Posts in Business

It is also critical for inventors and entrepreneurs to have a strategy to succeed, which seems simple enough, but is typically anything but simple for the creative types that are so good at inventing. The goal is not to create an invention that is cool, the goal is not to get a patent, the goal is almost universally to make money. The cool invention and patent are a means to the end, not the end in and of themselves. If you approach your patent activities appropriately you can lay the foundation of a business plan, at least insofar as the technology and technological advancement of your innovation is concerned. But like almost everything in life, there is a cost associated with succeeding. The cost is hard work to be sure, but there will also be significant financial requirements as well. While you may need to bootstrap your invention and business, as you move forward you will invariably need funding. From Angel investors to start, and maybe from Venture Capitalists eventually.

Protecting trade secrets is critically important if for no other reason than making sure that the time, money and energy you spend building your business is not wasted. If your employees could simply leave without having any contractual obligations that would prevent them from taking information, stealing employees away and/or soliciting your existing customers then they would be able to set up a business and compete with you for a fraction of what it cost you to do the same. After all, you were the one who spent the time and money for marketing to attract customers in the first place, and you were the one who spent the time and money necessary to train your employees. Without the cost of acquiring new customers and the costs associated with training employees that new business set up by your former employee would compete with you and have only a fraction of the start-up and overhead costs you faced. That can make it difficult for any business to keep the doors open.

Indeed, competing globally is a prerequisite to success for most companies in what is an ever increasingly global marketplace. To compete globally American firms engage in licensing, franchising, or exporting. For many small companies it is patent protection that provides the only means to obtain an advantage over established industry leaders. Patent protection prevents established industry leaders from simply copying new innovations, and aids small businesses and start-ups in attracting investor capital needed to grow, build market share, and create jobs. Unfortunately, small companies face significant financial challenges in acquiring, maintaining, and enforcing patents outside the United States. What they need is a strategy to lay the foundation for foreign rights, building off a credible and appropriate U.S. patent filing.

If you are a small business owner, you are located in a small personal office or you work from home, you probably use either a cell phone or personal landline as your business phone. When you call a potential client, what shows up on their called ID? What do potential clients hear when they call and want to leave you a voicemail? What if they simply want to know your hours of operation or fax number? You may not realize this but your telephone system’s features, including your caller ID display and voicemail greeting, have a major impact on how others see your brand.

Consider, for example, the old axiom that entrepreneurs must be unwaveringly fixated on a single goal. Most startups are built around a single product or service that is assumed (but not yet proven) to meet a real consumer need and offer a lucrative market opportunity. The CEO of that startup is likewise singularly focused on getting a fully-baked product out the door as soon as possible in order to start generating revenues while at the same time building a pipeline for future offerings. Given the limited resources in most startups, this often means that the engineers are building Version 2 of the product before Version 1 has even been tested in the market.

Earlier today IBM announced that it set a new U.S. patent record in 2011, marking the 19th consecutive year that the company has led the annual list of patent recipients. Leading up to this announcement I had the opportunity to chat with Manny Schecter, who is the Chief Patent Counsel for IBM, and someone I interviewed previously. Whenever I talk with Schecter I always ask him whether it is a struggle to continue to have senior management at IBM buy into eye-popping research and development budgets. Although I am sure I always sound like a broken record I am genuinely amazed. Schecter replied, as he always does, “it is not a struggle… everyone at IBM is on board with being the industry leader.” IBM spends nearly $6 billion annually on research and development and has now spent a generation as the top patenting company in the world.

One of the best things about social media is that you don’t need to have a big marketing budget to benefit from the different ways that social media can propel your business, but you do need to be committed and have a strategy. If you are not going to hire a consultant to assist you then you are going to need to invest the time to do things yourself, which is fine so long as you actually do it! Here is a list of “Social Media Resolutions” that you should consider implementing in your 2012 Marketing and Brand Building Social Media campaigns.

Thanks to social media everyone has the ability to connect with like-minded individuals all over the world. But if you want to exploit social media you need to have an effective strategy. It doesn’t take an enormous amount of time each day. In fact with only 15 minutes a day, you can really make quite an impact. But like everything you hope to succeed with in life it does take planning and forethought. Here are suggestions on how you might be able to use social media to develop your brand, monitor quality, engage customers, expand upon ideas and connect with others within your industry.

At his speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Commerce Secretary Bryson outlined his top three priorities to help American businesses “build it here and sell it everywhere,” focusing on supporting advanced manufacturing, increasing our exports, and attracting more investment to America from all over the world. The key to emerging from the Great Recession is, of course, manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs have left the U.S. in favor of more business friendly climates in other countries, taking with them U.S. jobs and U.S. intellectual property. But moving into a Presidential election year will government be able to do anything that is at all likely to help?

So here’s what I learned about Kickstarter specifically, and crowd funding in general, after running a campaign. Setting your goal correctly is at least as important as setting your rewards. The FAQs on all of these sites all say to set your goal to the minimum that you need to launch the product, and after running a campaign I completely agree. I still could have produced my book with a goal of $5,000, and that would have been a much more reachable and less nerve-racking goal. But I wanted to hit five-figures, and when perusing all of those successful campaigns (some of which had hit six figures) it’s easy to have delusions of grandeur. I just barely made my goal, but I was sweating bullets at day 22 or so with another $2,500 to go and no good ideas for additional marketing of the campaign. Instead of risking the backing I had received by setting a goal too high, it would have been smarter for me to set a lower goal and hope for a 150% funding success instead of the 105% I did barely obtain.

Frustration with registration and login isn’t limited to mobile devices, of course. As the web has become more participatory and an integral component of our lives, the average web user has accumulated dozens of accounts at different websites — each with a distinct username and password to remember. Even more problematic, many people try to cope with this problem by recycling the same password across multiple sites, thereby jeopardizing their online security. Social login alleviates this “password fatigue” problem and offers up benefits both for online users and online businesses and other websites.

Once you understand what to tweet, how to tweet and how much to tweet, you are quickly able to make excellent connections, increase your website statistics and search engine ranking, find some of your best brand advocates, and benefit quickly and efficiently from word of mouth marketing. In fact, next to YouTube, micro-blogging on Twitter is one of the quickest ways for information about you, your brand, your business, your products and your services to go viral. Before one can feel comfortable on Twitter, they must first understand the purpose of Twitter, realize the potential of Twitter and learn how they can use Twitter to meet their overall marketing objectives. Following, I will discuss and demystify 5 of the top myths about Twitter use for business and give you pointers on how you can get the most out of your Twitter account.

Social media is quickly become THE way to market your business. In the US, more than two thirds of all adults who are active online are also actively using social media today, However, there is still a whopping 57% of businesses who, for one reason or another do not understand the real impact that social media can have on their businesses. Gaining new and retaining old customers, sharing your products and services to a broader audience and giving your customers a voice, are just a few of the many benefits that using social media can bring to your business. There are many myths and misconceptions that keep business owners and marketers from reaping the benefits that social media. If you are one of these businesses, let me “set you free” to explore all that social media has to offer.

With copyright misuse having recently been successful in a rather high profile case I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit patent misuse and misuse concepts generally. To do that in a way that allows the casually interested reader to follow along probably requires first taking a step back away from the intellectual property centric theories to discuss some basic antitrust law concepts. This seems particularly appropriate since many of the misuse cases have a distinct antitrust flavor.

Eastman Kodak Company reported that it was continuing its march forward toward becoming a profitable and sustainable digital company. A sustainable digital company? In order to achieve this goal Kodak will need to better leverage its intellectual property portfolio. How will Kodak seek to generate cash from its intellectual property portfolio? The company is shifting gears and is pursuing a plan to sell 10% of it is patent portfolio to attempt to raise cash to remain in business.