Licensing is an alternative to starting your own business to bring your invention to life. For product developers, the most important step of the licensing process is reaching out and getting in touch with potential licensees. Until you've begun doing this, you're not...
How to Befriend Gatekeepers
Without a doubt, the step product developers struggle with the most when it comes to licensing is cold calling. You aren't in the game until you begin reaching out to potential licensees about your ideas for new products. Still, most people would rather do anything...
3 Easy Steps for Sparking Engagement On LinkedIn
In my experience, the one step product developers struggle with the most, by far, is getting in touch with the right people --people who can move their invention forward. The two classic paths to commercialization are venturing and licensing. My expertise is...
How to Get In to Any Company to License Your Product Idea
For the entirety of my career, I've been reaching out to companies to ask, "Will you look at my product idea?" That's how I made a living for 30 years. Most of the time, I got rejected. But enough liked what they saw and asked to see more, leading to lucrative...
How to Use LinkedIn to License Your Concepts for New Products
For more than 16 years now, I’ve been teaching people how to license their ideas for new products. I was attracted to the licensing model because it enabled me to focus on what I liked -- being creative, working with my hands -- on my own time. If a product I...
How to Get in to Any Company to Pitch Your New Product Idea For Licensing Consideration
If you want to license your ideas for new products, you must get your sell sheet in front of the right people at the right companies. I don't think of this step as 'cold calling' so much as getting in. Partly because there are other ways of connecting with potential...
How to Find the Right People to Pitch Your New Product Idea
Getting in to the right people at the right companies is the step that trips up people who want to license their ideas for new products the most. Fear of rejection is partly to blame. But until you begin reaching out to potential licensees, you're not really in the...
Why Getting in the Game is the Best Thing You Can Do to License Your Ideas
I've been inventing nearly all my life, although I've never really thought of myself as aninventor. (And still don't.) That's because my first inventions were out born out of necessity. They were really products more than inventions, which has always had a different...
How to License an Idea to the Music Industry
Some industries are more receptive to new ideas than others. Neither my students nor I have ever had any success breaking into the greeting card industry, for example. The music industry, on the other hand, celebrates ingenuity -- like you'd expect it to. When I...
5 Telltale Signs a Company Isn’t Serious About Innovation
There are thousands and thousands of companies that want creative people to submit their ideas for new products to them. My students tell me about new companies they're working with all the time. By and large, these companies treat inventors well. They've licensed...