IP Deal Making Tip (1 of 101)
As you can see from the title, we plan on providing at least 101 deal making tips for your IP related ventures. Our very first tip is:
It is better to negotiate the right deal badly - then the wrong deal well!
For example, if you decide to sell your patent, it is better for you to negotiate "badly" with a deep pocketed firm that has a track record for paying big money to inventors - then to hammer out a great agreement with a finder who may not even sell your patent in the end.
Another example, suppose you want to license your patent. Is it better to negotiate "badly" and agree to a lower royalty rate with someone who will champion your invention inside the company or to get the rate you want and then find out that the person you dealth with does not have enough clout in the company to push your invention?
I think you get the picture |
Are Inventors Crazy?
Found this great article on Inventors at Radio Man's Blog. Here are some highlights:
Segway scooter inventor Dean Kamen freely admits it: He often suffers sleepless nights wrestling over whether to quit a project that's not panning out.
Knowing when to quit a fruitless project is difficult, says the father of the Segway, Dean Kamen, left.
"You end up lying there saying, 'I'm not stopping. It would be an act of shallow cowardice. Or you decide to quit and you say, 'This is one of those ideas that just isn't going to work,' " said Kamen, speaking by phone from his home office in Manchester, New Hampshire.
When to quit -- said Kamen, also the inventor of health care technologies and the Slingshot water purifier -- is "the toughest question there is" for any entrepreneur who survives on creativity and instinct.
"It's not nearly as glamorous as people think to keep working on something and to keep hitting roadblocks and to keep going," he said.
Stubborn, delusionally optimistic, creative, fearless, flexible and focused are some of the ways psychologists and business people describe the personality of an entrepreneur. Surprisingly, another word is ignorant.
"You need to be in denial or in ignorance about the huge challenges you face," laughs Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple executive and entrepreneur who's starting the self-described "magazine rack" alltop.com. "You have to believe that it wouldn't be hard for you to succeed."
In a recession that has forced employers to eliminate 2.6 million jobs in 2008, people who might otherwise start a business at a time of their own choosing find themselves being pushed into entrepreneurship.
"More people often become self-employed in tough times like this," said John Challenger, CEO of a top employment firm for executives and middle managers.
Between 5 percent and 7 percent of clients at Challenger, Gray & Christmas are choosing to start their own businesses, he said. Workers are more open to starting a small business in the dot-com era, Challenger said. "I think we're in a more entrepreneurial period than we were in the '80s and '90s," he said.
Recessions can be "crucibles" for at-home start-ups. "Some of the best new businesses start in recessions because what they have really makes a difference if the market is interested in it," Challenger said. "There's not a lot of easy money to go around, and they have to fight their way forward."
Great entrepreneurs, said Kawasaki, do more than just fight hard to win their market share. They have vision. They ask what he calls the "fundamental question": Wouldn't it be neat if ... ?
Kawasaki said Apple would have failed without the unique contributions of its co-founder, Steve Jobs. "He asked the question, 'Wouldn't it be neat if people could carry all their music with them wherever they went?' " Result: the iPod.
Jobs described fond memories of his California childhood during an 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institution, saying his father "spent a lot of time with me . . . teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together."
Kamen, who works hard to inspire future innovators with his FIRST program to promote high school math and science, said every entrepreneurial innovator he's ever seen shares a few characteristics.
"It's not that they're brilliant or well-educated," Kamen said. "They work all the time. They don't let failure demoralize or destroy them. They pick themselves up and keep going and eventually, every once in a while, one of your ideas actually breaks through and works, and it makes all that stuff seem worthwhile." |
Questions From Our Readers(Con't)
A prominent feature of our blog will be to answer questions submitted by our readers. Please feel free to submit your questions and we will answer them as quickly as possible.
Question: What is the biggest mistake a patent owner makes when licensing his invention?
Michael: Tough to come up with just one! Let me give you one from a successful deal I was involved in. Short answer - don't put time constraints on the licensor - let her work under her own time table. In my case, the patent owner pushed me to pressure the licensor into closing the deal and wanted (heaven forbid) me to make an ultimatum - do it now or never. The patent owner pressed me, but I let the licensor get back to us in her own time, and yes it took a long time to close, but we did.
People are busy and licensors have their own very full plates before they are contacted by 3rd parties. Relax and work with your licensor without undue time constraints. |
RSS POSTS
