Businesses are often wary of inventions and inventors. Perhaps this attitude is unsurprising. After all, far more inventions fail than succeed and no one - whatever their track record - can consistently spot winners. So, the prospect of loss will always be more real than the prospect of profit.
Nonetheless, inventions - whether external or internal - can be a source of new opportunities for larger margins and company growth. An invention covered by patent and/or some other form of IPR offers a monopoly in the marketplace that others can't legally exploit by copying.
Invention feeds innovation and the marketplace is full of examples of highly successful products from private UK inventors. These include Edward Prosser's Ronseal Paint 'n' Grain, John Coathupe's Flymo Gardenvac and Pam and Phil Richardson's Biogel Reveal surgical gloves.
An invention can be the earliest and most unprepossessing manifestation of a world-beating product or service and in return for a degree of usually controllable risk can represent a relatively cheap and highly rewarding ground-floor investment for many companies.
Yet the invention stage is also the ugly duckling stage, when it can be easy to miss the latent value in a raw idea, particularly if it’s poorly presented by a novice inventor. Many inventions need radical redesign to meet production and marketing requirements. Companies would therefore do well to involve designers - who are trained to look for improvement potential - from the outset when assessing external or internal inventions. Equally, inventors would do well to seek the advice of designers to improve their presentations to companies or investors.
Invention should be a process of positive risk reduction. Many inventions start as one person's unsubstantiated hunch, and pursuing it often means persuading others to accept a level of risk on a par with betting heavily on a non-league club beating Manchester United.
That’s why the inventor who wants to succeed must as a priority work to reduce the perceived level of project risk. Some risk is inevitable in all business ventures but invention projects carry a higher risk than most. That risk should be spread so that no stakeholder - including the inventor - deems their share of the risk unaffordable.