I coach a number of inventors whose ideas are cutting edge and exciting. One of the analogies I often share with them about getting an invention to the market place successfully is the idea of connecting an electrical circuit. All of the multiple components need to be in place and in the right order for the circuit to function and the energy to flow and do useful work.

As with an electrical circuit, all of the different innovation pieces have to be synchronized and working with one another to develop the end result. True innovation-driven growth can be delivered if you develop a roadmap that aligns the leadership team on key priorities and capabilities.

The energy of innovation requires what I’ve coined, “Completing the Circuit of Innovation™,” by plugging in a holistic intellectual asset strategy that goes beyond simply getting a patent. (To learn more about this, I recommend taking a listen to my Incite Innovation podcast about Completing the Circuit of Innovation. Click here and scroll down to #004.)

So in the spirit of “Top Ten” lists, here are the essentials for entrepreneurial success:

1. Start right! Have a clear definition of your idea or invention.
2. Find a coach or mentor to help you through the process and increase your chance of succeeding.
3. Keep searching. Conduct additional research of the art to better define the competitive landscape.
4. Develop Intellectual assets to strengthen your competitive advantage.
5. Define your territory. Learn what potentially can be owned by you or your competitors, and develop a vision for a pipeline of offerings and inventions.
6. Do your diligence. Due diligence and a defined market entry strategy will help exploit channels and potential targets.
7. Identify potential strategic partners and companies for your business proposition pitch.
8. Target the decision-makers. These often are the marketing people or innovation leaders with expansive networks who will open the doors and pave your way.
9. Develop partner relationships (and development licenses) with end users, equipment manufacturers and packaging raw material producers.
10. Find a coach with the expertise to help you establish reasonable royalty rates and a pricing structure as well as assist with commercial negotiations.

If you can check these off, you are well on your way to connecting the Circuit for innovation success!

If you want to be on the cutting edge of the latest industry trends and insights for your company’s strategic partnerships, here’s a conference you won’t want to miss this year. I’m chairing the 8th Annual MRT/PDMA International Congress on Open Innovation and Co-Development (Also known as CoDev 09!)

This year’s program will be held January 26 - 28, 2009 in Scottsdale, AZ at the Radisson Fort McDowell Resort.

We’re focusing on how to build the core components of a successful open innovation capability, and we’ve already lined up a compelling faculty with open innovation ambassadors from Cadbury, Frito-Lay, HP, Booz & Company, Kraft, P&G, R.J. Reynolds, Colgate, WD-40 and many more.

I’m very excited to kick off the conference with a candid one-to-one interview with Henry Chesbrough, author of Open Innovation and Open Business Models and acclaimed thought leader on Open Innovation – we’ll find out his perspectives on how companies can take their open innovation activities to the next level, how early adopters have excelled and discover the key ingredients of their success!

We’re also building in more time for attendees to connect with conference faculty, top experts and attendees of the event to ensure that you’re able to make networking connections for future discussions and possible partnership opportunities. We’ll even have an open innovation mentoring program to bring you up to speed quickly and ensure that you leave the conference with an action plan for getting started on the right path.

I highly encourage you to join us for what promises to be another exceptional program!

“Disruption” has become a popular business term, especially in the innovation realm. My company is working with a lot of corporate clients to help them identify disruptive opportunities and disruptive threats. I also enjoy passing that disruptive potential on to our clients who are startups and lone inventors.

So what is Disruptive Innovation?

Disruptive innovation requires looking beyond technology and new products to understand the barriers that are leaving the often unrecognized or unexpressed needs of nonusers and low-end users unfulfilled. It typically provides new levels of convenience, access, and cost effectiveness to people – often at the expense of some high-end feature. Companies often overlook the needs of many people who would welcome a “worse” product that made some aspect of life better for them.

You’re probably asking, “how can this be? No one would want a product that is worse, would they?” In fact they do! And that’s disruptive.

Kleenex® facial tissue and the Swiffer® mop are great examples of what Clayton Christensen of the Harvard School of Business has called “disruptive innovation:” an innovation that may be initially worse in terms of standard metrics of established products and customers, but which appeals to non-users or low-end users by offering improved convenience, lower cost, or other benefits not previously viewed as the basis for competition.

When the facial tissues were first available in the 1920s, many women used them to remove makeup and cold cream. Marketers at Kimberly-Clark responded, repositioning the product in the early 1930s as “the handkerchiefs you can throw away.” Women used them as a convenient replacement for the handkerchief, even though they weren’t as strong or washable, and that forever changed the handkerchief industry.

The disposable Swiffer mop also offers a “worse” performance relative to the durability and cleaning power of conventional dry and wet mops, but would convert many non-moppers and infrequent moppers into frequent floor cleaners!

The key here is that it’s all about the business model –not the technology itself—that determines whether the opportunity is disruptive or not. A given technology can be launched as a sustaining innovation aimed at mainstream users in a head-to-head battle with the previous incumbents in the market, or it can be launched in a way that draws in non-users and low-end users while motivating the incumbents to largely ignore your efforts since they aren’t feeling pain - until it’s too late.

That’s the kind of disruptive advantage that motivates the long-established giants to flee rather than fight, giving the market entrant a precious foothold from which to grow with further “sustaining” innovation.

I’m getting ready to help showcase a “Workshop of the Future” at the FAB LAB at Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wisc. The event is April 30th 4 to 6 p.m., and is designed to connect people and their ideas to the world!

I invite you to check it out. You’ll be able to create, collaborate, learn and build just about anything you can imagine, and then connect to experts who personally help make innovators’ dreams into reality.

A little FAB LAB background: The Fabrication Laboratory concept was created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Dr. Neil Gershenfeld and his team at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. It integrates local expertise, global resources and bench top fabrication technology to deliver personalized fabrication or rapid, proof-of-concept prototyping.

The FAB LAB at FVTC is only the 16th in the world and first production facility in the USA outside of MIT. It’s also the first to focus on entrepreneurs and developing businesses in partnership with the FVTC Venture Center. I’m proud to champion this resource!

If you’re an existing business, a student, a “garage inventor” or a creative soul with a great idea, you can have access to personalized product prototyping. The FAB LAB is open to FVTC students, our partner organizations and the general public, through a variety of packaged options.

he FAB LAB is a unique “Innovation Center” that provides innovators/inventors the knowledge base and resources to translate their idea into a prototype product. We provide industry expertise at FVTC in engineering and manufacturing who will help you make almost anything on specific technology needed for product prototyping. Learn how to use laser engraver cutters, CAD programs, milling machines and more.

If you’re an existing business, a student, a “garage inventor” or a creative soul with a great idea, you can have access to personalized product prototyping. The FAB LAB is open to FVTC students, our partner organizations and the general public, through a variety of packaged options.

Check out this link to learn more.

I’ve had a great time meeting with packaging industry leaders this week at the 2008 Packaging Strategies Summit in Bonneventure, Florida, where I was one of the featured speakers. With so many innovative developments in packaging design, I am fascinated by how these leaders are continually coming up with great new ideas that deliver differentiation and disrupt the store aisle!

One of the challenges I often hear about is how to maintain this growth while meeting the needs of what I call the Innovation Ecosystem (which I tell my clients is a top-priority!). Today I shared with conference attendees the main elements they must focus on as they design their own packaging innovation ecosystem. Environmental, economic and social considerations are the three main forces involved in sustainable innovation.

Of course, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all ecosystem, so each company must create its own based on its unique offerings and capabilities. To build an innovation ecosystem, you need to have an open-ended sustainable outcome by looking across the design, delivery of product, how it is used and how it is disposed of. These ecosystems involve complex relationships between many players: vendors, customers, regulators, influencers, shoppers, decision makers, management, innovators, brokers, competitors and others, where simple linear chains of events are not applicable.

The business objectives should focus on how to decrease the environmental footprint, improve the financial bottom line and operate the organization ethically to improve your relationships with employees and the communities where they live and work.

We also talked about the need for developing partnerships and alliances that complete their ecosystem and deliver sustainable, innovation-driven growth. Bottom line: It’s important to choose the right partners who have the eco-friendly designs and the disposability that you don’t have within your own brick and mortar walls.

Check out the Simply FABulous article in this month’s Insight on Manufacturing magazine. The online format is in itself an innovative way to page through a magazine!

Reporter Rick Berg really captured the essense and spirit of the new FAB Lab at the Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wis. I’ve been a proud champion of the FAB Lab, a state-of-the-art facility that links companies and entrepreneurs with subjct matter experts from all over the world who can help innovators develop their ideas into a rapid prototype. I encourage you to click on the E-zine link and read up on how this facility is transforming the way innovators innovate!

One of the trends I’ll talk more about in 2008 is the movement toward eco-friendly consumer products. Our “alpha mom” is beginning to demand household cleansers that she trusts are not only safe for her home and her family, but won’t deplete the budget. One company is filling that need in a big way:

Clorox is rolling out a series of natural, biodegradable household cleaners called Green Works to its $4.8 billion family of cleaning and household products. Known for making bleach a household cleaning product more than a century ago, Clorox is the first major consumer products firm to launch such a line. Now the company has a chance to move green cleaning products beyond the niche of Whole Foods-type stores and into the wider world of Wal-Marts and suburban supermarkets.
As part of this week’s product launch, Clorox is also introducing a nationwide advertising campaign for Green Works. The products - which include a general purpose cleaner, window cleaner, toilet bowl cleaner, dilutable cleaner and bathroom cleaner – are now available in 24,000 stores nationally, including Safeway and Wal-Mart.

Clorox makes three brands of conventional all-purpose cleaners - Pine-Sol, Clorox Clean-Up and Formula 409. Because Clorox has several big brands that consumers know and trust. This latest move will definitely break down barriers for consumers who might think that natural products don’t work, they’re expensive, and you have to go to special stores to get them.

While the overall $2.7 billion market for household cleaning products isn’t growing, the so-called Green niche is. Sales of natural cleaning products rose by 23 percent between 2006 and 2007, according to SPINS, a market research and consulting firm for the natural products industry. Clorox’s own research concludes that almost half of all consumers would be interested in natural cleaning products if they were as effective as traditional ones.

This product line is at least 99 percent natural, biodegradable, nontoxic, made from plant- and mineral-based ingredients rather than petroleum, and not tested on animals. The new Green Works products will carry the logo of the Sierra Club. Clorox’s commitment to Green Works - the company’s first new brand in 20 years - is the latest evidence that environmentally-friendly products are going more mainstream.

I’m very excited to tell you about a new product that Innovationedge helped launch this week for one of our clients. It’s called the Aviafit™ pulsating leg band, and you can read about it and even order it (they come in pairs) through the in-flight magazine, SkyMall.

Aviafit is an intermittent compression device that mimics the pumping action of your leg muscles and enhances circulation throughout your legs, offering comfort wherever you are. It’s safe and very helpful for those who sit for long periods of time. I’d definitely recommend these for people who are on the road or in the air and are sedentary for more than an hour.

We’ve been working with the inventors at Israel-based FlowMedic for the past several months, and they’ve really inspired me with their passion for developing life-changing products that will improve the health and well-being of people of all ages.

They are so committed to this mission that they spent an enormous amount of time gathering and analyzing clinical data required for these types of products. Check out the FlowMedic Web site to see how this product is recognized as an effective way to reduce the risks and complications associated with poor circulation in the legs such as pain, swelling and potentially-fatal Deep Venous Thrombosis (DVT), a dangerous blood clot that can form in the leg veins.

Aviafit is the first in a pipeline of products we’ll be bringing to market in the months ahead, and I am looking forward to telling you about these innovative new gadgets that are truly disruptive!