Madeleine Key

Madeleine Key has been writing about intellectual property, inventing, and entrepreneurship for more than 15 years. As a ghostwriter, her work has appeared online in The New York Times, TIME, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Business Insider, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, The Globe and Mail, and more.

In 2015, she expanded and revised One Simple Idea, the bestselling how-to book about product licensing. With more than 800 5-star reviews on Amazon, it has been taught in numerous college courses, including the MBA program at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska; the University of California at Merced, and the University of the Pacific.

She is the longtime social media director for inventRight, the beloved coaching company, as well as the developer of its learning management system. In 2019, she helped create and administer “How to Launch a Product Without Starting a Business,” a 10-unit course for the University of Newcastle in Australia. To her knowledge, it is the first and only undergraduate course devoted wholly to product licensing.
As of 2021, she serves on the Communications Committee for the Center for Intellectual Property Understanding.

As a freelance journalist based in Oakland, her articles about arts and culture were featured in the SF Chronicle, East Bay Express, CALIFORNIA magazine, and on the website Civil Eats. She began writing for The Modesto Bee as a teen and cemented her interest in storytelling at The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s student newspaper.
Currently, she lives on the road in a built-out Sprinter van with her husband John and their Welsh Terrier Bear.