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.

It is a frequent request from sales teams: create products that are more competitively priced or competitively featured. It sounds good and this kind of request has send product marketing and engineering teams off to create me-too products for centuries. The trouble is that is hardly ever works out as well as one would hope.

See, when you set out to make a competitive product, you have actually given up the one thing that might just be the key to your success: the ability to set the criteria for which products are judged and buying decisions are made. You have let your competition decide what is important and make you play catch up.

If you have the creativity and capability, it is much more fun (and probably more successful) to do something your competition isn't doing. Create a new product category. Solve a new problem in a new way. Sell to new customers in a new way. Go after a Blue Ocean or a Purple Cow, as the authors's suggest. Do something to set the pace and decide the rules of the game and then get your competition chasing you (or better yet, dismissing you as an outlier and you can be successful without them even noticing).

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

There is a spectrum of emotion that is said to rule the stock market that runs from fear to greed. With the recent events in the financial markets making headlines, I have been thinking about the factors of fear and greed and how they affect our individual or organizational risk tolerance. If you have assets and resources adequate but not extraneous, the fear of loss may keep you in conservative investments. If you have an excess of resources or are investing with money you are prepared to lose, you can be driven by greed.

In other contexts, I prefer to draw the risk tolerance curve below.

When you are contemplating a decision, do you have more to lose or more to gain? This, more than any other thing, will determine your boldness, your willingness to accept risk, and the lengths to which you will go to preserve the status quo.

I used to work in an intrapreneurial group at a huge, multinational corporation. Although by the corporate standards it was a "start-up," I recognized immediately the difference between this group and the actual start-ups I had worked with. This was no scrappy start-up. As a case in point, we had a full-time attorney, PR professional and agency, and trained marketers making sure we used the brand appropriately. The company knew that at even the most aggressive projections, the revenue and margin that would be brought by this new business was less than the value of its brand in the marketplace. Thus, there was more to lose than gain. Which is one of the reasons why, in my opinion, these initiatives were not successful under that corporate umbrella? Start-ups work when there is more to gain than lose.

I see this curve playing out in the discussions about the use of "social media" in corporate contexts. Some companies large and small are jumping in and now have Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, and active outreach by more than one "department" of the company. Other consumer brands are reluctant to jump in and lose control over the message, the brand, or the customer experience (all things that might be a false sense of control anyway). Tara Hunt's new book The Whuffie Factor outlines this well. When I met her last week at WebVisions, she said several times that her next book will be about the cultural change that is required to "do" social media and create social capital in the marketplace. I think she'll find that companies must create environments where they have more to gain than lose by their efforts to see the change take hold.

In fact, this even applies to personal motivation factors and change management. In Alan Webber's Rules of Thumb book, he says that there is a formula for predicting change: "Change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change." Said another way, change can happen when the risk of gain is more than the risk of loss.

Related to my earlier post about there not being a shortage of ideas, there is a natural selection process for ideas. In most organization, especially lean start-ups, only a handful of ideas get any resources, so they have to be good ones. That is a good tension to have. I have been told before that when money or resources exceeds ideas, then companies are in big trouble. I haven't ever experienced that situation and hope I never do!

I have been reading Alan Webber's new book, Rules of Thumb. In it, he offers and describes 52 different rules of business that he has learned over the years.

The concept in the cartoon above is a saying that I think I started repeating since my very first week on my very first job out of college. There was never a shortage of ideas. Things that could be done. Places to go. People to see. Products to build. Features to add. Only a shortage of everything else to make ideas reality: time, money, expertise, capacity, etc.

To me this is not only a inescapable truth, but it is also a blessing. Not all ideas are good ones. Without constraint the best ideas wouldn't win and we'd waste a lot of time. The corollary to this (and perhaps a future cartoon) would be "May the Best Ideas Win."

As always, feel free to use the cartoon for any non-commercial purpose, as long as you give me credit and link back to http://jenniferbdavis.blogspot.com. Thanks!

"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.

When we were growing up, my Mom thought it would be great to connect four stationary bikes (one for each of us kids) to the television and we'd all have to keep peddling for the TV to power up.

Now, there is a new gym in Portland called the Green Microgym which is the first health club in the world to generate a significant portion of its own electricity by putting the sweat power of its members to work. It would be quite a commute for me (doesn't make sense to drive to so far to go to a green gym, right?), but for the neighbors it sounds very cool.

Now, I am just waiting for the electricity-generating daycare or playground (why not tap into the energy of all those little kids?) or the wide-spread use of the electricity-generating nightclub dance floor. These might be a great solution not only for those who want to save energy, but for those in rural areas and in emerging regions where reliable power is elusive or too expensive.

An innovative company in Brazil is offering a subscription service targeted to male gift-givers (surprise, surprise) giving them an easy way to send gifts of chocolate, flowers, etc for a low monthly fee. Check out the link above if your Portguese is pretty good or see the Springwise article. I am wondering what other things could be done on a subscription service.

Keeping up with holidy, birthday and anniversary correspondence is a natural. Jack Cards makes the chore (I mean priviledge) of sending personalized cards easier by sending you the cards in advanced, pre-stamped and addressed, so that you can zip off a personal note and everyone will wonder "how does she do it?". What if this was combined with a tiered service that sent along gift certificates in the cards or better yet, allowed you to categorize your address book into close family and friends, colleagues, and casual friends allowing you to tailor the gifts to each (keeping track of what you got them in previous years). Combine it with a 24x7 concierge service and you text a message or call them with immediate needs (flowers for a friend who just lost a grandparent, for instance) and it starts feeling like having a personal assistant.

What if you took it even further. What if there was anniversary plan that combined a time share with this gift subscription, to create custom luxury get-aways for a couples' wedding anniversary? You could tie this into the "themes" of each anniversary. You know the ones that say you give paper or clocks on the 1st anniversary and the 50th is gold? They could tier the offerings based on location and budget. I'd love the 3rd anniversary luxury trip to Italy to celebrate leather and glass which are traditional gifts for this anniversary or the trip to Japan on the 12th anniversary for silk and pearls.

Sometimes you see products or ideas and immediately think "Brilliant! Why didn't I think of that?" Here are a few that I think are great.






The final submission is not a product, but rather a crowd-sourced service of sorts. When we were choosing names for our children I found a very useful site where strangers had gone to the trouble to rate and comment on names, ranking them according to perceived attractiveness, intelligence, athleticism, and other criteria that might come back to haunt the kids later. I found it very insightful and I really valued getting the feedback early before we made a mistake. Now, you can get strangers to provide your image consulting in much the same way. Your very own focus group. Sadly, the site and service are only in German, but what an opportunity for someone in the States to do something similar (or to utilize their high school German). Check it out at checkyourimage.com.

Just saw a write-up on Posterous, a super simple blogging platform. I thought Tumblr was the simple one, but this platform is even easier. It takes the information in the header of an email and turns it into an authentication for a blog post. Pretty ingenius (perhaps not without its risks as well).

Check it out and think about how you can take unnecessary human steps out of your product or service. It might be easier than you think!

Why live in a town you hate? Why have a job that you feel is a waste of your talents? Why do you make the choices you do.

If your first answer to these question is "for purely economic reasons" or something like that, I invite you to rethink.

If you live in a town because it is cheap to live there, it could be that there is a reason for that...that you make less money if you work there. Usually the supply-demand thing does work out (statistically). If you hate the town, move. Unless you are a trust fund baby that doesn't have to worry about your income (in which case move to a staffed luxury compound in Honduras or something instead), you will probably be okay. You will find that will diligent work, some talent, some energy in networking, and a little luck you can live the same lifestyle in a town you like.

You can live your own dream, if you care enough to take action. Exert leadership over your own life. I am down from my soap box now. Feel free to respond.

"For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three." - Alice Kahn

I love technology. I especially love database-driven, web-enabled technologies with great interfaces that make important things easier to do. Seriously, I really do.

But, I have become aware recently (or should I say "reminded") of ways in which technology can fail to deliver on its promise.

1. Stop-Drop-and-Roll When Technology Makes Something Simple More Complex

Forget scale. Forget extendability. Sometimes business needs are simple. You need to answer the phone and route calls, for instance. How hard can it be really? Incredibly difficult once you create phone trees, voice prompts, scripts, and queues. Add to that a hold music music track from Hades (a stress-inducing piece of classical music that is reminiscent of a battle scene from an epic film) and you have a comic combination of making something simple hard. Part of the problem is trying to fit all possible needs into one solution, when in fact a customer-driven approach would call for multiple, smaller solutions.

For example, some websites are packed with information for everyone which makes them hard to navigate, contain too much copy, and lose their purpose (for example see anything that the good folks at Microsoft post), so all technologies are prone to this kind of complexity. In contrast, stands very simple web page design where the text is a clear call to action, the copy is natural speech, and all of the content fits "above the fold" without making the user scroll to read.

Using the web page example and applying it to my telephony problem, I wonder if the solution is this. Replace the complicated phone tree with its 50 options (and the hold music that enrages already irritated callers) with a pleasant woman's voice who says "Thanks for calling us. We love to hear from you and want to make sure you talk to the right person who can help you the best. To skip to sales, press 1. To go straight to technical support, press 2. Or just hold and a real live, honest-to-goodness human being can assist you. On our website you will also find a directory of contacts that might help you connect even more quickly. Again, thanks for your business. Please wait a moment while we connect you."

If technology makes something more complex, you should stop it, drop it, and roll with something new. For instance, if your customer base is known and finite and if you have more than 2 options on any phone line, break it up and pass out new numbers. It could be that your business is too complicated for the technology to solve. This leads to my second principle.

2. Don't Pave a Cow Path (or Pave Only Cow Paths that Lead Somewhere)

A colleague of mine once told me a story about how a farmer sold his property to a developer and they decided to build houses along gravel roads laid down where the well-worn paths through the pasture land that the cows had cut over years of grazing. Years later, they paved those gravel roads and although the residents complained, only the old-timers remembered the someone hadn't sat down to design the best layout for the neighborhood, but had instead paved the cow paths.

How often do we do this? Come up with a great technology solution to a problem we don't understand fully, just because the technology solution is in hand or can be envisioned. I am guilty of this more than I like to admit (being generally optimistic about technology and life and having this natural impatience to get on with something already). We start building solutions for things that only work the way they do by accident. Or, we throw out a perfectly good "cow path" solution in favor of a more complicated one.

One of the most successful development projects I was involved with was an internal corporate application. Before writing a single line of code, I lived the workflow of the application (however painful it was) for several months managing an Excel spreadsheet. During this "alpha" phase, I worked out all the communication flows and templates, the policies of who needed to be copied on what, and started to quantify the benefits of automation. The core workflow changed quite a bit in those early days and got refined in this manual process, and I was able to articulate requirements for a little application that is still very useful and powerful (and has gone through numerous iterations as new needs and ideas were explored).

This reminds me that one must make careful choices about what gets paved and why. Living in a tent on a cow path for a while, while taking land surveys might be a perfectly reasonable way to "write" requirements.

3. Nothing Replaces an Outside-In View

Companies love to create Inside-Out solutions. You need to know how many product returns you get and why products fail, so you adopt a nifty little service application to manage the transactions. It works great. Unless, a customer wants to see all their transactions and the status of each. Maybe that gets a little tougher. Or unless a sales person wants to see all their transactions and the status of each, across multiple customer accounts, geographies, product lines, or departments. Then the transaction system doesn't quite serve the purpose. Before you rush out an implement a fully-integrated CRM package (which can be wonderful by the way), remember the problem you are solving and the points above. It could be that the outside-in perspective would tell you to keep the transaction system and implement a report instead. It could be that a fancy, automated report isn't needed, but rather a regularly scheduled phone conference with a key customer to walk them through any open issues and assure them of your attentiveness to their issues. It could be that you have back office communication or coordination challenges, that once solved through better roles and responsibilities, the issues are minimized and more manageable.

It is good to keep in mind that most customers don't really care about the efficiencies of your business overall, how the same phone tree helps them and their competitors, or what you are doing to solve problems for everyone. They really want their problems solved. And, it is always easier to solve one issue than ten.

Technology can be a part of that. It can help coordinate information, make dispersed and diverse team act together, and can provide feedback loops in real-time. It can be game changing or tactical, but it is only a part of the whole solution.

"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?

Love this story from the blog by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (can't wait to finish their book which I have been carrying around for several weeks).

"Dell told us (the story’s in Chapter 8 of Groundswell) that when they started their most recent support forum, 1999, they knew they’d need moderators. They pulled 30 support reps off the phones and converted them into forum moderators. Those support reps answered questions online, just as they had been on the phone. Already, Dell was getting more efficiencies, since each answer could be read by dozens or hundreds of other people searching for it on their support forum. Now, five years later, the support forum is many times larger than it was then. And the number of moderators is no longer 30. It’s five. And that’s because the members of the community are moderating it themselves."

What in your business could be made more efficient by turning over the reins to a larger group of people? Other employees? Customers?

Following the recommendation of a colleage and an unability to get an appointment with our normal primary care physician, we went to ZoomCare this weekend. If you are in Portland I highly recommend you check out their services. In any case, their approach illustrated 10 ways that innovators can change industries. I really hope my dentist, my hairdresser, and other service businesses I frequent are reading this.

1. Let your customers buy/schedule online
Go to http://www.zoomcare.com/ and pick your appointment time. So simple. Again, why can't I schedule a hair appointment like this? We scheduled my husband's appointment after hours and it was confirmed via email (our choice) by the next morning. The doctor had read the comments that we had put on our appointment request prior to the appointment.

2. Let customers be spontaneous
Their website includes a real-time graphic indicator of the wait time in their two offices. This is handy for estimating how an impromptu appointment will affect your day. There is no wait if you have an appointment, but if you don't, you can see how busy the place is without leaving your house.

3. Seize a niche
ZoomCare is in the gap between urgent care centers and traditional doctor's offices. You don't get to pick your doctor. They don't treat heart attacks, strokes, offer kidney dialysis, or deliver babies. They are a healthcare solution for folks that are generally healthy, but need periodic treatment.

4. Publish a price list
It is crazy to think that ZoomCare's website might be the first fee schedule I have ever seen in healthcare. Normally, insured patients don't even know what their healthcare is costing them (besides their co-pay and then the statement that they receive showing what the insurance has paid). This doesn't lead to good consumer behavior. It is fee schedules like ZoomCare that make me think that I could accept one of those catastrophy-only healthcare plans, where I'd pay out of pocket (but before tax) for office visits, etc. The fees didn't seem too bad and even if all of us came into the office each month, the fees would be less than I am paying in insurance today (and my employer pays most of it, so I am only seeing a portion of the actual cost).

5. Don't underhire your front-line staff
ZoomCare hires front-desk staff that have college degrees and diverse backgrounds. Where other doctors offices have clerks, these guys are more like cruise directors. I suspect the hiring managers would love their office associates had experience in a circus, speaking multiple languages, and had degrees in diverse fields. After all, they are the face of the company and should be a reason people come back. The doctor was great, too!

6. Treat your customers like intelligent, rational human beings
My husband was shown in his diagnosis by the doctor (with the use of a video screen). Then the front desk person walked him through the treatment handout at the desk and had a bag of information ready for him when he left.

7. Partner seamlessly
Zoomcare accepted our insurance (it was listed on their website as one of the plans they accepted). They emailed (or appeared to email) the prescription to the pharmacy of our choice. My doctor's office by contrast, made me call into their separate prescription line and I had to provide the phone number and address of the Costco pharmacy that I wanted them to use, something they could have Googled as well as I could.

8. Don't partner when you can provide
The office itself had a whole little store front set up where they sold over the counter treatments and other items that their customers might need. It reminded me of the little stores set up in hotel lobbies for those who forgot their toothpaste. If the patient needed aspirin and some cough drops, they could get them right there and avoid yet another stop along the way.

9. Don't underestimate the power of a happy customer
We were told at Zoomcare by someone (who was impressed by the follow-up phone call he received to ensure he was feeling better). We have gone on to tell no fewer than 12 people (and that was before this blog post) about the service.

10. Make your customers beg for more
We already wish they had an office closer to us (it was worth the drive, but could be more convenient). The ZoomCare brand could certainly expand to a whole range of health services. I wish they had dentists/hygenists on staff (although my dentist's office practices would make them a great candidate for running a ZoomCare Dental office). They could expand to vision care. They could expand to an online over-the-counter medication store with home delivery. They could expand to home health care of other types. The positive brand they have built can expand out to new endeavors. Perhaps ZoomCare will expand to a neighborhood near you!

I am a list maker and an organizer type. You know...the kind you ask to plan things and handle things because I can keep my wits about me and manage tons of details. However, I have learned that there is a barrier to organization that many can never overcome...the front-end work and clarvoyance required. Before you know all the stuff that needs to be done, you must start a list. You must organize your day without knowing what emergency may arise. You must create a filing system before you know all the things that you may want to file. And, before you have anything to file, you must create your plan.










Now, you can see why I love and fear for the success of a new product from BlueLounge called the Space Station. It is a sleek desk organizer with "internal coiling pins" to maintain the sprawl of wires that exist on most desks. The design has a "why didn't I think of it" simplicity and I am thinking variations of this could be made out of a wood for a more furniture feel (which is what I would want for my home office).

Still, we'd all have to designate these USB ports, decide what equipment would need to be accessed frequently enough to get a cord wrap, go out and buy duplicate connections for when you traveled (assuming this puppy doesn't fold in the middle to fit in a carry-on bag), and the other things that kept people's desk messy in the first place. I wish them luck!

Earlier I posted on the value of stretch goals that are unbelievable. Seeing no way to reach a target price point on an evolutionary or incremental path, people must thing revolutionary and be relentless.

So, how does this apply to service businesses? Seth Godin has blogged about the discipline of answering the phone in one ring. What other metrics like that could challenge your teams to think in new ways about the old problem of how to provide great service?

If a call center could always pick up after the first ring, here are some challenges for other service businesses:

• Could a retailer guarantee that you'd never wait in line? I mean never. Not even for a second.
• Could a beauty salon guarantee that your manicure will last until your next appointment or it is free?
• Could a town car service provide flight delay insurance or traffic jam insurance to ensure that any costs and travel rearrangements associated with either would be handled? See previous post about bundling products and services.