Innovation CHEF

Henry Chesbrough of Open Innovation fame gives a very detailed presentation of his material in this 2004 video presentation to the Xerox PARC community. He puts forward the idea that innovators need to become conversant with the principles of IP management in order to be able to access external technology and maximize the return of investment of their own labs.

Check it out here.

Of course this is preaching to the choir here.

A complete innovation delivery has to include some consideration of what happens when you are successful! Basic knowledge around Patent Law isn’t hard to understand. A business that depends on technology requires an IP strategy to protect and grow THE BUSINESS.

If you are in the Business of Innovation I would fully recommend “The Fundamentals of Intellectual Property Licensing” course organised and delivered by the Licensing Excecutives Society Internal (LESI)

I would not for a minute diminish the important role your attorney or patent agent will play. Some things are clearly too important to do in a DIY fashion. Innovators who understand IP and businesses that understand IP and have developed strategies will use their legal resources more effectively and get much better value.

I have probably spent as much time involved in the management of IP as I have in Innovation practice and see the benefits that having both bring.

Interested in Feedback of course…

Very Busy Week on the Irish Dragons Den. All looking well for Innovation in Ireland? Fortunes about to be made all round? Well maybe not. Usually we try to discuss a theme during the review. Last week it was all about getting the pitch and presentation right. This week: is the business investable, is the business viable and is there a difference? Can a good idea be brought to market? Can a brand be built? Very interesting stuff to consider.

First segment had a child friendly innovation type feel. Pitch one was from Michael with the Animatazz animation kit. This product promised to bring the magic of animation home. Essentially it is a box of pipecleaners and other odds and ends to make characters that are then animated by following the instructions on the book and DVD. In a smart move, you provide your own camera/phone and use the moviemaking software that comes already with your computer, thus avoiding those difficult software warranty issues. Is this business viable? Yes. Is investable? Yes again. With the right marketing and product placement strategy this is a brand that could grow and grow and make an investor a handsome return. It is the growth potential that makes Animatazz investable. There was some good discussion around expanding the product line with lower and higher age groups. I’d encourage Micheal and Gavin, the Dragon who invested, to look at licensing some popular cartoon characters if they really want Santa to come on board this Christmas. Sarah, pointed out the big words in the manual but I’d think that the DVD and some tweaks to the instructions could overcome any issues. Check out the Website for little animations.

We then had a whole bunch of kid themes pitches all unsuccessful at gaining investment.

• HipKidz is a fully interactive Sports & Activity centre in Galway which helps you to get fit and have fun at the same time. It is a viable business. Could the brand grow as a franchise? Maybe. Didn’t get to see too much but probably could if Aidan chose to operate in that fashion but that didn’t look to be the pitch.
• Table Huggers looked like a combination of a play mat (colourful, interactive surface) and an ironing board cover that you put on your dining table for the kids to play with. Viable Business  – Yes. The idea could probably find a large market too but did the ladies have the capability to bring it to a mass market themselves? The Dragons said they did, so I must have missed something or RTE left it out.
• Ronald had the Baser card. Top up credit card for minors. Not sure we all want to pass a fetish for plastic credit based shopping on to the kids since it hasn’t done wonders for the stability of the current economy but the dragons assured us that the banks, in their wisdom, either had this one already in the bag or would soon.
• Brians World War II based strategy game didn’t get much of a chance. I love RISK but the Irish Dragons don’t…

Back to the bigger pitches with Girls Night In.

Vera runs a pamper party business. Like an old style tupperware party, invite your friends over for flowing chocolate and cocktail, a hunk to serve you and have some Craic with the girls while your toenails get done. It’s been going for a couple of years and although the profits sounded small it looks to have survived and grown. Could this brand grow? Could it be franchised? One of the comments made tonight by Bobby the Dragon was that he didn’t have time for one of the ideas. Building a brand is hard work. Vera looked like she could do it but she didn’t get the backing she needed. I suspect the slim profits that seemed to be on offer wasn’t a big enough incentive for the Dragons to get involved. An investable business needs profit potential and for the investors to make a sizeable return. This business has the growth potential with Vera at the helm but maybe not the profit. Good luck though.

Cormac had his hands on a brand already. The Zsweet. It is a zero calorie, natural, kosher sweetener that doesn’t affect diabetics. Cormac is the sole distributor in Ireland. Cormac wanted to promote Zeroworry foodstuffs based on this product rather than the Zsweet itself. He had been advised that promotion of the existing brand would be too expensive in the competitive sweetener market and was creating a new brand instead. Now, I probably expect that there was quite a bit of leverage from the existing brand and whatever promotion that was happening elsewhere could have been used but perhaps Cormac was going to use this new food range as a beachhead into the Irish market. Bobby the Dragon offered half the money, the others didn’t get the proposal Cormac was offering and unfortunately Cormac didn’t get the cash.

The producers snuck in a couple more short unsuccessful pitches then

• rentcollectors.ie
• a shotgun cartridge component separating machine for recycling
• connector.ie

Final Pitch

It’s been a long show and the final pitch came from veterans of the UK Dragons Den: Alan and Dave with the Toilet Cobra. It’s a toilet bowl cleaner – replacing the unhygienic brush. Retrofitted by screw tapping a hose onto the cistern water supply pipe this then hangs on the side of the toilet and then cleans with the patent protected arrangement of tablet and water gun. The guys had a granted UK patent and said they had a European Patent (doesn’t actually exist but it means then can validate their patent in any EPO member country).  The arrangement of the  system depended on having a tablet in the water gun bit. No tablet – no toilet cleaning. Since you have cut into your pipe to install the thing you are pretty much stuck with it and are locked into providing the guys with an annuity stream coming from their tablet sales.  There are dangers with this particular business model but the guys are at an early stage and Niall the Dragon chipped in the €25k they where looking for and the promise of some design help. Not too bad at all.

Last week in the Poll the CleanPass tied with the Chordelia.
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Facilitating with a new creative problem solving team today and used a very simple technique that always seems to help engagement in the process.

Usually within the first five minutes of sitting down I tell the team that they can save everyone a lot of time and effort if they just provide the answer to the problem right at that moment. There is usually a bit of stunned silence at this point because as far as they are concerned we have gone off the script. It is almost like a pattern interrupt in NLP. I get them to write down the idea they came into the room with, share it with the team and we have a discussion. This takes less than 30 minutes and is, in my experience, the best warm up for any idea generation session.

The script they thought they were going to follow had a big build up until they would share their best idea.  Of course, until that point they were probably watching and waiting for that moment and much less engaged and listening less actively than they could be. Within 30 minutes they don’t have that anymore. They are not thinking about when they are going to share. The decks are cleared for real engagement. You will still find that some people will remain attached to their favourite idea but that’s OK because they aren’t looking for an opportunity to share it anymore and also you, as a faciliatator, are aware of the High Gravity Ideas early and can manage them more effectively.

High Gravity Ideas are those ideas that people can’t escape from because of emotional attachment and threaten to pull all other ideas towards them regardless of their value as a solution.

High Gravity Ideas are not neccessarily a bad thing to have but without some assessment of their value they can soak up time and waste resources. I would use the TRIZ tool Ideal Final Result to assess the value and fit for the problem early in the process.

Keeping the decks clear is also very useful during a long session. It is a human need to be heard. People who haven’t spoken in a while might be getting frustrated with the process, the others in the room or with the facilitator and once this happens  they really can’t think about anything else but how they are going to get their point across. 

• Change the script early.
• Identify and manage the High Gravity Ideas.
• Clear the decks often.

Try to keep everyones mental space free for new ideas and thoughts to occur. Make it easy for for the team to listen and build on the ideas of others and work in an idea space that is going to add real value.

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
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