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‘Innovation Simplified’ with NventNode
New online software service helps create, track & polish ideas
By Mike Drummond
Independent inventors seeking to pop into the 21st century may want to throw away their notebooks and log onto NventNode.
NventNode is an inventor’s notebook meets online-product-development-guide tailor made for the modern Edison and the age of open innovation.
Whether you’re pursuing a licensing agreement or manufacturing on your own, NventNode serves as a digital hub to organize and develop your idea from initial concept to polished product.
The folks at product-development firm Design My Idea created this online portal, building on their existing collaborative system to demystify the complexities of commercializing new products.
NventNode walks inventors through some 16 stages of the product-development cycle, with heavy emphasis on market research, including prior art, identification of the competition, focus groups and defined customer base.
A lot of thought went into the construction of this site, including the monetization part. Along the way, NventNode offers tiered pricing for services from Design My Idea and client companies. This is a business after all.
NventNode allows inventors to build teams from various disciplines including engineering, prototyping, business, marketing and intellectual property. You can pay to use Design My Idea staff and its referrals, or roll with your own team for free.
The system is nothing if not flexible.
In all cases, inventors can select who can see what and when along the product-development cycle – and all must abide by a non-disclosure agreement. Inventors also can jump back to any form field to add, delete or modify information. Inventors can even switch between going the licensing or manufacturing routes at any stage.
“Innovation isn’t linear,” says NventNode co-founder and Design My Idea president Brian Gates. “We don’t require all fields to be filled out in linear fashion.”
At the end of the process, inventors can post their products on the NventNode website for potential customers/licensors. Or they can keep it private. (Alert: If you don’t already have a patent, posting your invention on the Internet constitutes public disclosure and can impair your intellectual property rights. It also leaves you particularly vulnerable to knockoffs.)
As of this writing, posting was more of an “if you build it, they will come,” proposition, as users and visitors were scarce. Gates’ goal is to have “well over 1,000” users by the end of 2011 and “hopefully some products that have been develop or are doing extremely well.”
Manufacturing a new product on your own requires more heavy lifting, but the payoff can be greater than licensing. As NventNode notes, if you launch and manufacture to sell a product to retailers, distributors or directly to consumers, “on average you will make 20-40% of the wholesale price.”
In licensing arrangements, because licensors assume most of the risk, inventors on average “receive 2-7% of product sales for the life of the product or agreement.”
NventNode is designed to help inventors develop polished, market-driven products, services or technologies, or in the words of Gates, “push inventors to the point of having a solid presentation.”
And with greater polish and solid presentations, come less risk and better odds of commercial success.
Editor’s note: This article appears in the February 2011 print edition.
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