Don’t you hate it when you read a headline promising you all the right answers and a perfect direction, but then the article that follows tells you it’s impossible to meet that promise? Yeah, me too. That being said, ensuring an invention’s success is nearly impossible.

No one should be making promises indicating the success of your invention. I’ve said it before and I can’t say it enough — hard work, luck and market timing make an invention successful. But there are a few things you can do to help yourself along the way.

Simply develop your invention to meet your customers’ needs. That’s the number one thing you can do. It sounds obvious enough, but for some of us, it really isn’t. At times, we become so swept up in our creativity that we lose track of the people we’re creating it for — customers. This can begin as early as when we first identify a problem. We see something as an issue requiring a resolution. It’s obvious, right? Well, maybe it’s just obvious to you. Perhaps it’s not even really an issue to anyone else, and therefore probably not a good invention to pursue.

So, why do we often jump the gun like that? For many, the inspiration hits them so fast and hard that they may not realize that the invention idea isn’t really on the top of a customer’s list of wants. A lot of people don’t want to hear it, and friends and family may not want to tell them. My suggestion is to take your time with a new invention idea and try to work it out in your head the type of market that might be interested in it then follow that up with research.

But losing the customer doesn’t just happen from the beginning. Sometimes you can be off to a great start, right on track, until you start creating for yourself and not for the customers. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with building something for yourself, because you should do it for yourself and find ways to leave your mark on a project, but don’t sacrifice the needs of the end user for your personal wants. It can be as simple as color changes to functional changes. Speak their language; use their imagery — a lot of this you probably learned during the research phase.

Once you’re finished, or at least you think you’re finished, make sure you do testing. Make sure the product actually works, of course, but also that it works for the customer. Just because it works fine for you doesn’t mean that the customer won’t use it differently. This real world testing may result in design changes and reworks, but in the long run, you’ll be thankful you did it.

In the end, developing your invention to meet customers’ needs will help when attempting to pitch it to a corporation for potential licensing. It helps you build relationships with these corporations and helps these corporations build relationships with retail buyers. As well, if you just want to take your invention to the market yourself, you’ll have a greater understanding of how to market it. Never lose sight of the customer.

We give a lot of tours of our design facility, Inventionland, here at Davison. Local schools, Boy Scouts, university students, corporate executives and others have walked the faux brick pathways, enjoyed the waterways and sat in the grass of Inventionland. Each came through our invention factory with lists of questions and left with a new understanding of what a creative workplace can be.

Now, I’ve talked about youth before, but a recent visit from a fifth-grade aspiring inventor reminded me of our role in educating future creators. Seeing this young man walk through reminded me of the other children before him. It’s their eyes. They remind me of why we are where we are today. The poet/artist William Blake often spoke of the innocence of children and its relation to the creative mindset. He’s right. I can see it in the eyes of our visitors. Children often have that anything-is-possible attitude and they maintain it until someone tells them that not everything is possible. Inventionland aims to bring back the notion that anything really is possible.

By inspiring the youth with this type of belief system (or perhaps they inspire us with it), we’ll be able to foster creativity as second nature to them. This is what we need to preserve our lead amongst other nations in the innovation race. Globalization opened up the world market in technology and industrial design, which means there are billions of potential competitors waiting for their own inspiration to create the next big thing. We need to be one step ahead of this. I think we are in many ways.

Watching that fifth grader with his big eyes and non-stop questioning, I realized we have a glorious future ahead of us.

In marketing, educators often talk about the product life cycle. Usually displayed as a graph, it follows the sales vs. time throughout the life of a product. Once a product is launched, it starts off with little sales, and then it grows, gaining momentum until it hits its maturity before sales begin to decline. In an ideal situation there would be three products running through the cycle at any given point, so as one is at the verge of declining, another will be in its growth stage, while another is at its introduction stage. This is what many consider to be a healthy corporation.