Hello All,
This is the last post in a three part series. Recently, I have been TOO busy with all of my little projects, but I am slowly, surely ticking things off my to do list and making measurable progress. The batch of products I ordered from the manufacturer in India are currently out at sea and on their way. Soon, I will post them on Amazon and see how that goes. I have finished some promotional writing for my diet book and made a script to ask people for honest reviews of the book. I also set up a Facebook advertising campaign which is ready to go. Everything has to come together at one time for it to be successful and there is so much stuff to do; Honestly, the promotion of the book is much, much more difficult than actually writing it IMHO!
That being said, pre-orders are important! if anyone would like a copy of my book ahead of time, please let me know. I, of course, will offer a BIG discount on pre-orders and would appreciate an honest review, even if you found something you didn't like about the book, but be nice! Although, I hope you will be pleased. One of the things I have yet to do is, I would like to set up a free webinar session to explain some concepts of the book and some things about weight lifting and nutrition, and I would like to make this free to people who pre-order the book. You may or may not have seen, but I am currently going to the gym in efforts to build some muscle and am experiencing pretty nice results! I have been weight lifting since I was in high school and would like to share some fundamentals and nutritional information on the topic.
Selling Open Innovation Ideas
The main topic I would like to blog about today is the third thing from my list of projects I am working on, Selling Open Innovation Ideas. This all started for me when my father asked me to read a book called One Simple Idea by Stephen Key. Stephen is the idea man and has made his living solely by selling new ideas to companies. One of his most famous ideas was a product which you may remember called The Michael Jordan Wallball. I certainly remember seeing these things everywhere when I was younger. Now, being older, I was amazed to hear the story of it's creation and how Stephen made over $200,000 with taking no risks, over this one simple idea, and that's after splitting the royalties with Jordan. Key basically sent a cardboard cutout of his image of the product (a prototype, really) to a toy company. At the time, there were home/office mini basketball products, so this was a fresh, new idea, and having Jordan on there instead of a normal backboard was a great idea!
His wife thought it was a stupid idea until the toy company replied to his mailed in prototype only two days later saying they would like to negotiate about the product idea! He made a royalty contract with them, not even needing to file a patent on the idea, and the rest is history.
I have studied a lot about Stephen Key and about his successes. He was kind enough to share his method with the world. He inspired me to carry around a little (virtual) notebook and constantly think of new ideas for how products can improve. Whenever I think of an idea, I just write it down and add it to the list. Some ideas are better than others, and some ideas sound good, but are not practical or feasible... or don't make good business sense. It is important to think of how the company and the market would view the idea and to think about the costs and factors of production.
Also, with many of my ideas, it usually is the case that someone has already thought of them. I have had many moments of "darn, that was a good idea too, but they got it already". This has happened with clothes hangers with rollers so you can just pull your clothes off easily. I also happened when I thought it might be cool to partner with an engineer and develop a suit for VR where you would get hot, cold, rumble feedback, etc, all over the body while playing a VR game or watching a VR movie. If there was an explosion in the movie, you would be able to feel the heat on your skin. However, a quick YouTube search showed me that two people were already in works designing something similar. There are many people in the world with great ideas!
Currently, I have a really great idea which is a secret of course. The market is the gaming industry, and I think it has the potential to be a new item which many people would start buying. However, nothing is sure, but I have a good feeling about it. It is a simple product to develop, but I need the marketing rights on several of the game characters.I already tried to contact the main publishers, but I was rejected and ignored. However, I think the individual game development companies actually hold the rights on their IPs, so I will contact them very soon. If nothing seems to work, I will partner with an established manufacturer of video game goods and have them appeal to the companies for the marketing rights.
I also have an idea which I was asked by P&G to submit. I haven't submitted it yet because it has been difficult to call them from Japan. See, when submitting ideas, it is important to KNOW WHO you are sending the idea to. Even with some patent protections, it is still possible to have the idea stolen and you need a paper trail and a name; You can't just have your idea bouncing around all sorts of people inside the company because you'll never be able to have someone to pin the responsibility on in the even something dastardly happens! However, I have my sell sheet all done and ready to go. What is a sell sheet you ask?
This is an example of a sell sheet. The company will instantly get an idea of what the product is. Thanks to the graphic design skills I taught myself while illustrating my diet book, I have developed THREE of these sheets for P&G and am working on making one for the gaming industry. Of course, I can't show them, but if my ideas are rejects or accepted I may post them here in the future.
Anyway, that is just the basic overview of open innovation idea selling. I hope throwing a few ideas at the wall will cause one of them to stick!
I hope this was an interesting insight into how to make some passive bucks! From here on out, I plan to blog much more about music. I would also like to make a color scheme for my blog posts and blog in a few different areas, such as food or things about Japan, weight lifting, or anything else I am into.
All the best,
SCOPS
Comments