Time to market is everything. Most startups and even big companies live by that creed. The theory goes that the sooner you can sell your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), the better off you are. This is clearly the case if you have a product that the market wants. What complicates this approach is when a startup or any company, trades a solid product strategy for speed. Building something quick is always a good idea but what you build has to be what the market needs. Moving too fast might create products that people want to use but will never make any money. Case in point — Webvan.

Webvan was an online “credit and delivery” grocery business that delivered groceries to customers homes within a 30 minute window. People loved it. The convenience of ordering your groceries was compelling to the dot comers who were busy changing the world. Unfortunately, it went bankrupt in 2001. It’s downfall stemmed from moving way too fast on building infrastructure and market expansion without considering how the company will make a profit. This “first mover advantage” idea was a common one used during the dot com bubble. A similar company, Peapod, moved fast but based their strategy on using existing infrastructure. Peapod is still around and it’s business model has been copied by Safeway for it’s home delivery service.

Time to Market vs Time to Profit

Webvan’s time to market strategy was a good idea but what got lost by moving too fast was the fundamentals — time to profit. Time to profit should be considered just as important as time to market since that’s your real end game — deliver a product to the marketplace and start making profits. Ideally, the correlation between your arrival in the market and when you start making money will coincide. This ideal scenario rarely happens but it’s the most desirable. When you move too fast, this perspective gets lost because of the “we can make it up in volume” or “let’s seed the market first” types of arguments. This attitude is dangerous and will set your business up for failure.

Planning at the Speed of Light

Getting stuff done is important but more important is getting the right stuff done. In order to do the right things, you have to spend some time planning and considering your time to profit. Once you have a plan, then it all comes down to execution. That’s why startups or small automatous teams have an advantage — they have laser focus on the tasks in front of them without the distractions of a big company. Laser focus is vital to a successful project but that focus has to be properly directed. That’s why it’s essential that when you are racing to get your product done that you at least step back and plan for success. You can build fast and plan for success by following the ideas listed below:

• Build Platforms: When you build a platform, you allow yourself to use it for many different things. This may seem counterintuitive to the whole focus idea but it’s not. Platforms allow for changing direction without having to scrap a lot of work.

• Leverage Others: Part of your project plan should consider how to leverage the work of others. Anything you don’t have to create is one less thing that might go wrong.

• Fail fast: Risk is always part of any project. Not properly mitigating risk can kill a project faster than anything. The key to risk mitigation is to fail fast and be able to recover quickly since you usually can’t afford parallel paths in a fast paced startup.

• Iterate with trusted end users: End user feedback is vital to a successful product. The sooner you can get users involved, the better. This also allows for critical course corrections that most of the time, you can’t plan anyway.

• Plan for the Zig: All projects have to zig and zag around obstacles to breakthrough into success. Make sure you at least have those potential zigs in mind when you launch off on your project.

• Step outside the bubble: The fog of a project will skew your reality. It’s best to step outside the daily grind and validate that what you are building still makes sense. This single method will prove to be the most valuable since you don’t always see problems that could be right in front of you.

• Plan to iterate: Ideally, you would build your MVP, launch it and become wildly successful. That rarely happens. What typically happens is that you launch something, it kinda works and then you need to tweak it. Build these tweaks into your plans so that an accurate picture of time to money can be achieved.

Speed Kills Only if You Let it

Most entrepreneurs are impatient. They know that time is money and want to get their product out as fast as possible. This single focus values getting stuff done as opposed to getting the right stuff done. That’s dangerous since the biggest failure of any rapidly moving project is that the market conditions change and the project should have zigged when it zagged. Don’t get me wrong. Moving fast is important. The faster you get something done the less likely the market requirements will change and the closer you are to profit. Do be wary of moving too fast that you get blinded by the “time to do it over but no time to do it right” or “we can make it up in volume” conundrum. This is the surest way to be the next Webvan.

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The Perils of Moving Too Fast originally appeared on The Daily MBA on January 24, 2011.

A Guest Post By Mark Davies

A close friend recently posed these questions to me – Why is it that anything we do becomes boring and monotonous after a while? Why can’t we always feel the same passion for our jobs, our relationships and our lives as we did in the beginning? And why is it so hard to sustain interest in anything that is a permanent fixture in our lives? The answers lie in the fact that adventure is exciting, the unknown is exhilarating, and anticipation makes something much more appealing. This is why we look forward to something new, be it a job or a relationship, and why we find everything so wonderful and promising in the beginning. But as the days go by and you find yourself settling into a routine, you find that the shine wears off and life becomes humdrum again. The only way to sustain passion for your job is to innovate, and if you’re looking for ways to do that, here are a few:

• Push your boundaries: Instead of doing only what you’re expected to do, set new challenges and goals for yourself. This way, you not only find the motivation and drive to go in to work every day, you also lay the groundwork for a climb up the career ladder. When you push yourself to excel and be the best you can, you’re in a race against yourself, always trying to improve and become better. Set short-term goals that provide a cascading effect and lead to your long-term ambitions. Each goal you reach pushes you onwards towards the next one and keeps you going.
• Find ways to improve your knowledge: Any job that allows you to continue expanding your knowledge horizons can never be termed boring or routine. Even if the nature of your work is monotonous, use your time fruitfully and pick up new knowledge, and not just in spheres that are relevant to your line of work. Keeping up with the times and being aware of all that’s happening around you is the best way to beat the demons of recession and arm yourself against a lay-off. Knowledge gives you the confidence that you can and will survive, even if you lose your job.
• Shake things up: The best way to get ahead is to get noticed. So if you’re just a part of the team, come up with new ways to do things, methods that are both productive and effective. You may earn quite a few enemies along your way to the top, but even this could be minimized if you go about it the right way. Success is as much about tact and subtlety as it is about being a go-getter and achieving targets. Don’t be content to be a part of the crowd; rather, play to your strengths and make yourself indispensable to your organization. When you’re appreciated, you find that boredom and the mundane slip out the backdoor and never come back.

Sometimes, it really is up to you to make your job more interesting and worthwhile. If you take that attitude, the any job can be rewarding and exciting. Who knows, you may even invent the next Post-It Note!

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Mark Davies, he writes on the topic of Masters Degree Online . He welcomes your comments at his email id: markdavies247<@>gmail<.>com.

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3 Ways to Innovate at Work originally appeared on The Daily MBA on December 20, 2010.

This post really resonants with me. I think it’s because of the desire for so many company to create an innovation process at the expense of creating the freedom to innovate. I also sometimes fall into this trap.

In particular, these two paragraphs really capture the essence of innovative companies:

Unfortunately, when the addiction to systems and structures rules the day, an organization’s quest for a culture of innovation degenerates into nothing much more than a cult of innovation.

Organizations do not innovate. People innovate. Inspired people. Fascinated people. Creative people. Committed people. That’s where innovation begins. On the inside.

Systems and processes are fine. In fact, you need them to run a functioning company. I think where companies fall down is when they institute a layer of process that stifles creative people. The balance seems to be the happy medium between creative freedom and rigid process that makes repeatable products.

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Blogging Innovation: Innovation From The Inside Out originally appeared on The Daily MBA on February 22, 2010.

Talking Points

• There are 4 main Intellectual Property (IP) categories: Patents, Trademarks, Copyrights and Trade Secrets.

• Patents allow for monopoly practice of an idea in return for disclosing it for the public good.

• Trademarks help create your brand and identity. They can be a picture, graphic or set of words or phrases

• A copyright protects authors of “original works of authorship” by making it illegal for someone else to copy and use it as their own.

• Trade Secrets are important information that companies keep secret to have a competitive advantage.

• US patents have a duration of 20 years from the first filing.

• US Trademarks can be registered or not and have an unlimited duration as long as properly used and maintained

• US Copyrights are valid from the moment of creation to 70 years after the authors death (if created after Jan 1, 1978)

Discussion

Intellectual Property (IP) has value. Every checklist from company evaluations to investment due diligence has at least a couple of bullet points on your companies IP. For the purposes of this post, I will focus on the US since that’s what I know and deal with daily. As you have guested, from reading my other posts, I am not a lawyer but I deal with IP pretty much everyday. So, I have some experience sorting through the complex morass of legal jargon and I have filed ten patents and two trademarks. If you have questions or don’t understand something, drop me a line and/or consult a legal professional.

Patents

From a filing and prosecution perspective , patents are the most complex form of IP you will have to deal with. The reason is that you, as the inventor, have to explain your invention so that someone having ordinary skill in the art can reproduce it. Another burden is that the invention has to original, which means that there is no other prior art that explains what you want to patent. There is also a burden of obviousness as well as breaking the known laws of physics. In the US, you have to be the first to invent something not the first to file, which means if there is a dispute about an invention date, then you need documentation that proves when you invented something.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) also has clear guidelines as to what must be contained in a patent and how specific sections need to be written. See Exploring Further for the link.

Patentable Subject Matter

Under 35 U.S.C. § 101, the categories for patentable subject matter are broadly defined as any process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or improvement thereof. The supreme court interrupted this to mean that subject matter for a patent was to”include anything under the sun that is made by man.” This broad statement does have limitations. According to the court, the laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable. Aside from that, pretty much anything else is (Taken from Cornel Law reference below).

Types of Patents

The two most common types of patents are apparatus or method patents. There are various others, such as chemical structures but I won’t get into those since for the majority of us, apparatus and/or method will cover it.

• Apparatus: An apparatus or system is a machine, set of machines that perform a useful, novel function. They can be anything from a better toaster, to a satellite or a nuclear reactor. Think of an apparatus as something physical.

• Method: A method patent details a process to create or do something useful. The trick with these is that the method order and the method are protected. This means that if someone deviants from the method order and can still make it work, then you are out of luck.

Sometimes, apparatus (or system) and methods are combined in one patent to broadly protect the combined use.

Parts of a Patent

Patents have several import parts. Each part serves a specific purpose and must adhere to specific criteria. These parts include:

1. Abstract: A short summary of what the patent is about. It’s really not relevant to the legal definition of what the patent does but is helpful for a general idea.

2. Specification: Contains the background and preferred embodiment of the invention so that someone with ordinary skills in the art can recreate the invention. The specification is a critical component but secondary to the claims.

3. Drawings: Along with the specification, the drawings detail the preferred embodiment and any other relevant information that will aid in the reproduction of the invention.

4. Claims: Claims are the most important part of a patent. Claims are what is being protected and come in two flavors: independent and dependent. An independent claim is said to stand on it’s own, which means that, along with the specification, the claim describes either an apparatus or a method that can be created. A dependent claim depends on an independent claim to support the creation of the combined apparatus or method.

Patents take a while to prosecute and create. In some cases, inventors will file a provisional patent application that officially records at filing date. A provisional patent application does not require the same level of detail nor format as a full patent application. The advantage is that you can file early while working on the full application. A provisional patent application must be converted into a full patent application within one year.

Trademarks

Trademarks are words, symbols, or phrases that are used to identify a particular manufacturer or seller’s products for the purposes of distinguishing them from other products. When the word, symbol or phase is used to distinguish a service, it’s called a service mark. Some well known trademarks include: Coca-Cola, Nike, Pepsi, NFL, etc. The whole point of trademarks is so that a company or person can build and maintain an identity so that consumers can easily identify different products and services. Trademarks can be registered with the USPTO or not.

Criteria for a Trademark

Since the whole purpose of trademarks is to identify different products and services, they need to be distinctive and non-confusing from other marks. In broad terms, trademarks fall into four categories: (1) arbitrary or fanciful, (2) suggestive, (3) descriptive, or (4) generic. Each category has specific rules, which I will not get into. The thing to remember is that trademarks or service marks are meant to be associated with some product or service so people can relate that back to the company that provides the product or service. The more distinctive and unique, the better.

Copyrights

Whenever an author (or coder) creates an original work that is in a fixed, tangle form (like an article or source code), it becomes the immediate property of the author. For example, as I create this article in a fixed tangle form, I automatically own the copyrights. As the author, I can choose to do with those rights as I see fit. Bestowing or selling copyrights is at the sole discretion of the copyright holder.

Logistics

Since copyrights are established automatically when the work is in a tangle form, no registration with the copyright office is required. In fact, since 1989, you don’t even have to mark that the material as copyrighted. In practice, it’s always a good idea to identify that the work is copyrighted by adding the word Copyright, the date and the owner. That way, there is no confusion.

Fair Use

Fair use of copyrighted material is a bit tricky. In general, fair use is primarily designed to allow the use of the copyrighted work for commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education. There are several tests that are applied to determine fair use. These include:

1. The purpose of the use: If the work is used for educational or non-profit means, then it’s probably OK.

2. The nature of the work: Is it purely facts or someones creative writing. More factual works are easier to fairly use.

3. The amount of the work used: This is kind of subjective and usually determined by a judge.

4. The effect of the use on market or profit: This is basically do you compete in the marketplace with the copyrighted work. If so, then it’s probably not fair use.

Trade Secrets

The last piece of IP is the trade secret. This can be anything that a company uses to gain a competitive advantage. As the name implies, the company keeps this information secret so competitors don’t use it. Trade secrets are the least protected type of IP from a legal point of view. Usually, trade secrets are protected by Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) and the limitation the company puts on who knows the information.

A Comprehensive Approach

Most companies have all four kinds of IP. There is no hard and fast rules as to what you should patent, trademark, copyright or keep secret. In general, companies patent physical objects or processes to make things, trademark a logo or saying, copyright all their manuals and websites and keep secret a wide variety of formulas or knowledge that gives them a competitive edge.

Things To Ponder

1. Look up a famous trademark. How long has it been in use? What is the legal definition of it? How does that compare to what you see.

2. Look up one of your companies patents. Read through the claims. How close are the claims to the title or abstract? After reading the claims and specification, write a couple of paragraphs on how you would create the invention.

3. Do a search for a famous trade secret. Why do you think it’s a trade secret? How do you think the company protects it? Write a paragraph on your thoughts.

4. Invent something simple. How would you go about patenting this invention? What prior art might you have to deal with?

Exploring Further

• Explanation of US Patent duration

• Cornell Law School Patent Page

• Harvard’s Overview of Trademark Law

• Copyright Clearance Center Copyright Basics Page

• The Daily MBA’s Patents on a Budget

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Topic #16: Intellectual Property originally appeared on The Daily MBA on February 10, 2010.

People often ask me how often an idea turns into an invention. I have no real statistics on this but it seems that the people I know that invent stuff have between 3-5 ideas a day that might be worth exploring. Most of those ideas lead nowhere. That’s why this post over at Blogging Innovation caught my eye. I think the article sums it up best as

“the great geniuses produced quantity as well as quality.”

The common denominator in innovation is that the innovator usually has tons of ideas. In fact, there are so many ideas that they can’t possibility pursue them all. The real difference between idea and innovation is focusing on a problem to solve. Finding a solution to a nagging problem usually focuses those mass amount of ideas along a common theme that then leads to an invention.

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Blogging Innovation: To Uncover Great Ideas, Generate Lots of Them originally appeared on The Daily MBA on January 25, 2010.

Success at anything requires passion and focus. You can’t just show up, wander in the meadow and expect to be a smashing success. It takes dedication, passion and focus to achieve your goals. This guest post over a Zen Habits nails the reason passion is important but misses the point on focus.

Focus is important to get tactical tasks done as well as provide a strategic road map for your career development. That I get but always focusing on being an expert on one thing, that’s dangerous. That does not mean you should cast a wide net and do everything. That’s not productive either. What is productive is to be intellectually curious about areas outside your focus. This allows you to become better at your chosen career by adopting different trends and ideas from others. If you are in the innovation business, this is absolutely critical.

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Zenhabits: How Passion and Focus Will Rock Your Career originally appeared on The Daily MBA on December 22, 2009.

Great guest post over at OnStartUps about when to release. It’s always a struggle to sort out when to release a product. Chances are, you never really know the right time nor the right features to release with. This is truly an art to get right.

Most of the “release early” debate revolves around software, which is easily upgradable adding features is just a recompile away. Looking at this from a hardware view (which is my background), I find it easy to say that releasing hardware early and often is a bad idea.

Hardware is an investment that is hard and expensive to upgrade. Spinning hardware is also expensive and requires more resources than spinning software. So for me, getting the hardware features and architecture right trumps releasing early every time.

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OnStartUps: Releasing Early Is Not Always Good originally appeared on The Daily MBA on December 21, 2009.

I just found the Blogging Innovation site (via a Twitter post). This article struck me as a great approach to innovation. Instead of going for the disruptive innovation all the time (something that far too many companies do), having a blended innovation approach makes the most sense.

I have always prescribed to the focus on the incremental mind set because even disruptive innovations incrementally happen. I am looking forward to more posts by these guys.

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Blogging Innovation: Four Quadrants of Innovation originally appeared on The Daily MBA on December 7, 2009.

Great post on focus and why being in the zone is much more productive that just working. Concentration makes you more productive. That’s the trick to Time Elasticity. Too often, we get distracted with other things while trying to create or get work done. This expands the time required for tasks and just makes us frustrated.

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Shot Of Inspiration: Time is Elastic Grasshopper originally appeared on The Daily MBA on November 13, 2009.

I have always wondered about how to make Video and Podcasting part of my online presence. I think part of it was not the mechanics of doing it but rather what would people want to view and listen too. This post over at Best Biz Practices gives both a technical how to and what content people like to view and listen too.

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Best Biz Practices: Video and Podcasting originally appeared on The Daily MBA on November 8, 2009.