I was reminded this week of one of my mantras… ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s what you do with the ideas that matter.
At the TechPlace Work it Wednesday’s coffee drop, I met Anant Kataria. His company, Sagacious IP, helps companies with their patent strategies.
In the conversation, he told me that he encourages startups to treat their innovation ideas as assets and to patent them. Even if you aren’t ready to develop them yet.
If you have a process to capture ideas in your company and evaluate whether to patent them. Once you have the patent, if a business decision is taken later to not develop the idea, then the patent can be sold.
With 80% of startups failing, this can mean if they come to that point of dissolving the company, they may still have patent assets to sale. All too often startups fail, not because they don’t have good ideas – but because they fail in the attempt to execute on them and build a business.
That’s when I came up with my cliché. “After all, ideas are a dime a dozen”. And I laughed.
(I get my humour from my dad. He always laughed at his own jokes. Even when he was the only one laughing.)
I then explained more seriously what I meant.
As an idea person, I know coming up with an idea is the easy part. Doing something with it, getting it off the ground, that’s the hard part.
To which Anant said – exactly. So why not find a way to capture ideas and turn them into assets, that could be worth more. Assets that you could develop. Or sold if you decide not to develop it.
I can see lots of reasons why you might decide to develop an idea. You don’t want to commit resources to it. Maybe the idea isn’t fully complimentary to your brand or existing products. You know your target market can’t use it, but a different target market might.
All sound business reasons.
Though usually by the time you have that visibility you have spent some cycles on the idea. I think of that as sunk cost. The cost of innovation.
Hmmm.
But if you had a patent to sell at that point…
Interesting idea.
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