How To Vet Clever Ideas Without Giving Them Away? 539
Rival writes "As an inquisitive and creative geek, I am constantly coming up with 'clever' ideas. Most often I discover fundamental or practical flaws lurking in the details, which I'm fine with. As Edison said, 'I haven't failed; I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.' Other times, I discover that someone else has beaten me to the idea. I'm fine with that, too. At least I know that I've come up with a great idea, even if I'm not the first. There are times, however, when I can find no flaws with an idea and nobody else seems to have thought of it. I'm not conceited enough to think my idea is genius; I just assume that I'm not knowledgeable enough to see what I'm missing. In these times, I often want to ask a subject matter expert for their thoughts. On the admittedly long chance that an idea is genius, however, what is the best way to ask for another's insights while mitigating the risk of them stealing or sharing the idea? Asking a stranger to sign a contract before discussing an idea seems like a good way to get a door closed on my face. What are your experiences and suggestions?"
Ideas want to be public (Score:5, Interesting)
Ideas are a dime a dozen. What matters is confronting your idea with real world feedback and you'll be astonished by the results (read this for more on keeping your idea confidential: the great startup idea that I can't reveal yet [fairsoftware.net]).
Guy Kawasaki gave one really good suggestion to test your idea: convince a woman. It sounds stupid and insulting, but what he really means is that it's too easy for geeks and tech lovers to fall in love with a geeky idea. Presumably, women are more grounded and will tell you why your idea is not practical.
Finally, regarding confidentiality: don't worry about it so much
Just ask Rands (Score:2, Interesting)
guess what element of your idea is wrong first... (Score:2, Interesting)
Faux stupidity is the key (Score:5, Interesting)
What I do is I pitch a modified version of the idea where several key components are blatantly impossible, stupid, and possibly illegal. Then I pitch it to my friendly neighborhood geek and ask for his advice. They'll start ranting about how retarded my idea is, but I'll keep goading them and say "Okay, but imagine if we could fix that, what else do you think?" Knowing how geeks are amenable to abstract hypotheticals, and love to refute things in a thorough point-by-point fashion, they'll keep going on and on about the rest of the design too. I'll pretend to take notes the whole time, but in actuality I'm just seeing what they say about the real parts of the design. But when I depart, they're left with the overall impression that my idea was retarded and useless. I get my feedback, and they're none the wiser!
Anyway, that irrelevant nonsense aside, I'm busy working on a high performance V-8 hemi engine powered by babies. I'm having some troubles with the baby pump getting clogged by babies, and also my valve timing equations could use some tweaking. Any automotive engineers want to help me out with some constructive criticism and proprietary engine timings? Thanks!
Just put together a proposal and try to find $$$. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody is that interested in ideas; ideas don't make all that much money, believe it or not. Execution makes the money. If it's a good idea, lots of people will be happy to pay you a comparatively small amount (that well may seem huge to you) for the privilege of bringing it to market. They don't steal ideas; that would be killing off the golden goose. Venture capital and other similar interests don't want the ideas to stop coming to them, which is what would happen if they actually stole ideas.
Same thing with publishing and creative works. When I was younger and working on my first books, I was very wary of publishers. I hated to discuss a manuscript. Everything I sent was plastered with copyright notices and I would be sure to send myself a sealed certified copy first with a postmark date on it and then file it away in a safe deposit box. I was that sure that my prose was precious.
Now I have the better part of a dozen books on the market and I've been through the process a few times and I know much better. The publisher isn't interested in what's in your book. They're not impressed. They've seen tens of thousands of manuscripts. It's no crown jewel to them, no matter how good it is. They just want to know whether or not they can sell it. If they can, they're perfectly happy to pay you the royalty and rake in the dough.
Ideas people often make the mistake of thinking that we live in a world of ideas, in which ideas are precious and he who has them rules. In fact, we live in a world of employees and middlemen, most of whom are perfectly uninterested in ideas. With or without your idea, they'll continue on their merry way to be successful by paying for ideas from someone and turning them into products.
If you don't get over your fear, what will happen is that they'll continue to make money, continue to pay other people for their ideas, and you'll continue to have nothing but your great ideas that nobody knows about. Just put them out there. Talk about them as much as you can. That's the way that you broaden your network of contacts, potential funders, and potential buyers to the maximum extent possible.
Don't worry about it (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. People overvalue the concept of "idea" and undervalue the concept of aggressive business positioning, development, marketing, capital, and a lot of, well, work.
I was at Harvard when facebook was "born." I was persistently skeptical about the whole thing, as the concept was not new *at all*, and friendster was reigning supreme, which I kind of thought was a silly fad. I was subsequently astounded over the years how facebook has taken off. (I am still astounded.) But, had the founders listened to me, or saw that their idea was "taken," it would have gone nowhere.
That being said, I wouldn't give a highly established potential competitor research data that you have gotten to get your idea off the ground. Despite my words, I also hold a few patents, but these are mostly defensive positioning and required by my corporation.
Nebulous "ideas" have an insignificant chance of being "thought of" already. What you need to do is get honest feedback about the barriers to implementation, then just go and do it!
Re:Ideas want to be public (Score:1, Interesting)
I beg to differ. Next month a brain child of mine will receive over a million in funding for advertising and go live.
it's been almost a year since I've had any control over the project and i signed the NDA. Unfortunately for me no one was there to warn me about signing away my rights, i was under the impression i was protecting them. A good friend of mine who was the driving force behind me was convinced by a third party to cut me from my own project. Sadly age played a significant role, amongst other things.
I'm actually hoping they are successful in their venture. It gives me inspiration on my next project and I learned a valuable lesson: trust no one :)
how to keep 'em from stealing (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's how: tell them your idea. Nobody is going to bother to "steal" your idea until you have already taken the risk and expense. People aren't cruising around looking for ideas to steal. Think about it: have you ever heard, even second-hand, of anyone doing that? Have you ever thought of doing that (forget whether or not you'd do it; have you ever even considered it)?
What good idea-stealers do, is watch to see who makes what work, and then imitate. You won't be imitated until after you succeed.
Re:Ideas want to be public (Score:2, Interesting)
Getting locked out of your OWN invention (Score:2, Interesting)
I have an idea for a niche electronic product, and I've built a prototype. I'd really prefer not to spend the thousands of dollars involved in an international patent, not to mention the thousands more to defend the patent if I think that patent actually has been breached.
My only concern is that some "other company" might patent my idea, then sue me for infringement of that idea. Does "prior art" cover this? As long as my invention has been published/marketed/discussed/shown to my friends, the "other company" can't then go on and patent my original idea, right?
As I said, it's a niche product, custom-made to order, so I don't expect some big factory to steal the idea then churn them out by the thousand. So should I bother patenting it?
*Yes, I realise that asking for legal advice on Slashdot will have a terrible signal to noise ratio.
Re:Don't worry about it (Score:3, Interesting)
When I joined Facebook, I liked the simplicity. They had taken a page from Google's book, and created a really simplistic, intuitive interface. No real user-configurable colors, or other silly things that are rampant on MySpace, and just make its already hideous design look worse. Then they got popular, and started to emulate MySpace more and more. MySpace would then copy elements of Facebook, and they've been going back and forth ever since. The simple interface was so much better...
Re:Or there's the other alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
What I would do is find someone who's well acquainted in the field, then tell him your idea in great detail. If it's a bad idea, nothing lost, if it's a good idea, you can threaten to slaughter his whole family.
Or just, like, bring him on as a business partner? Since you don't know enough about the field to even know if your own freakin idea is worth beans or not? The one thing in common between Intel, Apple, Microsoft, and every other large successful 'idea' company that I can think of? Even when they were tiny startups they still had more than one person in the company. Hell, the word 'company' should be a clue, have you ever heard of a 'multinational alone'?
Re:Ideas want to be public (Score:4, Interesting)
I am constantly coming up with 'clever' ideas. Most often I discover fundamental or practical flaws lurking in the details, which I'm fine with. As Edison said, 'I haven't failed; I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.'
I recall reading a quote of Nikola Tesla about Edison, something like "Edison wasted so much time and effort when he could have done it right on the first attempt if he just learned a bit of science".
I'm not sure if Edison is any sort of role model.
Re:Ideas want to be public (Score:3, Interesting)
I've just been reading an Edison biography, and it depends on what you mean by "idea". Alexander Bell made the first telephone (he didn't really have the "idea" for it, because lots of people thought it would be cool to transmit voice by wires, although they didn't see any commercial application for it - and they didn't make it work). But, hearing of this idea, Edison (and many others) began to try to improve it, particularly for longer distances (which limited Bell's version), by creating a microphone that worked by varying resistance, instead of generating currents by induction, and therefore could be amplified (by regulating an ordinary telegraph signal). So, that was Edison's idea: not entirely obvious, unless you understood the issues, as one skilled in the state of the art would. But it wasn't worth anything.
Edison did a ton of work, and came up with something that was OKish. He submitted it to Western Union for commercialization, and they weren't impressed. He went back, and experimented some more. He had thought that the carbon disk he used (that translated pressure into resistance) needed to vibrate with the sound waves. But as he tried stronger springs, that incidentally reduced the vibration as a by-product, the signal got clearly. He eventually noticed this, and tried locking the carbon in place, so it didn't vibrate at all - and the signal was perfect.
The idea of a telephone was not valuable; the idea of translating sound into resistance was not valuable, but *this* idea - that rigid carbon is very effective for translating sound into resistance - *was* a valuable idea. Although it seems less Edison's, than nature who had to keep... banging... him... on... the... head... with... it.... until he got it. But I think that's the nature of truly new ideas: they are very hard to see, even when right in front of you. We likely are surrounded by great ideas at all times that we cannot see...
Look for trust and be honest? (Score:2, Interesting)