Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Friday, May 05, 2006Product Ideas, Inventions, and Innovations
Growing inventions into innovation is an inherently collaborative process. Effective collaboration is predicated upon the development of shared meaning. In order to cultivate shared meaning, it's become clear to me that that we need greater precision in our language. More specifically, we need a better way to understand how product ideas, inventions, and innovations are different points on a spectrum.
It seems to me that a product idea has the following characteristics:
- It is an insight that leads to a hypothesized relationship between cause and effect.
- The effect (utilitarian or emotional) is desired by users.
- The insight is articulated in the form of an abstract design of a device having features that presumably cause the desired effect.
Within the realm of ideas, there are more or less potentially valuable ideas:
- A well-articulated, actionable idea has an overt benefit and real reason to believe.
- A dramatically different product idea addresses an outcome that is both important and under-served, which requires a deep understanding of the user and the context of use.
Designation as an invention requires a bit more:
- There needs to be a functional prototype - a physical instantiation of a well-articulated product idea.
- There must be observable evidence that the use of the product causes the desired outcome.
Inventions, too, lie along a range of more or less certainty, which is typically resolved in an iterative process of hypothesis-experiment-revised hypothesis:
- Can we explain clearly and precisely how the features of the product cause the desired outcome?
- Is the solution novel? Is there the potential to develop meaningful intellectual property protection?
- Can the product be manufactured in volume? Can it be made at a cost that is competitive over time relative to a broad range of alternatives?
- Is there valid evidence of a signfiicant market for the product?
In order to be commercializable, there needs to be less, rather than more, uncertainty in regard to such questions.
The characteristics of a commercial product innovation are unambiguous:
- The product has been adopted by users.
- The product is generating revenue.
Most of the "inventions" we see at Evergreen IP are, per the above, rather rough product ideas - though some have the potential to become, first, well-articulated ideas and, subsequently, potential inventions. However, even promising inventions have a long way to go before they become innovations.
Building upon the preceding, a subsequent post will present a rule-of-thumb method for putting a value on an idea. (Hint: If somebody offers you $10,000 for your product idea, you should probably take the money and run.)
