2005-03-27 Essential Reading For New Inventors and Ideas People

I highly recommend this book to someone with a great idea but no clue what to do next. I've bought three books on the subject of inventing all by different authors and this is by far the easiest to read from cover to cover. What I liked about the book is that the author - Harvey Reese gave examples from his own life of how he did things, and not also all the successes but also the times when things went wrong and what he learnt from the experience. The book focuses very clearly on the issue of product licensing, i.e. selling your idea to a big company to allow them to make and sell your product as opposed to manufacturing it yourself. For anyone considering manufacturing your own product there are many hardships and pitfalls and the book clearly outlines these and then takes you through the alternative route to market of product licensing.

One of the things the book gets the reader to consider is the time and effort involved in doing it all yourself, the stress involved in running a business, the money needed to be invested, etc. Having spoken to many inventors at the British Inventors Show I know from their experiences that the average time most inventors told me it had taken them to get their product to market was 4 to 6 years. With even the simplest of devices costing as much as £40,000 to get into manufacture. Many of those people had re-mortgaged their homes or gone without for many years to afford those fees.

As well as joining a local inventors club, I'd highly recommend reading books like these because they are based on the experience of a real inventor, someone who knows what it's like to come up with an idea and then try to get the product to market. The book even shows real reproductions of faxes Reese sent to manufacturers and explains the importance of laying a paper trail down of your idea, so even if you don't have a patent in place you can still show that you thought of the idea first.

The book is very motivational and helps inspire the reader into action. He quite rightly points out that most great ideas are not unique and that many people may have had the same exact idea as yourself before but it's the one that does something about it that gets the rewards.

He also talks about the full product life cycle from the time you think of your invention to the time it's no longer being sold in the shops and what to do next. If you're the kind of person that thinks up a lot of good ideas for products that have mass appeal then this book is certainly my number one recommendation.