Failure

The story goes something like this:

A bright young man has a great idea. The idea is sweeping in its scope. Its basic simplicity means that anyone can understand it. The idea will revolutionise existing industry, or create an entirely new industry.

The young man - and it's almost always a young man - is from the right background to appreciate the idea's potential problems. He knows how to make this idea in the metal, if given the tools and materials. All it needs is labour, time, and experimentation.

Drawing the idea takes only a few minutes. Drawing some more variations on the idea takes another few hours, probably on the next day or in the next week, when he's got more spare time. Deciding on the physical construction, with its details and difficulties, takes another month or more. This is all if he is able to work and think without interruption or upheaval.

Actually building the idea, after all of this, is surprisingly quick, and only needs a few weeks. He takes a little time to celebrate, and starts testing.

There are problems. They are very obvious, and he is embarrassed that they weren't thought of before. Some are easy to solve. Others prove to require more time and experimentation, while the bills for all of this start to mount.

So far he's been working alone, in strict secrecy, because the idea has no protection. Anyone else could copy it and claim the idea as their own. Worse, a rich man could come along and patent it. The young man knows a little about patent law and understands that the actual inventor has few or no rights, if that person does not have the patent.

This is the plan: He will perfect and patent the invention, sell manufacturing rights to the patent, and become rich.

Getting the patent is very expensive. It's something he's never done before. He either puts it off and continues to work in secrecy, or he finds the money somehow - from precious savings, or borrowed from family and friends, or earned through a business that he has started.

Usually all of this takes twenty years, but it never looks like that at the start.

The reward at the end of all of this will be worth all of the work. The reward is fame, fortune - when the world beats a path to his door for his idea - best of all, it's being proved right to all the cynics, all the sceptics, all the doubters. Maybe he's already got the honest love of a good woman. So he continues to work to perfect the idea before patenting it, then tries to sell the licencing rights to the rich men who have the means to bring this idea to the world.

The young men who have these ideas are usually not wealthy. Their interest is the technical fascination of the problem, not the economics of business. Usually they have a technical background instead of a business background. The activity of buying and selling - everything that business is about - does not interest them except as a means to an end.

It comes as quite a nasty shock to find that nobody wants to buy the idea in order to profit from it. All those presented with it usually agree that it is a good idea, maybe even exceptional. But they do not buy, because it looks like trouble. It is new, and using it will involve change. It will force people to learn new things and to change their habits.

It will cost a great deal of time, money and effort to bring this new idea to the shop's shelves. Convincing ordinary people to buy usually requires showing that it is an improvement of an old and accepted idea, or if it is a new idea, that it completely beats what it replaces. The existing beaurocracy and laws will have to be bent around this idea as well.

If it really is worthwhile, taking it commercial is likely to require the entire resources of a large corporation.

Given that the existing company has got perfectly good business lines already, why should they go to this trouble on something that will probably turn into an expensive and embarrassing mistake? Until the competition forces the company to improve, there is absolutely no incentive to do anything which involves uncalculated risks. Improving things costs a great deal of money, but the shareholders and the board have to be appeased on every financial quarter year. The company's own R&D people don't want to be embarrassed, or forced to admit that they were second best, so they will be unlikely to recommend it to their bosses.

It probably won't get made and sold unless the now middle-aged (and still probably not rich) inventor is willing to set up tooling and manufacture it himself, which entails considerably more work than inventing it did.

The exception to this is when the idea will obviously sell. The companies then find it in their interests to R&D and plan production, but they may look at what the inventor is offering, develop and patent a better solution, and go with that instead. If they move on it at all, that is. inventors are different people to the ones who are employed in large, stable, safe, predictable corporations.

Usually the idea is relegated to the pages of an obscure book, and very few people in the world have heard of it. And that's usually it. In short, the plan of seeking success by inventing, patenting, and then selling rights or licenses is one of the most difficult propositions that a non-commercially minded person can undertake.