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Invention, Inventor

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I had a friend email me the other day with a great idea for an invention. I think now that I have a patent filed more people will do this. It was an uncomfortable situation.

Good ideas are like pretty girls in Hollywood -- a dime a dozen and 99% of them won't amount to anything. I'm not trying to be cruel or anything -- far from it. Most people do not understand the difference between a creative idea and something really worthwhile.
This is due to the way we tell people about business success.

Whenever you hear of a business doing well, somebody always adds the tagline "they made hot dogs faster and cheaper than anyone!". While this may be true, this does not make a successful business. In fact, any sort of little blurb that you can hear about a business is about worthless.

We are encouraged in school that creativity is the way to solutions. "Invent a better mousetrap, and they will come". The fact is, this is a pack of lies. Simply because something is creative, new, original, cheap, whatever, doesn't mean it will amount to anything. It just means you are a creative person.

Think of ideas like a car sitting in your garage. Your journey to success is like going on a long road trip. If you've never driven a car, what chance are you going to have making it to your destination? (Translated: if you have no general business skills, how can you meet customer's needs?) If you don't have a roadmap, are you getting there or not? (You must have a workable business plan that is well-researched and thought out). If the engine isn't tuned up, or you haven't taken care of the tires, will you make it? (Execution intelligence is absolutely necessary)

Sure you have a shiny car. We all have shiny cars. My father-in-law, many years ago had the idea of an artificial Christmas tree with the lights built into the tree. Great idea. So somebody else made it and made a lot of money. Did he make a mistake by not persuing that idea?

Perhaps yes and perhaps no. If he could have put together a great management team, protected his invention (if it really was an invention at all), broke into some markets, and set up a distribution chain, it would have been a great idea -- -maybe. It might be the cost of doing all of that is not worth the return. It might be that other people are already doing it, or the distribution chain is closed. Could be a million reasons (and there usually are) why it would not be worth persuing.

That's not the way we think of these things, however, and we continue to delude ourselves that these little creative ideas floating through our heads are all worth millions if we could only harvest them. It's kind of sad, really: instead of realizing that we can learn to be successful, many of us choose to believe that we are constantly being robbed; that the little guy doesn't have a chance.

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on December 13, 2005 6:33 PM.

Transitions was the previous entry in this blog.

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