Welcome to Innovation Café. Here, we explore the world of invention and intellectual property. Today, we’re looking at a challenge many fast-moving inventors face: what should you do when you have more ideas than you can handle? Let’s look at the high-speed innovation problem, discuss ways to manage it, and find out how to turn extra creativity into real results.
What is High-Speed Innovation?
High-speed innovation means coming up with new ideas very quickly. If you invent only once in a while, you can focus on one idea at a time. But if you create two or more valuable inventions each month, you’ll soon realize you can’t patent every idea or build a business around all of them.
Many inventors, myself included, who come up with lots of ideas, face this problem:
- One invention in a lifetime: You build a company or a career around it, betting everything on that one idea.
- A few inventions every couple of years: You might need help from collaborators or form several companies.
- Two or more major inventions per month: This level of output is too fast for traditional entrepreneurial strategies.
f you’re working at this speed, you need to choose whether to let some ideas go or find new ways to bring them to life.
Strategies for Managing High-Speed Innovation
If you have more ideas than you can work on, you need a plan. Here are your main options:
1. Pick and Build
Choose a few inventions and focus on building them yourself. This keeps you in control and lets you see your ideas through to completion.
Challenges:
- Requires significant time and resources.
- Forces you to let many great ideas go.
2. File and License
You can file patents for your inventions and license them to others. This way, you can keep inventing while others handle making, marketing, and selling your ideas.
Challenges:
- Filing for patents is expensive, and today’s legal landscape has made patents less reliable.
- Inventions must meet a high threshold of value to justify the investment in patents.
- Your licensee(s) might not share your vision, and the resulting implementations of your invention will not live up to the promise of what you could implement.
3. Let Go and Focus
Focus on your best ideas and let the rest go. It might feel wasteful, but it lets you spend your time and energy on the ideas most likely to work. Here’s a simple analogy: if someone threw $100, $20, and $5 bills into a crowd and said, “help yourselves,” you’d go for the $100 bills first. The same idea applies here.
Challenges:
- It’s hard to “break up” with your inventions.
- Requires a dispassionate, strategic mindset.
The Evolution of Patent Strategies
As a high-speed inventor, I’ve experienced this problem firsthand. Early in my career, I filed for patents on many ideas, focusing on a licensing strategy. However, as patent law has become less predictable and patents more vulnerable to invalidation, I’ve had to raise the bar for what I choose to protect.
Today, I focus on two key criteria before filing for a patent:
- Does the invention have exceptional value?
- Is the idea worth the cost of pursuing a patent and the risk of legal challenges?
This shift has forced me to let go of many good ideas, but it’s also allowed me to focus on what truly matters.
Ask Yourself the Right Questions
If you’re a high-velocity inventor, here are some key questions to help you decide what to do:
- What’s my endpoint (or desired exit)?
- Do you want to build a company?
- Do you want to sell or license the invention?
- Do you want to dedicate it to the public?
- Does the cost outweigh the benefit?
- Consider the financial, time, and emotional costs of pursuing an idea.
- Which invention aligns with my goals?
- Prioritize ideas that align with your long-term vision and resources.
Embracing High-Speed Innovation
Inventors who move quickly face special challenges, but they also have a chance to make a big difference. We all have the ability to innovate. If you have the confidence to follow your ideas, you can become a high-speed inventor too.
The main thing is to balance creativity with strategy. If you focus on your most important ideas and let others take on the ones you can’t use, you can turn the challenge of too many ideas into a real advantage.
Final Thoughts
If you come up with ideas faster than you can use them, the hard part is choosing which ones to follow and which to let go. It’s not easy, but with the right approach, you can succeed as a high-speed inventor.
January 4, 2026, postscript
The strength of the US patent system has declined precipitously since the passage of the America Invents Act and the Alice v. CLS Bank decision. At the same time, trade secret protection has dramatically improved with the passage of the Defend Trade Secrets Act. In many cases, you will need to rely on NDAs and keep information out of the hands of others (i.e., trade secret) in order to protect your inventions against theft. This changes the value proposition for many inventors. Many of your inventions will issue as weak patents, subject to invalidation in post-grant proceedings or court. This argues for a new path for high-velocity innovation: apply your skills in a different area. I have hundreds of patents, but I’m also a lawyer. I now spend more of my time coming up with creative legal approaches and far less time seeking patents that are ultimately too expensive to enforce myself (patent litigation can easily cost $10 million per side) and too uncertain to bring in investment.