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IP Licensing or Manufacturing – What’s Best to Get Your Invention in the Market

So, you have a patented invention, but don’t have any idea what to do next? And what are the different money-making options available for you? This article will provide you detailed information about how to bring an invention into the market – manufacturing on your own and IP licensing.

The first step is to study your invention comprehensively, and familiarize yourself with the industries it can have applications in. Do market research!

Google can help you a lot in this. Search for the top companies and emerging players that are active in the target markets of your invention, and study all their existing products/services. Sources and references may include online business journals, magazines, and blogs. Also, try to know the technologies that are trending and going to hit your target markets in the future. This is because, maybe you find a product infringing your technology, and you can file an IP infringement case against the manufacturer. Maybe your technology can be used for improving the functionality of an existing product, thus creating IP licensing opportunities for you.

You need to think from the customers’ point of view if you want to succeed. Read customers’ feedbacks on social media, e-commerce sites, companies’ official sites, and online blogs. Analyze the problems customers are facing with the current products and help them in finding solutions. By doing so, you can create your personal brand, and establish your own fan following. Here, you can also tell customers about your future product launches and business plans.

Let’s take an example. A company is selling an electronic device, which has an early heat-up problem. Fortunately, you developed a special chip, which can solve this problem. What you need to do is to search for the online reviews that customers have posted regarding the problem and tell them that you have invented a solution for this. You can build trust among a group of customers, thus, it will become easy for you to market your products.

If you do market research comprehensively, you win half of the game. The next step is studying market analysis reports and an exclusive building IP monetization strategy for your invention. There can be two options:

IP licensing:

Patent licensing is same as renting a house to a tenant; you retain the ownership of your IP rights and at the same time allow someone to use them to manufacture and sell products for a given period. The licensing agreement can be held between individual inventors or companies; the IP holder is called licensor, and the party that gets the right to use, sell, manufacture from the patented technologies is called licensee.

As an IP holder, you have the right set terms and conditions in the licensing agreement. The terms may include a fixed amount of the future sales or a part of the royalty per unit.

However, it is hard to tell what is the total amount you can earn as an inventor by licensing your patent to others. It depends on patent valuation, which is influenced by several factors. These include:

Total market size and the growth rate
Number of customers that fall in the patent life
Number of customers that make purchases
Product development costs and taxes
Annual profit to the manufacturer

There are two options in IP licensing – exclusive and non-exclusive. In exclusive licensing, only one licensee got exclusive rights to develop and market an invention (usually, exclusive license agreement are done with start-ups, helping them grow in the competition). On the other hand, non-exclusive licensing allows multiple licensees to practice the patented technologies at the same time, thus utilizing the IP to its full potential.

Manufacturing on your own

Usually, the royalties that inventor gets by IP licensing range from 2% to 10% of the total revenues. If you think “why should I get a small slice from the pie when I deserves the whole part“, you should go for manufacturing and selling products on your own.

According to a study by Ed Zimmer and Ron Westrum, more than half of the inventors who decided to manufacture and market on their own claimed to be successful.

To be a successful businessperson, you need to be familiar with the business world. Additionally, you must possess these personality characteristics:

Salesperson: All entrepreneurs have one common aim i.e. to sell their products to maximum number of people. Thus, you should have qualities of a salesperson, telling people about your products and convincing them to enter in the list of your paying customers as well.
Risk taker: Sometimes, you have to come out of the crease to hit six on the last ball to win the game. Although, there is a chance of run-out, but you don’t have other option. Similarly, to grow as a successful businessperson, you must be willing to take risks. You may face bankruptcy or down credits but at the same time have fair chances to come back for another game.
Innovator: Innovation is one of the key tools of business growth, and you should be expert in that. Providing people with something new and upgrading products and services with the latest technologies help attracting new customers and retaining the existing ones.
Manager: You should possess managerial skills and know how to handle a team. You need to understand the fact that employees are core elements of a business; and they can help you increase sales only if they are focused and inspired.

Conclusion:

Patent licensing and manufacturing are the two options to bring an invention in the market. But, it is difficult to tell which one is better. Both have their own benefits and drawbacks, and it is up to you to choose based on your personal preferences.

Thus, your goal should be very clear. Whether you want to set-up your own business or get royalties by allowing someone use your IP rights.

However, returns on investment is more if you go for manufacturing, but you need thousands of dollars to set up a company. If you don’t have enough financial resources, IP licensing is the right way for you to go.

Manufacturing or licensing, what do you think is best option for IP commercialization?

What’s The Difference Between CRM, DAM, ERP And MIS – And Why You Should Integrate Them With W2P

For maximum productivity in web-to-print (W2P) it’s necessary to integrate the online sales portal with other business management systems. In some cases these will already exist within the print service provider’s business, and in others they may be added subsequently, but either way, it’s valuable to understand how they function and what benefits integration with W2P would bring.

CRM:

Customer Relationship Management tools support the sales role by recording all customer contact whether it is sales or service related. From this information a CRM system can prompt follow-up calls or other contacts and generate promotional offers for both existing and prospective customers, backed by a record of previous purchase history and notes on any problems.

Feeding W2P activity information into a CRM system is an obvious move as it’s important that all customer interaction and purchasing activity should be visible within the print service provider’s organisation. This not only gives sales and management staff a more complete view of how much business a customer is doing with the printer, but also a sense of how they prefer to interact – do W2P sales follow sales visits, calls or email promotions, for example, or do they tend to occur independently of them?

This information can also provide pointers for the maintenance and development of the W2P portal itself. If initial W2P orders are followed by a reversion to phone, fax or email ordering, for example, this may mean that the portal is not sufficiently easy to use or doesn’t support the type of work that the customer wants to place.

DAM:

Digital Asset Management systems have been around for a while, pre-dating widespread broadband internet, and were often used to provide access to hi-res picture libraries for graphic designers, ad agencies and magazine or catalogue publishers, with on-line interfaces for image selection. Nowadays they may also store master layout documents, images and graphics that are frequently used by customers of template-based W2P.

A value-added service that can tie customers in to their printer, a DAM system can be integrated with a W2P portal to enable the correct templates, images and graphics to be accessed during online construction of template-based jobs. For speed of display, often low resolution RGB images are used to provide the customer preview; when the job is approved for print, these are replaced with high resolution print-ready CMYK versions, a task that can be automated with the correct integration between W2P portal and DAM.

Any W2P system that includes template-based job creation will by default have some degree of DAM functionality, which should be sufficient if you’re starting from scratch. If there’s an existing DAM system, integration with the W2P portal may be possible to save duplication, or it may be simpler to transfer the relevant files into the W2P system.

ERP and MIS:

Often used interchangeably, Enterprise Resource Planning and Management Information Systems largely overlap in planning and executing jobs more efficiently, managing quoting, job numbering, planning and scheduling, allocation and use of resources – both mechanical and human – and consumables and stock replenishment, finishing, shipping and invoicing. In addition to improving customer service through more accurate quoting and job tracking, ERP and MIS help printers gather business intelligence via analysis of customer data and can play a useful role in achieving compliance with quality and environmental standards.

MIS solutions, the type more familiar to most printers, provide analysis of costs based on ink usage, production time, media use and wastage. This analysis may extend to material, equipment and operator performance, in addition to stock management and generation of invoices and delivery notes. Some MIS vendors provide CRM functionality as a module, or web-to-MIS connectivity. Sales staff are also supported via mobile access to MIS, making it possible to quote and book jobs from the customer’s site.

While MIS offerings generally provide outputs that can be used with financial systems, ERP solutions differ in that they generally provide the financial tools as well, which may include CRM, human resources and payroll. ERP proponents point out that this all-in-one approach avoids the potential difficulties inherent in connecting disparate systems from multiple vendors and can avoid problems by alerting users to situations such as customers having exceeded their credit limits or payment terms before further jobs are accepted, for example.

Close integration of either MIS or ERP systems with W2P allows online customers to benefit from automated pricing, ordering, job scheduling and status visibility, while giving the printer reliable information about work in progress for production control, profitability analysis and cashflow planning.

Publicity Predicament Number 2 – What’s the Right Timing For Publicity?

Media outlets are in the news business. And as you can tell from the close resemblance between the words “news” and “new,” the mission of the media is to bring you interesting and timely reports on what’s new. If you’re an entrepreneur or organizational marketer and you feed your news about what’s new to the media at the appropriate time, you’re helping both them and yourself. You give them news to share, and you receive credibility and exposure to potential customers.

Ah, but what is the appropriate time? Media deadlines are the most important element in proper timing. Follow these guidelines to make the publicity process work in your favor.

In one group are radio, television, newspapers and web sites, which have short-range deadlines, and in another group are magazines, which have considerably longer-range deadlines. For the short-range deadline media, one week is generally enough lead time for those media outlets to pick up your story. For magazines, the lead time depends on the publication schedule: Monthly magazines need to receive your press releases or pitches 3-6 months ahead of time, while those published every other month need even longer lead time. Weekly magazines need 3-6 weeks advance notice, whenever possible.

When announcing events or looking for coverage for them (as opposed to, say, announcing a new product or providing perspective on a trend), you often need to add a few weeks to the lead time, because daily media often have a weekly rather than daily publication schedule for their calendar listings. That is, upcoming events get published in a batch once a week on Thursday or Friday rather than every day.

The biggest timing complications arise with a product launch, because magazines need to receive your publicity materials 2-3 months before the newspapers, radio, TV and websites in order for them to feature new stuff around the same time. If you rely simply on press release distribution for publicity, either magazine coverage will lag way behind the other media or the newspaper etc. coverage will be premature.

Solve that dilemma by sending publicity materials directly to the magazines at least three months before you want the coverage to appear, then wait until the week before you want the coverage to hit up the newspapers, radio, TV and websites, either by contacting them directly as well or by doing a general press release distribution. That’s right – do publicity in two batches.

Using the guidelines above, plan your timing carefully so you don’t have publicity appearing before your product is ready for purchase or after it’s too late for customers to plan to attend your events.

Bonus Tip: Improve your timing even more by looking up or requesting a publication’s “editorial calendar.” This is an issue-by-issue rundown of planned topics – for instance, the March 16 issue will cover network security, the March 23 issue software upgrades and so on. If you dovetail your publicity with a particular publication’s editorial calendar, you’re practically a shoo-in!

Dubai Business – What’s Happening Now?

It took no one by surprise when Dubai’s boom bubble burst just after the global recession kicked into full gear. The real estate and construction industries, which were among Dubai’s primary economic contributors for several years, suddenly found themselves in a dire situation. Businesses went bankrupt and expatriates were quick to leave before things became unbearable.

But, that was in 2008 and early 2009. How is Dubai’s business environment now? Are investors still looking for the silver lining in this gray cloud? Can the remaining entrepreneurs still make it work? What would you do if it were you who had a business in Dubai?

Let’s take some very interesting facts into consideration, before we go creating opinions and deducing.

1. Dubai is still the biggest trading port connecting the world’s East and West.

While some industries went crashing down, the trading sector in Dubai never waived in its strength. Between the early months of 2008 and mid 2009, trading was the same as it was during the booming years. Many investors from countries such as Japan, Kuwait, India, Singapore, Germany and Spain continued to apply for new trading licenses in Dubai. Have they suffered during the recession? Apparently not, because the contribution from the trading sector in 2009 has far exceeded expectations.

2. Professional practices in Dubai are still going strong

Doctors, lawyers, business consultants and IT service providers in Dubai are still earning a good income and maintaining their earlier lifestyles with ease. Some professions, such as marketing consultants, have suffered because people are no longer able to afford high advertising costs, but the overall picture here is a very positive one indeed.

3. Dubai offshore companies are in very high demand

Since the new Swiss regulations came into place earlier this year, the Dubai free zone company formations have increased. This is mostly because of the tax-free status and the 100% repatriation scheme upon business liquidation. Offshore companies in Dubai are mostly setup in Jebel Ali Free Zone and Ras Al Khaimah (RAK) Free Zone, but with new free zones such as Dubai Silicon Oasis, Jumeira Lake Towers and Dubai Investment Park coming into the limelight, the sky is the limit for investors who are looking for the best deal.

Considering the extremely positive outlook provided by the earlier points, it’s easy to understand that Dubai is rising up just in time. The government has changed rules and regulations, making it easier for investors to settle down in Dubai for as long as they need. With the new Dubai Metro public commuting system now in place and the low crime rate still intact, Dubai is now back among global economic giants. So, for all you eager investors out there, here’s a recommendation – start a business in Dubai. You won’t regret it.