You had a great idea and you found a company who wanted to license it from you — now what? Can you or should you still be involved with the project? I think so. There are a lot of different ways to be useful and helpful to a licensee, but I want to discuss one way in particular today. Help them sell more units! You can do so by leveraging your success story into PR work and media appearances. If a company called a news outlet about their new product, they’d probably be referred to the advertising department. Who wants to read about Coke’s new product? But on the other hand, people may be very interested to read about a small time inventor who’s made it big. Your story is interesting; theirs is not. I use the fact that I’m an inventor to gain access to different media opportunities all the day. It’s free exposure, frankly.
But make sure that you always confer with the licensee about your plans and to respect their wishes. It’s as easy to become a nuisance as it is to become an ally and partner. Get explicit information about what is inappropriate and what is not — you would never want to jeopardize your licensing agreement over a news story. But if you go about it correctly, you can use yourself to get publicity for them. Consider your options and talk it over.
Stephen Key is a successful award-winning inventor who has licensed over 20 products in the past 30 years. He is a board member of Accudial Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and has a new book "One Simple Idea: Turn your dreams into a licensing goldmine while letting others do the work," from McGraw-Hill. Along with business partner Andrew Krauss, Stephen runs inventRight, a company dedicated to education. Teaching inventors and entrepreneurs the skills needed to successfully license their ideas. You can listen to the weekly radio show on inventing.
One Simple Idea is available in book stores and online book retailers nationwide. When you buy the book you get access to our our database of over 1400 companies looking for ideas as well as other bonus materials. Visit www.inventright.com to learn more.
