How to give your idea a fighting chance
First, be clear on this: Your idea is worth nothing, nothing at all…not unless you do something real with it. If someone steals your idea and makes millions on it, thank them and consider yourself lucky if they credit you with the original idea.
Money does not flow to ideas. It flows to people who intend to do something about it and who take the risks required to make it real – from the opportunity-cost risk of not doing other things that might have been more successful, the economic risk of spending time and resources on an uncertain return, to the social risk of being seen as a madman.
So while your idea might be a nice invention, the first question you have to ask yourself is not how do I patent my invention, but rather “what are my intentions?”
Whenever you have an “idea”, stop right there and assign a value from 1 to 100 to your intentions. If you are really good, you’ll have a list with your ideas and their associated intention value. The value is a priority ranking, with 1 = “I will probably forget this in an hour” to 100 = “I intend to pursue this to the exclusion of all else, including health, family and friends.”
Along the continuum, if I have an invention idea and I just want to file a patent in hopes of someone licensing it, I’d set the Intention value to 10 or 12…maybe 15 if you actually pay the thousands of dollars in fees to support the patent after the year-long provisional period.
Valuing an idea: A patented idea should be valued at the cost it would take for the inventor to actually build and start marketing the envisaged product or service herself. If you’ve really invented a novel way to make a nuclear reactor – well, ok, if your idea really is likely to work, will produce massive utility, is novel and not-obvious, then your patent should be worth a lot – nuclear reactors are expensive. But if you have described a software idea that could be implemented and put on the web by two fourteen-year-olds in three weeks, then in my view your idea (just the patent without you actually doing anything real with it) is worth three weeks of a teenager’s allowance…times 2.
Sure, this isn’t the way things work today in the patent world, but we can dream. We need to “get real” about making ideas real.
What does it mean when the value you place on an intention fluctuates from week to week?
That is the thing about intentions. Unlike inventions, which can be set in a rigid patent, intentions tend to shimmer. But if you are ranking your intention on a line from 1 to 100, it might be more correct to say that the numeric value should stay roughly the same, but the other intentions you put on that line will give you the sense of the value going up or down.
For example, say your intention is to start a new company and build a product around an invention you have. You mark that intent at 60. The next day, you get a great offer for your dream job. You take a breath, clear your head, and decide that your intent to take that job is 80. It is going to feel like the original intention has gone down, but what has happened is that a new data point with a higher value has entered. Your priority for the original intention is down, but the value stays the same.
What do you think?