I had an interesting conversation with an inventor the other day. He asked a question that I'm sure is on the minds of many inventors considering working with EIP: what do you think the odds of success are and how big will the product be? When I asked him to clarify, he was trying to figure out, a priori all the work and effort, the odds of EIP succeeding in licensing his invention to a BigCo. It was part of his trying to decide whether he should go it alone or work with us.
For those of you that know me, you know I love to read. And I think there is a very real analogy between getting a book published and new product development. I'm sure there are authors that have sat down, written a book that just flowed from their mind onto the page, got it published, and it turned into a bestseller. The existence of that phenomenon, however, does not make for a good strategy for an aspiring author...
Can you get lucky? Sure. It's happened. So has winning the lottery. But why would you want to just play with luck when you can stack the deck a little more in your favor? Good authors do research to make aspects of their story more real, they use agents and book publishers to help them market their book and they re-work their storyline based on feedback to make it tighter and more appealing. They work with jacket cover artists because they know, no matter the adage, that the cover design does help sell books.
New product development is a very complex art of design, consumer insight/research, packaging, intellectual property, and manufacturability (to name just a few). Can you get lucky and get a deal done with a great licensee? Perhaps. But going solo is a pretty risky bet and unless you're going to devote your life to doing it, the odds are dramatically not in your favor...
Next post (soon), I turn this thinking into actual math...
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