So, promoting new product ideas. To view that, go in the invention disclosure route for patent application. This is another way to go. So, as we saw early in the semester there's tremendous opportunity in IoT space for new products and services to be created, and there may be patent application opportunities with ease or not, might be, there might not be. Maybe it's just your ideas connecting a bunch of existing intellectual property that's a term you'll hear, attorneys use IP, Intellectual Property, a bunch of sensors and compute and memory and actuators in a way that's never been done before to craft anchor or create some new product, you might stand back and look at him and think there's nothing really noble here, all I've done is just connected that tinker toy pieces in a different way and just going take that to market as soon as you can. There are two crucial components for new product ideas to rise up to the level of the attention of the executives, even as this is probably true even in a small company, and there might not be a full executive staff, might just be the owner, for instance, it could be a small company. But, you need to address these two things, these next two bullets. You need a solid technical proposal which clearly defined what problem is being solved. So, you're going to include size and weight, and power, and features, and performance, and how it works, and all the technical details, for solving this problem. The other flip side or the other aspect, the other angle is a solid business proposal, this needs to include costs, volume estimates, average selling price, what do you think the margin is, think back to when you do the product tear down, you get out and got some insight, even if you're guessing a part cost. You break your product down into a bill of materials, you have what your cost is to manufacture this and then you can ask well, what's a reasonable advert selling price and what that difference is, as the margin that can be made and you multiply that margin by your volume and that's your revenue, right? You can take a crack at it, okay. Where does the competition look like, is there any competition? If you don't have any competition, you got a new idea and that's great because you can do your development work and you can introduce this product to the world and like Rubik's Cube or Pet Rocks or other things could be wildly successful. If possible identify market driving and restraining factors that remark, it has forces at play that want to push new products forward, but there's also some restraining challenges, or resisting factors at play in the market that want to resist adoption of your new product or a pushing back. So, there's two forces at play, if it's possible to identify those and it may not be possible to identify those. Now, as engineers are not very knowledgeable in this area, but almost all businesses have some kind of a business unit or a marketing department, marketing and sales and sometimes combined at the last three companies I worked at, big companies they all had business units that focused on a specific sector. So, if possible, if you could secure an advocate from a business unit to assist you would really help pull together the business proposal. Once you have the technical proposal and the business proposal together, now you're ready to schedule time with your, let's say, it's a 50-person company, and you can send a meeting invite to the owner and say, "I'd like to meet with you for a half an hour, I've got a new product idea." Walk in with the technical proposal and the business proposal and it's way better than just walking up to the owner and saying in the hallway, "Hey, I got this great idea for a new product." Now, you've got data, costs, volume. What problems being solved? What the features are? What the performances? Had answers to a lot of questions. So, that's what the owner's going to start asking, he's going to ask all these questions and go home here's the data. Take a look at this, maybe I'll give them a brief slideshow and PowerPoint. Let's say go chew on this and then get back to me with what you think.
