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How To Vet Clever Ideas Without Giving Them Away?
Rival writes "As an inquisitive and creative geek, I am constantly coming up with 'clever' ideas. Most often I discover fundamental or practical flaws lurking in the details, which I'm fine with. As Edison said, 'I haven't failed; I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.' Other times, I discover that someone else has beaten me to the idea. I'm fine with that, too. At least I know that I've come up with a great idea, even if I'm not the first. There are times, however, when I can find no flaws with an idea and nobody else seems to have thought of it. I'm not conceited enough to think my idea is genius; I just assume that I'm not knowledgeable enough to see what I'm missing. In these times, I often want to ask a subject matter expert for their thoughts. On the admittedly long chance that an idea is genius, however, what is the best way to ask for another's insights while mitigating the risk of them stealing or sharing the idea? Asking a stranger to sign a contract before discussing an idea seems like a good way to get a door closed on my face. What are your experiences and suggestions?"
Ideas are a dime a dozen. What matters is confronting your idea with real world feedback and you'll be astonished by the results (read this for more on keeping your idea confidential: the great startup idea that I can't reveal yet).
Guy Kawasaki gave one really good suggestion to test your idea: convince a woman. It sounds stupid and insulting, but what he really means is that it's too easy for geeks and tech lovers to fall in love with a geeky idea. Presumably, women are more grounded and will tell you why your idea is not practical.
Finally, regarding confidentiality: don't worry about it so much
What ideas did you have? This will help us make suggestions.
Give them a FriendDA?
You're looking for a non-disclosure agreement. No method other than a contract has force of law behind it. That is, if you're using an untrusted stranger in the first place. There's something to be said for asking friends, even if they may not be giving you a completely unbiased opinion.
In other news, you do come across as kinda arrogant here ("as an inquitive and creative geek..."). Everyone has ideas. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Got an idea for a better mousetrap? Build it and see if it really is better. Talk is cheap and action speaks louder than words.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
They will find flaws
Your sentence is missing a period at the end. Also, you should be clearer about who "They" are although it can be assumed that it is "Slashdotters" as mentioned in the subject of your reply.
Also, your Slashdot ID (457709) is too high.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
and have the expert vet that element. You said yourself you think details are what you're missing; you have to hypothesize what details are missing or wrong and ask the expert to vet the hypothetical.
Talk to people you trust. It's just that simple. Use your friends and family as a "soundboard" for your idea. They will see the holes you did not.
I wouldn't expect anyone to ever sign an NDA without knowing what they are getting into. I don't recall the article, but it basically said any company who signs an NDA like that is opening themselves to liability. That's why most will not even discuss ideas so that you cannot later take them to court for stealing your idea. If you want to discuss an idea and they already have 2 years of research into the exact same thing they are opening themselves to the liability of a lawsuit from you. The same apparently goes for music companies.
Once you are sure you have a good idea run with it and don't stop until its too late. Anything else and you are setting yourself up for failure.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Most of your geekiest friends are intelligent people who can tear your idea apart and find the flaws, true enough. Just identify the geeks whose ideas you'll trust, but are far too unmotivated to take your idea and run with it. With a little research (you've been playing videogames with these guys at LAN parties for years, so you know who their friends are), you can make sure that you only show your idea to the most brilliant intellectually, but hopelessly inept socially. They'll never get it off the ground! And all for the price of a cup of coffee or a pizza! Win/win!
You can't take the sky from me!
Everything that I have invented is just in thought and is not produced for lack of money. These inventions are property of myself and are to be patented, copyrighted and trademarked under my name: Shampoo.
So just remind everyone constantly that your idea was invented by Rival and should be patented and trademarked and copyrighted under your name: Rival. It's that easy.
My work here is dung.
What's wrong with being bought out? If your idea is good and your business plan is decent then odds are that you can set it up in such a way that you can retire with the proceeds from being bought out.
Friends of mine got into the ISP business back in the day before it was even on the radar of $Monolith_Company. $Monolith_Company eventually bought them out. They've since spent their days traveling the world and working because they want to, not because they need to. What's wrong with this outcome?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
What I do is I pitch a modified version of the idea where several key components are blatantly impossible, stupid, and possibly illegal. Then I pitch it to my friendly neighborhood geek and ask for his advice. They'll start ranting about how retarded my idea is, but I'll keep goading them and say "Okay, but imagine if we could fix that, what else do you think?" Knowing how geeks are amenable to abstract hypotheticals, and love to refute things in a thorough point-by-point fashion, they'll keep going on and on about the rest of the design too. I'll pretend to take notes the whole time, but in actuality I'm just seeing what they say about the real parts of the design. But when I depart, they're left with the overall impression that my idea was retarded and useless. I get my feedback, and they're none the wiser!
Anyway, that irrelevant nonsense aside, I'm busy working on a high performance V-8 hemi engine powered by babies. I'm having some troubles with the baby pump getting clogged by babies, and also my valve timing equations could use some tweaking. Any automotive engineers want to help me out with some constructive criticism and proprietary engine timings? Thanks!
The enemies of Democracy are
Ideas are worth absolutely zilch. Any of the 6 billion people on earth can come up with your idea, and probably have. What is valuable is the execution of ideas.
So my advice is to pick one idea that you like and execute on it. You'll probably find out your idea wasn't that good after all and fail. Do this another 10 times or so and you'll finally get one idea that works. Stick with that one. Good luck.
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You know those people you know you can trust...
When you say "Don't tell anyone about my great idea..." and they DON'T?
Yeah those are great people to talk to.
Don't worry about someone "stealing" your ideas. They don't make money by stealing ideas, they make money by funding other peoples' ideas. A lot of money. They don't need to steal anyone's ideas. If you keep it to yourself, they will be perfectly happy to fund two dozen other people who share their ideas, and to make a killing doing it.
Nobody is that interested in ideas; ideas don't make all that much money, believe it or not. Execution makes the money. If it's a good idea, lots of people will be happy to pay you a comparatively small amount (that well may seem huge to you) for the privilege of bringing it to market. They don't steal ideas; that would be killing off the golden goose. Venture capital and other similar interests don't want the ideas to stop coming to them, which is what would happen if they actually stole ideas.
Same thing with publishing and creative works. When I was younger and working on my first books, I was very wary of publishers. I hated to discuss a manuscript. Everything I sent was plastered with copyright notices and I would be sure to send myself a sealed certified copy first with a postmark date on it and then file it away in a safe deposit box. I was that sure that my prose was precious.
Now I have the better part of a dozen books on the market and I've been through the process a few times and I know much better. The publisher isn't interested in what's in your book. They're not impressed. They've seen tens of thousands of manuscripts. It's no crown jewel to them, no matter how good it is. They just want to know whether or not they can sell it. If they can, they're perfectly happy to pay you the royalty and rake in the dough.
Ideas people often make the mistake of thinking that we live in a world of ideas, in which ideas are precious and he who has them rules. In fact, we live in a world of employees and middlemen, most of whom are perfectly uninterested in ideas. With or without your idea, they'll continue on their merry way to be successful by paying for ideas from someone and turning them into products.
If you don't get over your fear, what will happen is that they'll continue to make money, continue to pay other people for their ideas, and you'll continue to have nothing but your great ideas that nobody knows about. Just put them out there. Talk about them as much as you can. That's the way that you broaden your network of contacts, potential funders, and potential buyers to the maximum extent possible.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
For instance:
I have this awesome idea that does this thing with this do-hickey which lets everyone do stuff in original and clever ways. Like when you're doing that thing and it wont do this thing, you know? That's where this thing really shines!
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard Aiken
Irony Can Be So Ironic (Massachusetts Edition)
If he understands and digs it, it's been done or is fatally flawed. If he stares at you blankly, maybe you're on to something. Best part: he's guaranteed not to accurately disclose or competently act on your idea!
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
$100, no lawyer needed.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
They will find flaws
Your sentence is missing a period at the end.
I have no moderator points right now, but those who do need to moderate the parent, "Funny as Hell."
And while I know I will ultimately lose this battle, thomasdz, YOUR Slashdot ID (178114) is too high. :)
Exactly. People overvalue the concept of "idea" and undervalue the concept of aggressive business positioning, development, marketing, capital, and a lot of, well, work.
I was at Harvard when facebook was "born." I was persistently skeptical about the whole thing, as the concept was not new *at all*, and friendster was reigning supreme, which I kind of thought was a silly fad. I was subsequently astounded over the years how facebook has taken off. (I am still astounded.) But, had the founders listened to me, or saw that their idea was "taken," it would have gone nowhere.
That being said, I wouldn't give a highly established potential competitor research data that you have gotten to get your idea off the ground. Despite my words, I also hold a few patents, but these are mostly defensive positioning and required by my corporation.
Nebulous "ideas" have an insignificant chance of being "thought of" already. What you need to do is get honest feedback about the barriers to implementation, then just go and do it!
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Here's how: tell them your idea. Nobody is going to bother to "steal" your idea until you have already taken the risk and expense. People aren't cruising around looking for ideas to steal. Think about it: have you ever heard, even second-hand, of anyone doing that? Have you ever thought of doing that (forget whether or not you'd do it; have you ever even considered it)?
What good idea-stealers do, is watch to see who makes what work, and then imitate. You won't be imitated until after you succeed.
Dude, you're not a Slashdot geek... your microwave isn't in the same room as your PC. You mean you have to walk to another room on another floor in order to get yer grub?! Who can live with that sorta distraction?
If you want people to sign contracts, pay them.
If their advice isn't worth paying for, it's not really worth having anyway.
Ask a lazy person, or even better, a serial procrastinator. They may want to steal your idea, but will never get around to it.
The television will not be revolutionized.
I have an idea for a niche electronic product, and I've built a prototype. I'd really prefer not to spend the thousands of dollars involved in an international patent, not to mention the thousands more to defend the patent if I think that patent actually has been breached.
My only concern is that some "other company" might patent my idea, then sue me for infringement of that idea. Does "prior art" cover this? As long as my invention has been published/marketed/discussed/shown to my friends, the "other company" can't then go on and patent my original idea, right?
As I said, it's a niche product, custom-made to order, so I don't expect some big factory to steal the idea then churn them out by the thousand. So should I bother patenting it?
*Yes, I realise that asking for legal advice on Slashdot will have a terrible signal to noise ratio.
sustainable living
What I would do is find someone who's well acquainted in the field, then tell him your idea in great detail. If it's a bad idea, nothing lost, if it's a good idea, you can threaten to slaughter his whole family.
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You haven't made too explicit queries on Google for that, do you ?
Im the founder/ceo of a funded tech startup.
Let me share some advice I learned the hard way:
Share your great ideas promiscuously as possible to attract collaborators, even in highly specialised science and engineering fields.
Otherwise your ideas will never gain traction and actually happen, and you will always be a dreamer.
In the unlikely event that someone steals your idea, take it as a compliment and move on to the next great idea.
Great ideas are easy to come up with. It's the execution that's the tough part. Startups are 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Unless only 1-2 people in the world understand what your talking about, pretty much anything you communicate verbally is not going to have
much value to a competitor.The vast majority of the time secrecy is extremely toxic and harmful to getting an idea off the ground.
If you are the kind of person who has lots of good ideas, there's plenty more where they came from. I'd only worry about this if you'd sunk investment into making the idea real, e.g. if you have a company that's about to release a product.
I've given away ideas, really *good* ideas, and never lost a wink of sleep over it.
Once I was chatting with a software entrepreneur I knew about a software product he wanted to develop for the military. He'd had some success demonstrating the product deployed on a small scale, but the system concept wasn't practically scalable to large deployments. After hashing over the various approaches he'd tried, I drove home and as I did I had an epiphany. I realized how to make the product dramatically simpler to use on a large scale. I sent him an e-mail, and he went out and hired a math PhD and a couple of developers to make my idea work.
I never received a cent; I never asked for one. He did all the hard stuff. He made the business contacts, he wrote the proposals, hired the staff, everything. He put up his own money too. I just had a nice half hour chat and spent about ten minutes writing an email.
If I thought I only had a limited number of ideas like that in me, I'd worry about getting paid for a valuable idea like that. But I don't. The more ideas you discuss, the more you create. If you hole yourself up in your garage, you'll end up spending your time on useless ideas. This is heresy, but ideas really aren't worth much on their own. I've been in the tech business, and I've seen this is true. People who have lots of "clever ideas" have more than they can use. They get in the way. When they get a pot of money for idea A, you have to be careful they don't spend it on B. What you really need is money, time, discipline, contacts, technical skill -- a host of other things that are nearly impossibly hard to put together. Once you're able to do that, *ideas* looking for implementors aren't hard to find.
When you consider this, you'll see the idea that sensible people might want to steal ideas is naive. If the idea is easy to steal, it's not worth much in itself. If it's worth much in itself, it probably takes a lot of other stuff before you'll see any money out of it.
This gets to the nature of creativity. Ideas are like darts thrown into the wall. You can say, "Gee that's an interesting place for a dart to land," but that's not the same as being able to throw a dart into a bullseye not of your choosing. Really good ideas come from superior insights into the problem domain. When you pitch an idea to somebody, it should be clear that this idea comes from an unique understanding of the problem. That naturally makes you the best person imaginable to lead the conversion of the idea into reality.
Of course, if you think somebody is talking to you under false pretenses, you should cut off right there, but it is a rare, rare idea about which somebody could reasonably say, "Gee, I could make a lot of money at this by doing it myself, and I'd be better off doing that than working with the guy who had it." If you do have one of those one in a million lifetime ideas, then you ought to be talking to a patent attorney. But I can almost guarantee that none of your ideas are as valuable without you as they are with you. Very few ideas can be turned into money without solving many related problems which you have unique insight into. In that unlikely event, you should just *do it*, you should just create this amazing, money making, easy to implement thing. And of course get an attorney.
Mainly, I think you should concentrate on making your ideas a reality. If you do that, you'll probably make a living. Make enough money for other people, and you'll be in a position to make more money for yourself. If you want to get rich off your ideas, then be prepared to do a lot of the boring work it takes to make that happen. If you don't want to do that work, then prepared for other people to make money "off your ideas".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I had the same discussion with myself, and ended up on beeing open with all ideas. I have to say, for me it has been nothing but good. I've got so much back from telling. And of course you have to be willing to give constructive feedback on others ideas without stealing them. Most importantly, I ALWAYS share and discuss the idea with at least one woman! Women ask questions and puts you on ground wich again make you rethink and evolve the idea... I wrote a blog on stealth mode, here http://phidulabs.com/?p=34 That is at least my experience, I don't think I'm in position to suggest what is right for you or all others.
One great way to vet an idea is to implement it as an open source project or as a free service. If the idea is truly revolutionary you'll end up making money, friends, and tons of professional opportunities. Here's a short list of "ideas" developed this way: Linux, MySpace, JBoss, Craigslist, Hibernate, MySQL, Apache... I would rather be counted among these organizations than lumped into the purely for profit realm of Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, etc.