For most inventors with a new product idea, they are far better to license their idea to a manufacturer than to raise the capital to manufacture and distribute the product themselves.
This week’s top stories include small business advice covering the following four topics:
- Entrepreneurs Don’t Need Great Ideas
- 5 Instincts You Have to Fight to Succeed as an Entrepreneur
- 25 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was a Young Entrepreneur
- 3 Reasons Why Growing a Business Remotely is Beneficial for Your Company
Each week we scour all the top business-related magazines and newspapers for articles with the best advice for the small business owner, so you do not have to.
The Buyers Utility Map is a valuable tool to help businesses document the buyer's experience, and discover areas that can be leveraged to create a leap in value.
A business that offers products and services just like everyone else’s in their industry are viewed as a commodity. Commodity businesses compete on price meaning low or often negative margins, especially for a new small business. Instead of just following the crowd there is a better way.
Many individuals with a new idea for a product have the wrong idea about the role patents play in business. They see patents as a way to simply make money off their idea. However, patents exist to encourage innovation which is not the same.
It is often far better to see what the market leader is doing and just be a little different in your value proposition. Being the first to market means you will make lots of costly mistakes that your competitors can learn from and then capitalize on at your expense. Keurig and Xerox were not the first movers but today they dominated their markets by capitalizing on the dominant players mistakes..
There are four questions that every product or service company needs to ask before it embarks on a new business or product line. 1. Do customers recognize they have a problem? 2. If there was a solution to their problem, would they buy it? 3. Would they buy it from us? 4. Can we build […]
A telescope is a valuable tool. Used properly, it makes distant objects appear closer. However, used improperly it, in fact, makes the problem of seeing distant objects worse. The first word I often hear from tech start-ups involves how to protect their idea with a patent. While I have never been a big fan of […]
My first foray into the world of small business was with invisible fencing. At the time, in the early 1980’s, it was a new product in a whole new category of electronic pet containment systems. We were covered by a patent so no other company could sell a product like ours. It used a transmitter […]
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