The text book could have a name like "All that Glitters. . ." and cover in detail several hundred seemingly at first glance promising patents that never caught on.
The divisions or chapters would treat different categories, i.e., consumer v industrial, individual vs university vs corporate, etc.
The author could contact the inventors of patents issued 15 - 350 years to get their opinions or lack thereof of what went wrong.
An RPI finance prof said that they were trying to currently trying to make engineering students more entrepreneurial aware as well as technically creative.
Bret Cahill