In the world of “inventing help,” there a lot of folks that talk the game or only know one part of the game. Some people are in the business of just selling design, others prototypes, while others focus solely on patents. Through the years, I watched the “inventing help” industry leave inventors looking for a needle in a hay stack. If an inventor doesn’t work with someone who knows what do and the whole process from ideation to product-on-the-shelf, then they’re flying blind. How many companies do it from “soup to nuts?” Not many. In fact, we’re the only ones we know of that does.

Not long ago I met with a series of “experts” in the field of new product development and inventing. At the time I was spending the week in a series of meetings with groups of these people. All were fantastically intelligent individuals with their own successes in their own rights. But before we began, I held an informal poll of the group, a practice I made a habit through years of these types of meetings. I started right off, asking anyone in the group with a product on the shelf to raise their hand. Long ago, the results would have surprised me. Unfortunately, I’ve become used to rarely seeing a hand rise. If one person raised their hand, I’d make sure to follow it up, and ask if there was anyone with 10 products on the shelf. To date, I’ve yet to see anyone raise their hand for that one, beyond myself and designers at my company who’ve worked on our own and other inventor’s projects.

The people I talked to were experts in inventing and designing new products, as I said. But why do so few of them have products on the shelf? Because they have experience in only a small aspect of inventing. As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of companies vying for inventors’ interests to purchase their services, but they only deal with one aspect of the inventing process. Unless you’re responsible for everything from A to Z, you don’t have clear communication and clear execution in inventing. Companies like Davison, and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any like it, are in the business of new product development. That’s what we do. We aren’t in the “inventing help” game; rather we actually help inventors because we do everything from the brainstorm to the design to the engineering to the art to the packaging to the licensing and all the in betweens.

Inventors need help. They need help from someone who knows the real inventing process and what it takes to put a product on the shelf. Whether they use our services or not (and, of course, I want inventors to work with us), we want inventors to recognize the drawbacks associated with those individuals and organizations that only sell a small aspect of inventing as though it were the full deal.