4.3 Developing Ideas, Innovations, and Inventions

Deep

Deep products are based on the logic of innovation that we’ve just established and anticipate users’ needs before they have them. These types of innovations often have masterful designs that are intuitive for new users while still being capable of completing complex tasks. Adobe is an innovative corporation working in several fields, such as software, marketing, and artificial intelligence. Adobe often creates software applications with basic functions that are easily accessible to new users but that also enable experienced users to innovate on their own.⁴² Creating a platform for innovation is a hallmark of deep, forward-thinking innovation.

Indulgent

Innovations with lasting power engage users in ways that make them feel special for having purchased the product or for having found the service. Indulgence refers to a depth of quality that does not come from being the fastest solution to a problem. Indulgence may even sound like a negative trait. In humans, it certainly can be, but for someone using an innovative product, feeling indulgent can relate to a richness of experience with the user interface (UI). The UI of a product, particularly a software product, is what the user sees and interacts with. A feeling of indulgence imbues your product with a sense of value and durability that reassures users and encourages them to use your product confidently.

Complete

Kawasaki’s vision of a complete product includes the services wrapped around it and underlying it such that users understand the product well enough to be comfortable using it. Information about how it works and how it is meant to work is readily available. Thus, product innovation must include marketing and other communication efforts. For Kawasaki, this builds the “total user experience.”⁴³ If you truly have solved a problem in the marketplace, users will understand what that problem is and how your product and related services deliver.

Elegant

Elegance also is part of a product’s UI. It refers to intuitive design that immediately makes sense to consumers. Elegance conveys more information with fewer words. Elegant design is not afraid of negative space or of the occasional pause. Elegant innovations solve problems without creating new ones. For Kawasaki, elegance is the difference between a pragmatic, good innovation and something great.

Emotive

Emotive innovations evoke the intended emotion and demand to be admired and shared. In other words, truly great innovations create fandoms, not just consumer bases. You can’t force people to love your product, but you can give them experiences that create a sense of excitement and anticipation of what you might come up with next.

Step 1: Educate Yourself

Before your inventive product can do battle with other inventions, you will need to educate yourself. To prepare yourself to weather the competition, you need to learn as much as you can about the current investing climate, current product development opportunities, and current leadership approaches. Even if you are not deeply interested in leadership dogma, it helps to know what the current trends are in leadership and product development. To succeed as an inventor in a vast marketplace, you need to understand the rules, written and unwritten, of the industry and competitive landscape. The product development process can be quite involved. The process can vary by industry and by availability of resources.

Part of educating yourself is also gaining an understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses, and how those relate to your leadership style. A leadership style inventory can help you better understand your approach to leading others. This is just one example of many that exist to give you a starting point. As the inventor of your product or service, you will manage/lead others as you attempt to make your idea a reality. Also, the environment can constantly change. For this reason, it is important to understand the basic tenets of leadership and management in a dynamic work atmosphere. Many sources will give you insights into the challenges of management.

Another key step in educating yourself is to find out which kinds of contributors you are going to need to build a successful entrepreneurial team. Building a team is essential to making your invention a reality. Even those who invent alone—and they are quite rare—must have a development team, a manufacturing and/or service team, a marketing team, and other members with specific skill sets such as coders, graphic designers, test marketers, and more.

Step 2: Stay Organized

Most tip sheets for inventors suggest that you find a method for organizing your creativity so that you don’t spend time trying to remember previous ideas, plans, and decisions. You must organize information related to your business idea, your business plan, and your potential teammates in the process.

Contact management software has been popular for decades. Nowadays, you can investigate many other productivity and team-chat tools. Research ways to organize information about the people you plan to work with and hope to work for. The team-chat program Slack (www.slack.com) enables you to create specific topics for team members to discuss and collaborate on. Slack offers several features to help keep employees connected. Insightly (www.insightly.com) is a customer relationship management tool to stay better connected to your customers. Ryver and Glip incorporate task management. Flock and Microsoft Teams offer a host of features, with Microsoft leveraging its corporate position to bring about deployment in more than 200,000 organizations. Select the tool set that works best for you and consider paying for the software that offers the precise team communication functionality and utility you need.⁴⁶

Step 3: Conduct Market Research

Market research is an obvious must, but many entrepreneurs fail to go as deeply as they should in researching their competition. You must be aware of current and future competitors so that you are prepared to compete in the marketplace when you are actually ready. Being the best on paper now won’t be much use when you enter the marketplace with an MVP in six to eight months in competition with competitors’ new products and updates.

What should you consider with regard to team development when you’re looking at the competition? Within the legal limits of any noncompete clauses, you should be shopping the competition for potential team members. The best leaders are always seeking talented people. If you sense that someone would be a good fit for your team, that they have not only the skill set but also the temperament that would help put your invention in the market, do not be afraid to reach out to them. How you reach out is something you must research for each industry. In some industries, you will have to be highly secretive. Part of market research is understanding the market well enough to understand the soft skills you need to find contributors who are already working in the industry or in an adjacent one

Step 4: Conduct Patent Research

If you expect to apply for a patent, take the time to read up on policies and procedures. Officials in the US Patent Office, or in similar bureaus in other countries, decide whether an invention is worthy of receiving a patent. A patentable invention must meet the criteria of being novel, useful, and nonobvious; it must be proven to be workable.⁴⁷ Those three standards—novel, useful, and nonobvious—are subjective. So is the concept of invention, but conceptualizing invention this way sets a high bar for entrepreneurs who truly wish to make a social impact. Developing an invention that is patentable also creates a barrier against competition, which can make the difference between business success and failure. There are two types of patents. Utility patents last twenty years, and design patents usually last fourteen years. If a patent is granted, the inventor has a window of time in which to secure further funding, work to produce the product, and try to gain mass-market adoption.⁴⁸ After all is said and done, you can apply your creativity to social innovations, product innovations, or service innovations. If you can combine enough innovations, add your unique creativity, and create something that survives the diffusion chasm, you can truly invent something new.

The patent basics page of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s website is roughly forty pages long.⁴⁹ The utility patent process includes a thirteen-step flow chart⁵⁰ that outlines the process. The patent office encourages you to use a registered patent attorney or agent. If you are skilled and diligent enough to secure a patent, you should expect to pay fees and file paperwork to maintain it for years after it is granted. We’ve already discussed the keys to securing a patent, but to reiterate, here is how an invention is defined in US patent law: “In the language of the statute, any person who ‘invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent,’ subject to the conditions and requirements of the law.”⁵¹

When building a team to make your invention a reality, finding a patent lawyer or agent is key. Even those who have advocated for hiring patent attorneys in the past now suggest that hiring a patent agent might work. What’s the difference? Patent attorneys often bill by the hour, but they offer a full suite of legal advice. As the author Stephen Key indicates, patent agents are narrowly focused on helping you get and defend your patent.⁵² The other limitation that Key mentions is that patent agents may write a patent application in such a way that you are less prepared to protect your invention against future legal challenges. Key quotes Gene Quinn, a leading attorney on intellectual property and patent law: “By the time you realize that you are sitting on a million-dollar invention it will be too late to do anything about it.…Patent agents as a general rule tend to be very good at describing what it is that you as an inventor show up with.” What they tend to be much less good at is describing what your invention could be. They also frequently will use terms that are more concrete and limiting than would a patent attorney. Attorneys are taught the art of being hyper-specific, which is necessary at times, but also the art of being anything but specific.”⁵³ Patents cannot be vague, but they can be written with just the right amount of specificity to protect against similar products that may arise and threaten your market share.

Step 5: Develop a Prototype

Developing a prototype can be the most fun or the most tedious part of inventing. Much of your attitude toward developing a prototype depends on available resources, technology, and expertise. In this text, we reference the concept of the lean startup from time to time. In the lean startup model, the prototype is most often an MVP. As we saw earlier, an MVP is a version of your invention that may not be polished or complete in terms of how you envisioned it, but it functions well enough and looks good enough that you can begin to market it with reasonable hopes that it will be adopted. For other inventions, you may need to build a more advanced prototype. This requires serious investment capital, but the payoff is that users will interact with a version of the product that looks and functions more like what you had in mind during your ideation phase. As an inventor, you are responsible for establishing quality control minimums for your product. You may have to compromise on your vision, but you should not compromise on basic functionality or basic levels of quality in materials.

You have many options at the prototype development stage. You can build the prototype yourself or with a small team. You can partner with design/invention firms that specialize in helping inventors create, but you must be very careful and involve your legal representation when working with such firms to be sure that you maintain the patents and other rights to your invention. Many inventors have partnered with such firms only to see their intellectual property stolen. Another option is to get funding for your invention on Kickstarter or some other crowdfunding site, but again you must beware that establishing such a campaign puts your idea in the public sphere. “Copycatters are monitoring crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and watching for trendy products to go viral,” according to Amedeo Ferraro, an intellectual property attorney.⁵⁴ Competing companies, particularly in foreign markets, actively scout Kickstarter and similar platforms for new ideas that they can manufacture and bring to market before your crowdfunding project has run its course. Perhaps most chilling is this comment regarding legal protections that do not function, even when inventors take precautions to protect their intellectual property when working with some Chinese firms: “But even with these protections, there’s no guarantee that you can stop someone from copycatting your product. [One U.S. intellectual property lawyer] said that the problem lies not in China’s courts but enforcing rulings. Winning a case against one factory is relatively easy. But suing every factory and winning is expensive and time consuming.”⁵⁵ For this reason, some inventors prefer to start small and local, if possible. It can be better for them to start with a trusted team striving for a small profit and a good market position than to see the market flooded with copycat products.