Welcome to Innovation Café, where we delve into the complexities of invention and intellectual property. Today, we’re tackling a challenge unique to high-velocity inventors: what do you do when you generate more ideas than you can realistically pursue? Let’s break down the high-speed innovation problem, explore strategies for managing it, and find solutions for turning an overflow of creativity into meaningful impact.
What is High-Speed Innovation?
High-speed innovation refers to the ability to generate numerous groundbreaking ideas at an accelerated pace. If you’re someone who invents occasionally, you can focus on nurturing one invention at a time. But if you’re creating two or more game-changing ideas a month, you’ll quickly face a critical issue: you can’t pursue a patent while building a company around them all.
This is the dilemma many prolific inventors face:
- 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.
At this velocity, you’ll need to choose between letting some ideas go or finding alternative ways to bring them to life.
Strategies for Managing High-Speed Innovation
If you’re generating ideas faster than you can pursue them, you’ll need to adopt a deliberate strategy. Here are your main options:
1. Pick and Build
Focus on a small number of inventions and commit to building them yourself. This entrepreneurial approach allows you to maintain control and see your vision through to completion.
Challenges:
- Requires significant time and resources.
- Forces you to let many great ideas go.
2. File and License
Adopt a licensing strategy where you file for patents on your inventions and license them to others. This allows you to focus on generating ideas while letting others handle the production, marketing, and commercialization.
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
Only pursue the very best ideas and let the rest go. While this may feel wasteful, it allows you to concentrate your efforts and resources on ideas with the greatest potential for success.
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 critical questions to help guide your decisions:
- 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
High-speed inventors face unique challenges, but they also have the opportunity to make an extraordinary impact. Humans are born with innovation hardwired into our brains. With the confidence to pursue your ideas, you too can become a high-velocity inventor.
The key is learning to balance creativity with strategy. By focusing on the ideas that matter most and finding ways to let others run with your unused inventions, you can turn your high-speed innovation problem into a high-speed innovation solution.
Final Thoughts
For those of us who generate ideas faster than we can act on them, the challenge is deciding what to pursue and what to let go. It’s not an easy decision, but with the right mindset and strategies, it’s possible to thrive as a high-speed inventor.