Creating new and valuable intellectual property.

New. New. New.

Buy now.  Upgrade to the new and improved version.

We read and hear about it all the time.

And, it works.

With the pace of change of business and life nowadays, people are always looking for the next big thing, or even just an improvement on what they already have.

Question: So what can a business owner or leader do to his or her business and give yourself an uplift and an advantage?

Answer: Be creative and create new ideas which you can then convert into new sales.

How do we create new products and services?

Here is an exercise.

Think about, what did you do recently to create a NEW product or service?

What did you do recently to improve an EXISTING product or service?

Take a few minutes and make a list.

Now ask where did the ideas for those new products or services come from?

More than likely it’s one of these:

1. A problem you have seen or heard about that needs fixing.
2. Someone says wouldn’t it be good if…
3. Someone says I wish this tricky problem was not so hard stop.  If only there was an easier way.
4. Something else, which I have not thought of!

In other words, we are interested in creating new intellectual property or IP.

What therefore is IP?

Simply put, it’s new stuff.

It can be tools, techniques, know how, drawings, templates, lists, ingredients, methods, recipes… in fact anything that helps you create that “secret sauce”.

How do we create new and valuable IP?

We do it systematically and diligently.  The process is surprisingly simple.

1. Create ideas. Lots of them.
2. Test them out
3. Improve them.
4. Kill the bad ones.
5. Implement the best ones.
6. Learn along the way.
7. Repeat.

A long list of 100 ideas.

The start point is to generate a list.

Here’s a method that you might like.

It is based on the Roaring Success Growth Cube™ .  For a detailed copy of that paper you can go to my website and read the free article there.  Here is a summary of the paper.   There are six area to looking at for new ideas. 

1. Current customers.
2. Adjacent markets.
3. Product and service improvements.
4. Process improvements.
5. New markets.
6. New products.

For each area you can come up with many, many ideas which you can then consider implementing. 

Of course, the first step is to create the list. 

A long list. 

If I may be so bold, I believe you will need at least 100 ideas to start with at a minimum.

If you don’t think that is possible, then please think again. I had a number of clients run this exercise and their initial thought was “this is all too hard”.  However, once they got into it, they easily exceeded 100, 120 and 130 which were then filtered down and considered for implementation.

About the Author:

Steve Wood is a management consultant who helps business owners to achieve their own roaring success.  > Read full profile