All entrepreneurs consider their ideas sacred and most dream of offering them "hard protection" with with patents. The truth of the matter is, however, that most ideas benefit from sharing, not protection. So, here are my top three reasons why

3. IP protection is expensive
If you have ever looked into this, you know how expensive it can be to apply for a patent and only years later can you know the outcome of that investment. And if your concept is complex (and not obvious) you will need to likely file for multiple patents to protect the various aspects of the idea in specificity enough for the patent office. If you are lucky enough to be issued a patent, that is only the tip of ice berg in terms of cost. If you actually want to defend a claim against your IP, you can expect to pay 5 to 10 to 100 times more than you paid for the patent filing. If you intend to create a business (not just a licenseable patent portfolio), and you have invested that same cash in marketing, partnerships, or prototypes you would have been ahead.

2. You should give the world a chance to help
An idea you keep to yourself is something that others can't help you with. The more people you tell, the more people you can get thinking about your problems and offering solutions. The more people you tell, the more likely it is that the resources you need (ie, engineering help, marketing advice, an introduction to the buyer at a key reseller, etc) will materialize. You can't get the help you need, while fearing infringement.

1. An idea isn't enough
And the number one reason that IP protection is a false assurance...because the idea isn't enough to make a successful business. As anyone will tell you, there is a HUGE gap between an idea and its successful implementation. Most often than not, the idea itself changes wildly once implementation begins and feedback from customers rolls in (see #2). The key is to begin implementation as soon as possible and identify the steps necessary for commercial success.

In short, seeking IP protection can hurt a small business more than it can help. If you want to bring something to market, bring it to market. Be the first to promote it and the first to be successful. Anyone copying your idea and wanting to build a successful business will have to catch you first.

What's the worst thing that could happen? It probably isn't as bad as you think (or as likely).

Looking for a way to diversify yourself during challenging economic times? Looking for a fun business to start? Here are a few ideas that I offer for no charge at all. Enjoy!

• Someone should start a candle company called "Brazilian Wax."
• Or perhaps a surfboard wax company called "Back Wax."
• What about a line of garden pest control products called "Snail Mail"? Your tagline could be "Send snails and slugs a message!"
• Someone should invent a line of retail price or garmet tags that include a website or text number that you can access via your cell phone and call the business "Phone Tag."
• "Sticky Business" would be the fun name of a tape or sticker company.
• Start a real estate brokerage firm focused on selling parking spots and storage units and call it "Garage Sale."
• Open a private investigation business called "Name Tag."
• Create a line of clothing feature Disney characters (like the little bunny in Bambi) and funny phrases that they might have posted on Twitter. You could call the clothing line "Twitterpated."
• You can buy candles that smell like fresh baked cookies or berries, but not bacon, BBQ, or other non-sweet scents. Start a candle company with a name like "Savory" that offers unique scents like "grilled onions" or "rosemary."

Now, I never did say they were good ideas. Maybe you can improve on them!

"I base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch."
- Gilda Radner

When my sister was little, she was (and still is) a beautiful girl. Long, curly hair. Cute-as-a-button face. But would the girl wear frilly dresses? No way. They itched.

When I read this quote from Ms. Radner (a hilarious comic by any measure) I thought about those days. Her wanting to wear denim overalls while my mom was trying to get her into a pretty dress.

This was before the days of the tagless tag (an invention that my toddler sister would have cheered for). Before they made fabrics softer and clothing more seamless. Those inventions were there, right in front of us, the whole time. But we didn't see them. We didn't recognize the pain for what it was...a design problem to be solved. Once we identified it and named it, I am sure we could have solved it. My Mom is a great seamstress and our family is full of artists and problem-solvers, so I am sure we would have invented the tagless shirt, lined children's clothes, or the adaptation of swimsuit fabric to children's dresses. The problem had not been named, so it couldn't be solved.

What problems are you facing today that are like that? Moderate annoyances or hinderances that keep things from being truly useful, truly beautiful, or truly comfortable. Observe it. Name it. Then go about solving it. This is how we save the world, one itch at a time.

Home delivery of groceries has come, gone, and come again. There is an outfit in Sarasota, FL which literally brings that idea a step further, by offering bicycle delivery of organic produce from local providers. Instead of bringing the grocery store to you, they bring the farmer's market. This seems like a fantastic idea to me, combining environmentally-conscious local eating with environmentally-conscious transportation. The PR and marketing benefits are obvious.

What else could be delivered locally by bicycle? Produce, for sure. Meat from a local butcher shop (in a refridgerated trailer?). Flower arrangements from a local shop or garden center. What about plants and nursery supplies? Milk from a dairy (another retro idea that is gaining popularity). IKEA furniture delivered to dorm rooms for assembly. I even wonder if the neighborhood school bus route couldn't be converted into a modified bike cart. After all, those kindergarten kids are pretty light.

"We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys." - Eric Hoffer

What are you playing around with today and might actually be the next big thing for your business?

Years ago I worked for a software company and while we were developing software, one of the programmers came up with an innovative prototyping tool. We showed this tool to some other folks who loved it and over time, that tool became the best selling product of the company. Something that wasn't on the roadmap at all when the company began.

I wonder how many businesses start like this. GetSatisfaction.com, an innovative service that brokers companies and their customers, started as a way to handle support requests for the sale of excess and obsolete marketing items from defunct internet start-ups in the early 2000's. Twitter started as a side project and has become huge.

What are your side projects, again that you are playing around with, that should be moved to the core of your effort?

"I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience." - Mitch Hedberg

We once built an incredibly useful web application at work to handle a business problem that was labor intensive, a critical differentiator for our business, and was something that we needed to scale. The application was slick and worked really well, at least I thought. Then we started getting new users to try it and as they learned the nuances, we found they needed some "Do you really want to send this?" or "Do you really want to delete this?" confirmations added in to prevent some errors. In addition, logic needed to be added to the site that would prevent incorrect data from being entered in the first place. One colleague described the early version of the application as a gun without a safety. Powerful, but a big dangerous in the wrong or inexperienced hands. We quickly identified the risk areas and put fixed in place, but not without causing some consternation first. I have found that there are at least 3 ways to error-proof your product.

1. Make the Error Impossible

Usability experts like to focus on making the "right" thing to do obvious. I believe, however that equal attention needs to be played to making the "wrong" thing impossible (or at least horribly difficult). The shaped solid ink cartridges in a Xerox color printer is a great example of this. You can't put them in the wrong slots. They don't fit. All products and applications should be error-proofed in this way. Some people check for email formats on entry fields or check sum credit card numbers to ensure they were typed correctly. What about making sure in other ways that people can not proc

2. Take the Pain out of Error States

For a higher standard still, you can look to the quote above about escalators. How can you make a disabled, broken, or improperly used product still functional, but just not as functional. Instead of a 404 error on a website, what about sending users to an alternative page with a training video or with the offending part of the code pre-selected with defaults to make it easier for the user? Maybe in addition to sewing extra buttons into shirts, they should include safety pins. If the people mover at the San Francisco airport is not in operation, people can still walk on it and get a bounce in their step and view the artwork and displays on the wall. Remember, too that delays are error states and entertaining customers while they wait is also a way to take the pain away.

3. Reframe Unavoidable "Errors" as Opportunities for Differentiation

Taken one step further still, what about taking the unavoidable (or frequent) errors and turning them into differentiation points. For instance, all products eventually reach the end of their useful life (the ultimate error state). What about providing real solutions for empty packaging, used products, or those products which are at the end of their useful life? I firmly believe more people should bundle in recycling/removal or upgrade programs into the costs of their product. What other errors are unavoidable or frequent enough to justify looking at them differently? If most people mistakenly hit some key, select an inconvenient option, or have problems with particular types of installations, why not develop programs around those things and turn them into features that are marketed as differentiators, rather than error states to be avoided?

I am back from my winter hibernation and ready to post! In some ways, blogging is an expression that is akin to singing. My voice is rested and I have some things to sing about.

I have enjoyed people's different posts and approaches to New Year's Resolutions for 2008.

• Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, wants you to set goals and enlist others (via his Facebook application, cleverly named "Goal Post") to keep you accountable.


• My friend, Lisa, is determined to focus on 9 or so concepts this year, short enough that she can capture each on a Post-It Note.


• Penelope Trunk, of Brazen Careerist fame, says pick just one goal (and really commit to it).


• Others, like the folks at Andy Wibbels' BlogWild, have suggested picking a theme, instead of a laundry list of resolutions (destined to be ignored come January 7th).


• Ali Edwards, a gifted visual artist and scrapbooker, suggested selecting a word for the year. Her's is "Vitality." Here is everyone else's who responded to her challenge. I, of course, love the custom product tie-in possibilities for a one word resolution!

For myself, I am following the general gist above and selecting fewer things to focus on, making sure they are specific and attainable, and asking for your help.

My resolutions this year are simple. The personal ones including celebrating my 15th wedding anniversary this Summer in some memorable way and some specific ones for my family. The business ones include the successful management of a huge project at work and launching a new offering from Creative Outlet Labs.

However, there are two goals that I'd like to accomplish this year with the help of this community.

1. I'd like to learn how to draw one-frame cartoons. As the cartoon above illustrates, I am a fan of Hugh MacLeod (warning: some of his cartoons are not family-friendly) and wish I had thought about drawing on the back of business cards first, as I think it is brilliant format. Not only that, but I can try out my new Christmas gift from my husband, a Wacom tablet. This year, I want to have some blog posts that are just cartoons that I have drawn.

You can help with this in a number of ways: encouraging my early attempts that I might post here with positive comments/trackbacks and sending me your cartoon ideas (I understand that is how Scott Adams has gotten most of his Dilbert material for years). I will never be a professional cartoonist, but I'd like to be able to find new ways to communicate insights on business, innovation, and life... and cartoon drawing is it.

2. I'd like to make 1 million people smile. I mean be personally responsible for enabling 1 million people to have a positive, encouraging moment in time. I have some specific ideas of how to accomplish this, so stay tuned for more specific requests in the coming weeks.

I hope you are already off to a pulse-racing, mind-blowing new year!

Flickr, one of my favorite photo sites, just launched some new statistics features for their professional members. When I followed the link that I read, it offered me the chance to upgrade my personal account to a pro account with the #1 benefit being "Be enthralled by graphs and charts!" You can read all the stated benefits of upgrading at this link.

This makes me consider two things:

1. Sometimes you don't have to offer people much to get them to part with their money. Sometimes the value-add that is required, isn't much in the scheme of things. You don't have to offer the world, just enough to provide value to the customer.

2. People will pay for their own information. Whether it be Flickr stats or American Express' specialized statements that allow you to categorize expenses for reporting purposes, sometimes it is the data around the main service that provides the differentiation. This is one of the popular features of Xobni's service (see your most frequent email communicators in an easy pop-up) or iTunes (what are your favorite/most frequently played songs).

So, what information do you gather that you could sell, package, or otherwise entice your clients with? Would your corporate clients be interested to know how often their employees called for technical support? Would your customers be interested to know what their buying preference say about them? Could you post some statistics and get positive press mentions (like Google and Yahoo! do when they issue press releases about what the most popular search topics are in any given year)? I suspect that your data would be more useful and insightful than the fact that lots of people searched for news on Britney Spears this past year!

I am not telling you anything new when I say that online communities are becoming more important than actual communities in some cases. Can you rattle off the names of 5 people whose blog your read? Can you rattle of the names of 5 of your neighbors? This is not to judge (we are horrible at meeting neighbors and I haved bake a "welcome to the neighborhood" batch of cookies in...well, I don't know if I have ever done that, although I have thought of it).

So, online communities are important. You know about LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, etc. I hear about new ones like Damsels in Success (clever name) targeting professional women. What if none of these exactly fits the community that you'd like to be a part of? Why not start your own?

The leader in social network tools is Ning, who boasts 80,000 networks. Whether you are a Phish fan, in the advertising business, addicted to One Tree Hill, or a proud graduate of the Blue Springs High School class of 1987, you can find or create your own community. Like all good things on the web, there is a free option (ad-supported). They have private label options for corporate communities, premium options that include your own domain name, and for $19.95 you can set-up to run your own ads on your social network and create your own media empire.

To broaden your options, you should also check out KickApps, which is a similar thing, but emphasizes "rich media community experience" and all the content gets displayed in a Flash viewer. They have some cool viral elements like widgets that others can embed to help spread the word about your community. Again, it is an ad-support, no-cost-to-you business model.

As an aside, a visit to Ning and KickApps illustrates the yin and yang of website design and voice. One is power-punching and athletic (as in rugby) the other is more ethereal and poised (as in yoga). Just goes to show how different visions and brands can manifest themselves online.

According to TechCrunch there are others that do this as well including CrowdVine, GoingOn, CollectiveX, Me.com, PeopleAggregator, Haystack, Onesite. They did a handy comparison chart that you might find interesting.

Now, I bring this up because I wonder if tools like this are being used for more than connecting with classmates and industry professionals? I could see these tools being a very powerful foundation for a church or ministry website, as it could include published content (sermons, songs, articles, announcements about upcoming ministries), as well as forums and places where parishoners could post their own photos of events or discussions about related topics.

I wonder also if any of these sites allow the network administrators to charge for membership to their networks? This could be interesting as an extension of a college course or the like and if there was a way to charge, this would be a very interesting "lab fee" item.

The following idea was passed along from Todd Hudson of The Maverick Institute from a presentation by Luke Williams with frogdesign at the Portland WebVisions conference in July.

Traditional brainstorming doesn't work. Why?

1. Traditional brainstorming doesn't generated that many ideas. Luke'sexperience is that the well runs dry in about 20 minutes. We've all experienced that uncomfortable moment when the room goes silent.
2. The ideas aren't really that novel. Yeah, a few weird ones emerge,but overall low quality.
3. Only a fraction of the ideas generated get used. Not an efficientuse of time and creative energy.

So, what's his technique?

• STEP 1: Decide on a focus area. Define the problem you're trying solve or product you're trying to develop. In our workshop he told us to think of an educational handheld product for preteens.
• STEP 2: Break up into groups of 2 to 4 people. Small groups generate more, and more novel, ideas than big groups.
• STEP 3: Assign each group a different random word (a noun) to generate associations. Use a dictionary. Pick of a page number, column numberand the number of a word in that column. Go there. If it's not a noun, read down until you reach the first noun. Our word was WHEAT.
• STEP 4: Have everyone individually start writing down their assocations with the random word. Mine were BAKING, WAVING, FLOWING, SEED, STALK, BREAD, HEALTHY, GROWING, ORGANIC, MACHINERY, FARMING, OUTDOORS, FIELD, BIG, EXPANSIVE, SUNNY, HARVEST, etc, etc. Do this for about 5 minutes. Then, share your associations with the group.
• STEP 5: Use these associations to generate fresh ideas about the focusarea for 10 to 15 minutes. Do this as an individual at first. Write each idea down on a post-it note. For example...SUNNY --> Solar powered unit that teaches kids about light, photons,etc.HEALTHY, ORGANIC, BAKING --> Product that teaches kids about nutrition.You can stick a sensor into food and it does basic analysis, e.g.,sugar content. Or you can enter in what you're eating and it will tellyou all about it....
• STEP 6: Have everyone present their ideas to the group and let newideas emerge as part of the discussion. Write these new ideas on apost-it note.
• STEP 7: Select another word or find a random object (he gave use a black desk stapler) and repeat steps 3 - 6. Generate new associationsand use them to generate more ideas. You'll be amazed how many novelideas emerge in round 2!
• STEP 8: Have each group present to everyone their random words/objects,the associations and product ideas that resulted. Write down any newideas generated by discussion on a post-it note.
• STEP 9: Place all the ideas into one of four categories

1. Specific Idea - Well formulated idea that offers immediate value.

2. Beginning Idea - Good potential that needs to be developed

3. Concept - General way of doing things

4. Approach - Very broad, general direction.

• STEP 10: Turn 'Approaches into 'Guiding Principles' that can be usedover and over.
• STEP 11: Turn 'Concepts' and 'Beginning Idea' into 'Specific Ideas' bylisting what would have to be done to make them more useful. Forexample, what technology obstacle would have to be overcome to make anidea practical.
• STEP 12: Rank all the 'Specific Ideas' through some voting process and start implementing!

I can't wait to use this technique. Try it and let me know how it works. Better yet, we could try it here if someone could suggest a problem to solve.