The first thing you're told when you come up with an invention is to get a patent. Many inventors believe this. In most countries, this isn't true. It's like buying collision insurance for a car that you're going to build from a kit, before you've even read the instructions.

Far more important is to understand whether there is a market for your invention, will your idea fly! Of course you need to keep the details of your invention secret, but there are many ways to validate your idea without revealing the invention details. For instance, focus on validating the benefits that your invention brings to customers, rather than the features and workings.

So why do so many of us try and seek a patent straight away? It's because we believe that if we don't file for a patent right away, we could lose our invention if somebody else does.

A patent is not an automatic monopoly right. It is a litigation document. It is drafted and filed precisely for that purpose - to be used in litigation. A patent gives you the "right to prevent" others from making, using, selling, promoting for sale, or importing your invention in the country where your patent was issued.

It's the right to sue anyone you believe has infringed your invention.

It does not guarantee that there is a market or that you'll make money.

Many of us are led to believe that getting a patent is the first step, of a two-step process, to fame and fortune. First you get the patent - then you license it. This is a fairy tale.

It's the old "get rich quick" scheme. It's the belief that the path to success is quick, easy and risk free. It has a strong appeal.

Randy Belaire reveals lot's more hype, misinformation and lies about selling inventive ideas in his new ebook: A How-to Guide On Saving Money And Making Money With Your Ideas at:

http://www.inventor-strategies.com/selling-invention-ideas

Now here's a thought. What does it take to turn an idea into a good commercial business? Turn it on its head and wonder if being the greatest scientist and scholar of the century means you're a successful entrepreneur.

Take Leonardo da Vinci. Described as an Italian polymath, being a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. Or so it says in Wikipedia. What a guy!

But guess what - by 1500 he was so hard up he had to go and earn some pin money painting portraits of the Gioconda family - and in the process gave the world the Mona Lisa.

So what's the point? We all know that Leonardo was a genius and he'll still be revered when you and I are probably pushing up daisies. But he wasn't an entrepreneur. The inventions he came up with did not meet the needs of paying customers at the right price - let alone the capability of building the products in the first place.

Now maybe Leonardo didn't mind too much being broke. But fact is that if you want to turn your ideas into commercial reality you need to make sure that you:

• Have a clear customer proposition
• Know exactly who represents your first core market segment?
• Can answer the question 'Is my proposition compelling'

Achieve what Leonardo sometimes found impossible….. bring your ideas to life and make a success of your business.

My thanks to Chris Chadwick for this contribution. 

Chris has worked at director level in companies as diverse as Cable & Wireless, The Burton Group, Amex and PPP Healthcare.  He was Chairman of Denplan Ltd, Director of the Leeds Building Society and Managing Director of Guardian Direct.

"Do you ever get that horrible sinking feeling that goes to the pit of your stomach when you've got to do tedious bureaucratic stuff that adds no value to anyone least of all you?

So if you've got an exciting business idea that you want to get off the ground fast why not completely kill it by filling out a business plan first?

Over the last 20 years or so, I've written more business plans that it's fair to throw at a convicted criminal (ok, maybe bankers put aside).   Do you know how many got read cover to cover?  Spot on, absolutely ZERO!  Now you may say that's because I can't do them and you could be right.

However I've done them in start-ups, early-trading companies and working for large corporations such as Amex, Cadbury-Schweppes and Cable & Wireless.  And a fair share of the proposals actually got funded - but … it wasn't down to the business plan.

The fact is that for some dumb reason investors, VC's, bankers and corporations get a lot of comfort out of seeing business plans - glossy, 80-page, pie-chart-filled carbon-wasting pap.

Why?  Because they can touch and feel it and believe that unless you're prepared to go to such lengths you can't be committed to your proposition.

So here's what you do if you've got a great business idea that you want to take to market.

Firstly, don't start with the business plan - only do it when you've figured out:

• Do I have a clear customer proposition?
• Do I know exactly who represents my first core market segment?
• Is my proposition compelling?

Some see business plans as road blocks on the runway to commercial success.  If you're the dude having to do it then it's a pain in the gluteus maximus.

So please, do yourself a favour and do the essential stuff first.  Because if the customer proposition's not great and you're not clear on your first market 'beach head' then even a brilliant business plan crafted by Ernest Hemingway isn't going to save you".

Chris Chadwick has worked at director level in companies as diverse as Cable & Wireless, The Burton Group, Amex and PPP Healthcare.  He was Chairman of Denplan Ltd, Director of the Leeds Building Society and Managing Director of Guardian Direct.  We first met when we worked together at De La Rue, where Chris set up a the Global Services division.  My thanks to Chris for this contribution. It certainly struck a chord with me!

It got me thinking about the value of old customers and how much cheaper and easier it is to reactivate old leads than start with brand new people - especially if you once had a good relationship with them.

Before you go chasing old contacts, do your homework.  You need to find out why they stopped buying from you and apply that knowledge to regain their custom. Establish a connection with them before trying to sell to them again.

If you don't already have a system that keeps a record of customers' buying behaviour, set one up. It doesn't have to be complex - a spreadsheet or simply a piece of paper is enough to record their basic buying habits.

Just contact them to ask how things are going. The key thing is to get an answer to the question: 'Why aren't you dealing with us?'

Consider whether your product or service is:

• no longer necessary
• too expensive
• unsatisfactory
• being beaten by a competitive offer

If an old customer is short of money, it's useful to know because you might be able to help through flexible credit terms.  Alternatively, they might be dissatisfied with the customer service they received or have found a better deal elsewhere. However, you might be able to show them you have improved your customer service or are offering substantial discounts.

Keep in touch with old customers and make them feel valued. Sending out friendly emails or a newsletter to old customers could lead to renewed custom.  Perhaps offer them a special loyalty deal.  You could even consider sending out a short survey (but make it worth their while by giving them an incentive to take part).

If you have no luck the first time, contact them every few months. Your competitor may disappoint them, or they may revise their budget or strategy. Customers' needs change. There is no reason to write them off forever.

Can you relate to this?

No-one is prepared to take the plunge and buy from you. They have no idea who you are or what they can expect from your product or service.

Internet marketing legend Frank Kern summarises this problem very neatly.   Before you can start selling to your market, you have to have a relationship in place with them.

There are 4 hurdles you must overcome in order to establish that relationship.

1. Interest and Desire

   Or, put it another way… I get bombarded with hundreds of messages all day long, why should I listen to you?

   You need to grab their interest through appropriate marketing tactics and arouse their desire to want the very thing your product offers.

2. Bonding and Trust

   Ok, you've got my attention but why should I listen to you

   No matter how interested people are in you, your product or service, they need to trust you, know you are real and that your product works.  Tell them about yourself and your product.

3. Proof

   That's an interesting proposition but who else has this worked for?

   Prove it's worked for other people by some real examples such as stories, testimonials or interviews.

4. Samples

   I think this may be for me, can I try it?

   This doesn't have to be a literal bit of your product. It can be a free trial, or an example of what they would receive.

Get these 4 components in place and you are ready to win over your target market.

Our clients have incorporated this advice into their business plans and are raring to build a relationship with their market.  I'll let you know about their product when they are ready to launch as it is a very cool service that will revolutionise your internet experience.

While I try to respond to everyone individually, there are common themes coming through which I'll address in this blog.

Understandably, plenty of you are raring to get your business plan in place, raise some money and launch your product.  But wait!! What you do next can make the difference between success and failure.

The traditional route to evaluating your business idea is to put together a detailed business plan with market evaluation, costings and profit projections.   But before you get buried under business plans and funding negotiations, not to mention throwing away your own money, resources and energy for the next 6 months, you need to stop and question whether your idea is compelling in the first place.

Is your big idea market driven?  Your business plan won't tell you if the fish (customers) will bite!

However I've learnt from bitter experience what separates a good idea from a non-starter.  Really it comes down to just 3 questions.

• Is there a market?
• Is there high value to this market?
• Can you get some kind of exclusivity?

Business Ideas Creator we can help you find the answers to these questions.  Get in touch to discover if your business idea is a flier.

You conduct some research, look at current solutions available and before you know it, decisions are made and resources are diverted into product development.  But months down the line the "innovation" is launched to the market only to become a commercial flop.  Your innovation didn't really solve a problem.  There's no demand for your product.

So what went wrong?  Well, the organisation was too quick to focus on a solution without properly understanding the customers' outcomes.  In my paper "The Innovation Lens", I discussed Anthony Ulwick's Outcome-Driven Innovation Model which focuses on the jobs the customer will do with or without the solutions available.

Customer outcomes should relate to the job the customer is trying to get done; they should not include a solution or features.  Don't unnecessarily narrow the scope of innovation to something the customer is currently using rather than what the customer is trying to get done.  Current products and services are merely point-in-time solutions that enable customers to execute jobs.

In trying to analyse the customer outcomes, Ulwick believes that most projects fail not because customers don't understand the problem but because the people trying to solve the problem don't ask the right questions.  So whilst we need to carefully eliminate assumed solutions from our customers' need statements, we also need to set the research objectives correctly in the first instance.

Take our recent participation in the MOD Grand Challenge as an example.  The aim of the Grand Challenge was to:

"Create a system that can detect, identify, locate and report a comprehensive range of military threats in a hostile urban environment, with a high degree of autonomy ".

By specifying the need for autonomy, an element of the solution was outlined within the main objective, thereby seriously restricting the scope for an early innovation.   Autonomous general purpose threat detection is a very hard problem that is unlikely to be solved any time soon. And yet, soldiers need a solution to detect threats right now.  By saying that the solution must be autonomous closes the door on an "Apple iPod" type innovation that is highly productive and ergonomic.

In setting the outcome criteria for the competition, it would have been better in terms of number of threats identified, minimising false positives and location errors.  And to reward the benefits of autonomy, the underlying criteria could have been set as: minimising the number of people to operate the system, the time to perform the task, or to maximise the stand-off range and maybe add the constraint that operators should have their "eyes out" rather than "eyes down" for better safety under gunfire.  Expressing the criteria in this way provides scope for other radical ways of solving problems other than through autonomy.

We need to move off the solution when looking for ways to innovate.  We need to talk about jobs, outcomes and constraints instead of solutions and give innovation a chance.

You'd be a fool to ignore the customer input and rely only on intuition or internal feedback to determine what product(s) makes the final cut.  Find out what your customers think of your shortlisted products.

Don't make the mistake of not carrying out a survey.

The best way to get balanced feedback quickly from your customers is to ask through an online survey. Surveys get to the pulse of your customers by revealing their satisfaction levels and preferences. What quicker way is there to gauge customer needs and respond to their requirements?  Whether you are discovering their preferred product, evaluating their desire for particular product attributes or ascertaining their budget, conducting a customer product survey is easier than you think.

We regularly conduct customer surveys at Mindsheet, so we've put together a report,

5 Simple Steps to Conduct Your Own Product Survey

to help you send out your own effective surveys in no time at all.  But before I arm you with our invaluable guide, what better way to illustrate how we do it than to get you to complete one of our own surveys online.

I've set up a simple, short (60 second) survey, to find out what products you are looking for and ensure we develop the best solutions for you.

Just click on the link to our survey and on completion you'll receive your copy of "5 Simple Steps to Conduct Your Own Product Survey".  Our guide contains hints and tips to get you engaging with your target customers to get the feedback you need.  In addition you get a sample survey and we tell you how to do your own — quickly and simply using FREE software!

Click on the link below to take part in our survey and receive your free copy of  our report

5 Simple Steps to Conduct Your Own Product Survey

If you have a friend who you think will benefit from our report, please forward this blog onto them.

Thanks in advance for sparing a few minutes of your time.

But before you launch into costly primary research there is plenty of secondary research you can undertake from the comfort of your desk.

Here's a guide to some good websites that we regularly use for research.

Amazon http://www.amazon.com/ with its extensive, searchable database of books, products and magazines (on the US site) is a great place to generate ideas for products if you are looking for inspiration and / or to establish how competitive the market is.  Similarly http://www.magazines.com/ shows the list of the most popular titles in any chosen field or http://www.tradepub.com for trade journals.  (Generally, the more magazines that exist in any one category, the bigger the market).

Ebay http://www.ebay.com is the largest online marketplace making it a great place to get ideas about what people are searching for and ready to buy. Check out Ebay Pulse http://pulse.ebay.com (or your geographical version) which provides "a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and cool stuff on eBay".

Alexa http://www.alexa.com/ What's hot on the web right now. Find out about the most popular websites and gather detailed traffic and rankings stats from your competitors' sites.

Keyword Research http://www.wordtracker.com/ tells you what people are searching for online by showing you exactly which keywords and phrases they're using. This can help you identify profitable niches in the first place or to optimize your website.

Article sites What are people writing about in your subject area?  There are a wealth of article based websites out there where you can read up on pretty much any topic you dream up.  Some good article sites are http://ezinearticles.com/ http://www.articlecity.com/ http://www.articlesbase.com/

Blogs If a subject is worth talking about, you can bet there's a blog out there already.  http://technorati.com/ is the "leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere".  Find out what people are thinking on any virtually any subject via this search engine.

Espacenet http://www.espacenet.com/ Visit the website for the European Patent Office to establish whether any prior art (existing work in the public domain) exists.

And a final one thrown in….Google.  Need I say anymore……..

I've just done a Google search on the definition of innovation and there are a lot of different opinions out there! I think many definitions seem to overlook the basic principles of innovation so I thought I'd throw my two pence in to the debate.

So here's what you probably already know about innovation. Innovation comes from the verb "to innovate" which means to "introduce something new" or to introduce "a new idea, method, or device".

This seems a simple concept to grasp, so what's stopping all of us introducing something new and becoming successful innovators? Because the introduction of something new is only part of the innovation story. Innovation in business is ultimately about making profits. (After all, why are we in business in the first place?)

An innovation must have uniqueness, the creative step of coming up with the idea in the first instance, doing something in a new way or some kind of invention.

The media tend to focus on the stereotyped example of the inventor coming up with new product ideas. In reality the novelty can occur in a new process, product, market, service, channel or business model.

In fact most business ideas aren't about new products. Take the example of First Direct, a division of HSBC Bank that pioneered the introduction of telephone banking in the UK in 1989. In a relatively short period of time, they overhauled a somewhat stuffy banking industry to a more customer service lead industry through a service innovation.

At the other extreme, the daughter of the founder of Ann Summers lingerie and sex aids shops came up with a channel innovation that radically reshaped the company. By remarketing directly to the female audience through the concept of product parties at home they gained a whole new audience and a large chunk of the retail market that they still hold today.

This uniqueness enables you to protect your idea (whether through IP) or by early market dominance, thereby giving the idea exclusivity. But a new idea is worthless unless it brings value to customers and shareholders. After all a waste tip is unique but there is no value in its unique arrangement. Furthermore, the value should be dependent on the unique arrangement to prevent competitors getting around your invention.

So if you've got all the pieces in place so far, it's now time for your idea to be realised through exploitation. This is where many innovations fall down - delivery! Good old fashioned project management and production.

And whilst your innovation may be successful, ultimately you are seeking to make sustainable profits. This is where the exclusivity of your innovation comes into play to prevent imitation.

So what should everybody know about innovation? Here's my quick sketch of what I believe illustrates the successful innovation process.

The innovation equation

I hope you found this post useful.

Raglan