Madeleine Key

Madeleine Key has spent nearly two decades helping inventors, entrepreneurs, and innovation organizations communicate more effectively about intellectual property, product licensing, and commercialization.

Since joining inventRight in 2014, she has played a key role in shaping the company's educational resources, communications strategy, and public presence, helping grow inventRight into one of the most recognized brands in the inventor education industry. She revised and updated the bestselling book One Simple Idea, which has introduced thousands of inventors to the licensing business model.

Today she oversees inventRight's email marketing, contributes to curriculum development, guides social media strategy, and serves as the longtime producer of inventRightTV, helping create hundreds of educational videos focused on licensing, entrepreneurship, and product development.

Over the years, Madeleine has developed a unique perspective on the inventor's journey through hundreds of interviews with inventors, patent practitioners, and innovation leaders from across industry, government, academia, and the nonprofit sector. Through those conversations, she has explored what helps ideas succeed, and what prevents them from reaching the marketplace. Again and again, she has heard the same message: "I wish I had learned about licensing sooner." Helping more people discover and understand the licensing business model remains one of her greatest professional motivations.

In addition to her work at inventRight, Madeleine serves as Assistant Director of Executive Communication and Storytelling for the National Academy of Inventors. She has contributed articles about intellectual property and innovation to Forbes, Inc., IPWatchdog, and Inventors Digest. Her work has included developing curriculum for an accredited university course on product licensing, producing free educational programs featuring leaders from organizations including the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and National Science Foundation, and speaking at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, and universities across the country.

Madeleine is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a Regents' and Chancellor's Scholar and trained as a journalist at The Daily Californian.

She remains passionate about helping creative people understand how ideas become products and how innovation creates meaningful impact.