Innovation CHEF

If you have ever bought something online you are familiar with recommendations for other products being generated for you. You buy the latest Dylan album and are recommended his previous back catalog, that kind of thing. Now conventional  systems generate these suggestions by picking items that are like items that other users have purchased in the past. Professor Barry Smyth, a University College Dublin (UCD) scientist, has made a major breakthrough in online “recommender” systems and has been granted US and China patents on his system to improve online shopping and information.

Professor Smyth says his new technique will help existing recommender systems to produce recommendations that are both relevant to users and different from each other.

“One limitation is a tendency to produce sets of recommendations that are similar to each other”

The new system avoids very similar products being recommended together and allows more choices to be displayed.

This is a major research area in computer science and Irish universities are at the leading edge of the field. Netflix, the US online movie rental company, is using open innovation with a  $1 million competition to develop the next generation of recommender systems.

Check out research by Professor Smyth and the team at Clarity – the Centre for Sensor Web Technologies

Bob’s New Album is pretty good though too..

• First you have a business strategy.
• Then you have an IP strategy.
• Then you have Business Strategy.

There are a lot of things to consider when building a business. Especially a tech business. Especially if it is a new technology that you are going to set the world alight with. Getting the product right, pulling in customers and getting the finance … these are all crucial to success. An IP strategy doesn’t lead the business but no business should be without one.

I’d also argue very strongly that the IP strategy should not be left to the lawyers, shouldn’t be the responsiblity of the R&D guys but should be front and center with the business heads. Why? IP is a business asset and like any asset you need to be mindful of the the return you are making from it. IP is a control point for your business. If you have a patent you can exclude others or through licensing allow access to those who you have chosen to make a deal with – thats a big deal.

Always identify the Key IP. The stuff that makes a difference. The reason why someone will come to you rather than someone else.

Without getting overly complicated here are three things to consider. There are many more factors and nuances but these are biggies:

1. You only have protection where you look for it so do you know where your market is? Do you know where it will be in 5, 10, 20 years time? Consider what happens when your product is successful. Even if there are geographies that you couldn’t exploit directly – could someone else?  Wouldn’t it be better if that happened on your terms?
2. In most countries the exclusive right granted to a patent holder is the right to prevent others from making, using, selling, or distributing the patented invention without permission. Think about locations where your product could be manufactured or key ports it might need to travel through.
3. Check for workarounds to your invention, check for modifications that can be made to your product that could dent your revenue stream. Make sure that the patent claims protect your business not that they protect certain technical choices that you made. You could have a brillantly written patent that is worthless because a competitor chose a way that was second best technically but leveraged other factors such as price or brand and they now own the market. If you can own second best, and third best then do so too.

IP is there to help protect the revenue stream and profits that you are working so hard to get. It is not an insurance policy for when things go wrong so much as a protection policy to maximise your upside when things go right. If the business doesn’t work out quite as you hoped you can always scale back on that investment or sell it on / license it as an asset.

Innovation is about turning those inventions and ideas into commercial reality, an IP strategy is about making business sense of the innovation.

We have been offline for a little while but now we are back with the traditional Thursday night review of the Irish Version of Dragons Den. Ideally we would have a show packed with new and useful ideas. A showcase of the best of Irish Innovation and talent. The Dragons would be discerning and adventurous business angels ready to help give the struggling entrepreneur the kick start they need. It all hasn’t worked out that way but there are still some glimmers of hope. It is a fun show to watch and to have twitter running a live commentary on #ddire is added entertainment.

No experimentation with the format of the show is matched by a unimaginative review structure

• 3 reasonably comprehensive pitches
• a few short unsuccessful tries
• the final pitch of the show

Pitch 1

Elaine Sarah is a trained goldsmith and her product was a novel take on the charm bracelet. Inspired by her mothers button box, Elaine Sarah has created silver button charms to be collected on “needle and thread” style bracelet, The innovation is probably low in this idea but it looks well implemented and I wouldn’t underestimate the design elements or craft that was needed. This kind of a business requires a brand to be built in order to be successful. The button bracelet has to be more than just another bangle, it has to have the cachet that allows the wearer and the admirer to see additional value and that only genuine additional buttons are bought to fill out the bracelet. She was looking €45k to build the brand. Elaine Sarah was a little nervous but had offers of the 45K in return for hefty chunks of equity in her company. She went with Niall, a fellow silversmith in return for 45% of the company.

I think this business will fly.

Pitch 2.

Leprechaun hair….Really…..

In the style of air in a jar, lucky shamrocks and other novelty items this is fake hair in a plastic bag stuck to a little piece of printed material with nonsense printed on it. This is a niche market and Gary is making sales. Anyone who saw the reception that the Paddygames got a couple of weeks ago won’t be surprised that the Dragons didn’t go for this. This kind of thing is either one of a multitude of products rolled out or a simple oneshot wonder. The latter may be the case.

Pitch 3

Ken the engineer has invented FAXCOP. It is a device you plug into your fax machine and it prevents junk faxes. Useful and environmentally friendly. Now, junk faxes are pretty wasteful, but if you think about it so are fax machines. Email does the same job and the resolution and readability you get from a printed document is much better and probably in colour and you choose if and when to print it out. Nevertheless, Ken has spend €100k of his own money in developing the device and sees a multibillion dollar business potential. Most of the Dragons baulked at investing €85k in a Fax machine busines reckoning it was 20 years too late.

Sean and Gavin looked like they might have gone in but for Ken’s reluctance to share how the device worked. Ken was looking to protect his Intellectual Property and not disclosing secrets on TV is one way to do that. However he had already said that he had filed for Patent protection and that the patents here at the national filing stage. This essentially means that he has already disclosed publically how the device works! That is the fundamental part of a patent filing, even if it is NOT granted – you still have to tell everyone how your invention works. (The application is kept secret for a while though you can change your mind after the process starts, but not at the national filing stage) Anyway, Ken felt he couldn’t share and the Dragon’s didn’t share with Ken.

Fast pitches

• correctfooddirect – healthy food baskets just for you! But not for the Dragons
• Used wedding dresses – no again
• Ecofriendly bicycle holidays seemed to be too expensive a proposition
• The scales that weighed beer kegs to check if free pints were being pulled wasn’t a winner

Final Pitch

Geena and Joan with Greenme.ie It’s the Irish Green directory site, with great material to pull you back for more. Boasting of €55k sales in two months and millions being projected this was surely a winner. The inquiry began. The business model is essentially selling advertising space with a green heart. Concerns were raised about whether the green ethos could remain pure if they needed the revenue to come in. Assurances were given that was not the case. Concerns were raised they might be tree huggers, Assurances were given again that this was not the case. Concerns were raised that they might be overvaluing their business by looking for €150K for only 10% equity share, Assurances came forward but in this case failed to win over the dragons.

There seemed to be a bit of a theme in this evenings show about businesses being overvalued. If you have a great business idea based on a new technology I recommend you check out this podcast. It is from the Killer Innovations podcast series and comes highly recommended.

The Grass Carver won last weeks poll:

Dragons Den week 1
Dragons Den week 2
Dragons Den week 3
Dragons den week 4

Yellow is one of the colours for spring 2009. That much was clear from the pitches on this evenings Dragons Den. Two pretty successful shows under their belt and RTEs Dragon’s Den roared back onto the screen. In the past weeks some real innovations have mixed it up with some new implementations of tried and tested solutions. The nonsense has got fairly short shrift. So what did week three have on offer and was anyone buying?

Eddie was a man smart enough to get out of the property development game a few years ago. Did he have any other ideas? His invention was the Hangout. Essentially a wooden garden Gazebo with washing line fitted to the interior of the roof. He has sold about twenty five already for a fairly good margin. He was looking for capital to get his invention manufactured and marketed. Eddie clearly had thought this one through, unlike the text tax idea that we reviewed on this site earlier.

The Hangout hit many of the key elements for successful innovation:

• knowing what the benefit was to the customer
• prototyping and refining
• Market testing
• Pricing and positioning
• protection of Intellectual Property

In fact Eddie had even subdivided and prioritized his IP. Nice job. The Dragons realised this was a guy with his stuff together. Building a brand should be straightforward enough even in a crowded market. There is enough scope there to develop the idea even further. I made notes to the side as I watched on how to use TRIZ principles to make product extensions and add features. Not often Garden Furniture is that exciting.

He got the cash and two backers. Excellent work.

Part two brought Colm and Pat to the Den. It was a little shelf that sat in your window ledge and allowed you to bunch up your good curtains into an unattractive heap above your radiator so that you could benefit from the heat. 30% energy savings were quoted. Note: I often talk about Rule zero of business, make it easy for people to give you money. The fact that Sarah laughed her head off through the presentation wasn’t a great sign. Bobby thought it looked like a skirt bunched up in ladies knickers and Gavin more genteelly inquired whether it would put creases in your treasured pair of curtains. The guys acknowledged that this was a product for people who valued energy savings over the look of the curtains in the bedroom. There is a problem to be solved here. The ideal solution allows you to save the money and preserve the look of the curtains. The guys had a bonus invention around the back, a heat recovery system using pipes to be fitted to the exterior of the house and a heat pump, could be good but it wasn’t what we were looking at tonight. The presentation was uniquely described as “Mr. Bean meets Open University” and the traditional bad pun meant it was curtains for this idea.

Next up was the first of the Yellow fashionistas to the Den. Fiona in bright yellow dress and blue leggings was the primary coloured accomplice to Paula. They brought four models to show off their own branded fashion to the Dragons. The business model was a little hard to catch at first but essential it’s a two pronged attack. Buy your trendy clothes from the fashionshed and have a styling party at your house with your own trained stylist for the evening. The party idea seemed a good hook for the business and seemed to have franchise possibilities. Despite having a good pitch they left empty handed. They have a blog on which they critique nicely the dragons sense of fashion.

In a line the unsuccessful:

Brian with his safety hinge to stop kids fingers getting lopped off in the door. I would like to see more
Andrew with the permanent roof overhanging block. Maybe not for the dragons in this market, but protect this idea and build a brand if you can!
Susan with MAC blinds. automated blind opening and closing. Maybe if this was 1980 and the control board wiring didn’t look like a safety accident
Myles with his separated wheelie bin idea. I think I have seen one of those already and maybe so did the dragons

Finally Colin, sports scientist turned M&A corporate lawyer with his paddygames event. Paddy games are essentially stupid events like three legged welly tosses and the like. Now in fairness this is, to a degree, an idea that challenges conventional thinking. This blog and innovation thinking in general encourages use of thinking in different dimensions and ways. However that is for useful advances and value creation. Couldn’t see it here. Colin said, while standing in his yellow suit, “who says we have to run forwards, go over hurdles rather than under them?” However Colin reminded me of Will Ferrells character in Curious George and made it hard (rule zero again) for the dragons to take him seriously. The PaddyGames are in pursuit of some major sponsors and Colin certainly has the chutzpah to carry something like this off. It wouldn’t have interested me, it didn’t interest the Dragons and Colin got the National TV exposure. Fair result.

So three weeks in. Dragons Den is shaping up nicely. Good lessons to be learned and some entertaining moments.

Dragons Den week 1
Dragons Den week 2

Monday morning round up of innovation related stories from Ireland from the past week. If you see anything worth talking about let me know..

1. We need to nurture the innovation economy, says Microsoft Ireland boss

Silicon Republic 26.02.2009

The future of Ireland lies well beyond manufacturing, says Microsoft MD Paul Rellis.

2. Plans for Cork science park to go on public display

People have been invited to comment on and help shape the development of the country’s first science park which has the potential to create up to 6,000 jobs

3. Ready for the Breakthrough

Irish Times, Monday, March 2, 2009

Dr Rory O’Shea has identified a number of strategies of action that can be employed by business schools to help stimulate academic entrepreneurship.

4. The Bottleneck

Irish Times, Monday, March 2, 2009

Good ideas have long abounded in Ireland, but the route from notes on a napkin to products on the market has not always been so straightforward.

5. Intel creates 134 jobs in Shannon as part of €50m expansion

Silicon Republic, 27.02.2009

Global chip giant Intel is to create 134 R&D jobs in a major expansion of its operation facility in the Shannon Free Zone, bringing total employment at the facility to 300 over the next four years.

6. Financial software player sets up R&D facility in Dublin

Silicon Republic, 02.03.2009

A UK-based insurance premium tax (IPT) consultancy has located its R&D office in Dublin to take advantage of the high availability of software development expertise in the city

7. New SFI Research Clusters
Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan T.D., announces the establishment of 5 new Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Strategic Research Clusters.

8. Irish Patent Office Announce the Launch of the Junior Inventor Competiton. This competition is aimed at Irish primary school children and encourages young students to be innovative thinkers.

9. Vision of Ireland as the “Innovation Island” is ambitious

Speech at FF conference, 28/02/09

Taoiseach talks smart economy..

10. Seanad Debate on Protection of Intellectual Property

DETE, 25 February 2009

… are fortunate to have in this country a well developed IP Protection system…

Good news for Innovation and research in Ireland as the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan T.D., announces the establishment of 5 new Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Strategic Research Clusters.

The SRC programme is intended to link scientists and engineers in partnerships across academia and industry to address crucial research questions, foster the development of new and existing Irish-based technology companies, and to grow partnerships with industry.

This announcement represents an investment of €23.9million.

The 5 centres are:

1. Clique - A Graph & Network Analysis Cluster
2. Alimentary Glycoscience Research Cluster
3. FAME (Federated, Autonomic Management of End-to-end Communication Services)
4. Irish Separation Science Cluster
5. Precision – Plasma Technology for Nanomanufacturing

The roll call of companies partnering with Irish Academia is again very impressive, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Ericsson, Pfizer, IBM, Idiro Technologies, Norkom Technologies, Agilent Technologies Ireland ltd., Alimentary Health, Biomining Inc., Bristol Myers-Squibb, Cisco Systems, Telefónica I+D, Dionex Corporation, Waters Technology Ireland Ltd, Enbio Materials, Holfeld Plastics, Impedans, Lexas Research, Proxy Biomedical and Straatum.

Great science and the opportunity for real innovation and development of some critical assets for the Irish economy. A lot of hard work goes into these. Congratulations all round.

Of course we’ll be watching!