Do you really want a good idea?

The preponderance of research suggests the most critical determinant of successful new products is the quality of the idea being pursued. Garbage in, garbage out. All other things being equal, no matter how well you follow the best practices and stage gate processes, if you start with any idea you will have poorer results than if you started with a vast market need.

When we started our research we were looking at inventors and the 1:500 success rate (if you can call success making back the cost of the patent). We were surprised to discover that this is a problem for businesses as well. Too often someone's idea gets nominated to be the next new product and then for mysterious reasons, fails to gain traction in the market place.

It didn't solve a problem that enough people were willing to spend money on.

This led us to the conclusion that almost *any* idea is the wrong place to start, whether the idea is from an independent inventor or a business VP or sales rep or even a customer. Here is the logic on why: there are an infinite number of "ideas" floating around. By picking one, specifically, you are randomly selecting one of an infinite number and placing your bet. Even if you select 1000 to work from, you are still selecting (1000/infinity) for your bet. The problem is that there is no certainty that the *most* profitable ideas, those that are *most* relevant to your customer's needs are included in the 1000 selected. Statistically, there is a high probability that a winning idea is not in the 1000.

We wanted to solve this problem, so three years ago we set out to address the issues surrounding the big question of "what to develop." The outcome was a global Internet enabled process that gathers people's pains and processes them in a way that is similar to stage gate (a gated process of developing new products). However, we only process the pains, not ideas or solutions. Then we rank the pains to eliminate over 99%, leaving only those with the greatest value to the customers that have existing demand.

Once the top ranking pains are revealed, criteria for the ideal solutions to the pains are crafted. Only then is any attempt made to gather ideas about how to meet the criteria. This is the point at which stage gate can come into play. The ideal solution specifications can now be given to an engineer who can work up a solution. Our system has the capability of specifying "what customers would buy, if they could (buy it)."

We filed our patent application for an Improved System and Method for Developing Intellectual Property. Our process is what we call "pain based." We identify the biggest pains people or companies have and use a ranking algorithm to select the most painful that people are actively seeking solutions for and will eagerly pay handsomely to solve. We never work on what the patent office calls "$10 solutions chasing $1 problems."

During the time it will take to setup and implement our global process, we have been approached by several companies to do front end research using our system to help them identify the biggest opportunities for which they could develop new-to-the-world products that have the greatest chance of success. We have found our approach works well in such circumstances and our clients have been very pleased with the opportunities revealed.

We don't dictate what to develop, because we aren't in their company. They will need to make those decisions. What we do extremely well is provide a set of verified high value pains with criteria for high value solutions that they can input into their own new product development process and filter, based on their criteria and capabilities.

Imagine a fish bowl with random "ideas" on slips of paper. There may or may not be even one good idea in the bowl. If you draw one out and develop it using the traditional inventor process, you will probably get the results inventors have been getting. The difference between some inventor's fish bowl and our fish bowl is ours contains only ranked opportunities (not ideas) with the highest probability of success and profitability if a (reasonably priced and other criteria, of course) solution is created, because they address big markets with lots of pain and a huge willingness to pay right now to solve their pain.

Our process focuses on interviews with customers and potential customers, channel participants, company representatives, and other stakeholders. We use ethnography and our own methods to uncover pains that people normally are unable to articulate. We don't guess what pains people have, we uncover them and validate them.

The output of our process is a set of specific, high value targets of opportunity that companies can then use their own methods and gate processes on to evaluate, filter, and develop.

We believe the for companies using state of the art practices, such as stage gate, our approach can eliminate most of the risk associated with selecting which new product to develop.

As you can tell, traditional solo inventors don't play a dramatic part in our approach; professionals do. We identify the market need, work with users to specify the characteristics of the ideal solution (for them), and then hand the specs to engineers to reduce the specifications to a design. To do one successful product, we believe we will have to filter out 1000 pains that are not significant enough to merit development.

The system is, indeed, broken. However, the inventor pursuing a product without hearing a very loud "sucking sound" in the market is the piece that can be fixed the easiest and will have the most impact on their success. Trying to push a product into a market is crazy.

Invention development companies are selling tens of thousands of people with the pitch, "pay me and I'll make sure the lottary ticket you already bought is a winner."  A fool and his money are easily parted. Been there, done somethings like that. Know better now... I hope. It only took 50 years.

There is a reason your mama said stay in school! Learn how to learn, so you can make the hard work a bit easier.