions for almost everything, but many of them are not available to everyone due to their cost. We investiagate low-cost solutions to accessible technology resources that one can build by oneself with the right knowledge, based on free technologies and open design, including Opensource. Thus, low-cost inventions are always created in response to a specific need, and even if a thorough analysis of the market situation has not been performed, they are usually at least 10 times cheaper than standard commercial solutions. On the other hand, inventions that give rise to patents can rarely be published, since doing so would invalidate the process of obtaining the patent. For this reason, explaining the development of the invention once it has been patented is suggested.

This book presents examples of the development of low-cost inventions in two fields of engineering: agronomy and monitoring.

> **Francisco Manzano Agugliaro, Esther Salmer ´on-Manzano** *Editors*

### *Editorial* **Low-Cost Inventions and Patents**

**Esther Salmerón-Manzano <sup>1</sup> and Francisco Manzano-Agugliaro 2,\***


#### **1. Introduction**

Inventions have been the technological advances of mankind. There are inventions of all kinds, some of which have lasted hundreds of years or even longer, preserving their essence. For example, the pipe as a means of transporting water, concrete to attach stones in construction, or the pulley to lift heavy objects; all of these are attributed to Roman times, and are still relevant today. Low-cost technologies are expected to be easy to build, have little or no energy consumption, and be easy to maintain and operate. The use of sustainable technologies is essential in order to move towards greater global coverage of technology, and therefore to improve human quality of life. Low-cost products always respond to a specific need, even if no in-depth analysis of the situation or possible solutions have been carried out. It is a consensus in all industrialized countries that patents have a decisive influence on the organization of the economy, as they are a key element in promoting technological innovation. Patents must aim to promote the technological development of countries, starting from their industrial situation.

Usually, for the proposal of a patent, a review of the state of technology on that particular issue must be made. This type of study is not often published in scientific journals, despite the technological value they have. This is why this Special Issue aims to include research works reviewing the state of the art in low-cost technologies used for patent applications. One of the ways that allows the survival of a company, in a world as competitive as the current one, is the promotion of technological innovation through its inventions; this makes it possible to add value to the services and products it can offer. The management of technological innovation requires the implementation of a set of mechanisms, including the protection of intellectual property. Thus, patents, licenses, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets are some of the legal tools through which inventors and innovators enforce their legitimate right to keep ownership of their inventions.

#### **2. Publications Statistics**

This Special Issue has eight published manuscripts. The submitted manuscripts come from nine countries and are summarized in Table 1. For this statistic, only the first affiliation of the authors has been considered. Note that it is common for a manuscript to be signed by more than one author and for authors to belong to different affiliations. The average number of authors per published manuscript in this Special Issue was three authors.

**Citation:** Salmerón-Manzano, E.; Manzano-Agugliaro, F. Low-Cost Inventions and Patents. *Inventions* **2022**, *7*, 13. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/inventions7010013

Received: 4 January 2022 Accepted: 10 January 2022 Published: 11 January 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).


**Table 1.** Authors' countries: statistics.

#### **3. Authors' Affiliations**

There are 14 different author affiliations for the manuscripts of this Special Issue. Note that only the first affiliation of each author has been considered. Table 2 summarizes the authors and their first affiliations.


#### **4. Topics and Keywords**

Table 3 summarizes the research conducted by the authors in this Special Issue, by identifying the areas to which they report. It was noted that they have been grouped into two main lines of research: Agronomy and Monitoring. Table 4 summarizes the keywords of the published manuscripts. The most frequent keywords were: IoT [2,7,8] and low-cost [2,6], see Table 4.


**Table 3.** Topics for low-cost inventions and patents.

**Table 4.** Keywords for low-cost inventions and patents.


**Author Contributions:** The authors all made equal contributions to this article. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank to the CIAIMBITAL (University of Almeria, CeiA3) for its support.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

