What to do when you have a new idea for a product or service and you want to take it to market?

The first step is to educate yourself. And we highly recommend you find your local inventors group. Your local inventors group typically holds meetings once a month to help educate you to the process of commercializing your ideas. Please take a look at our map to find the nearest one to you.

But for now take a deep breath. It seems extremely daunting but it can’t be done. Historically what is been taught is that in order to launch a product or service you need to start a business. It’s called venturing. It definitely has its pros and cons which we will discuss later. The other option is to license your product or service for royalties. These two methods are completely different from one another and require a different set of skills, time, experience and investment.

  1. Manufacturing and marketing your own invention: This typically means that you’re starting a business. You will have to design, prototype, manufacture, warehouse, fund, market, distribute, and invoice your new product or service. You will have to wear many different hats. Most individuals don’t realize the amount of money, time, and experience it takes to successfully run a business. We will provide some handy links to get you started. We highly recommend that you take the time to educate yourself on the total process which includes writing a business plan and establishing a supply chain. It’s an extremely exciting and worthwhile goal, but at the same time there are many risks associated with bringing a product to market on your own. Pro tip: Having to purchase your order or showing demand from customers is a great way to eliminate the unknown in regards…will people purchase it. You will hear many success stories but there’s also many Failures were people end up having inventory in their home office or garage they cannot sell.
  2. Licensing your idea for royalties: to license your idea out is to give a company the rights to sell market and manufacture your product idea or service for an established period of time. The advantage is that they do all the heavy lifting in order to market and distribute wour product. Usually, this requires a good idea that has “perceived ownership” in the form of a utility patent, a design patent, a provisional patent application, a trademark, or a copyright; It could even include a trade secret. There’s very little financial risk involved, but in many situations you will need to build a prototype and generate good marketing materials explaining the benefit of your product or service. Licensing is becoming extremely popular, given that companies are increasingly accepting ideas from independent product developers and inventors. This model is called open innovation.