Great Minds

Protecting your idea is one thing; obsessing about it is another. While it's healthy to believe in your idea, many inventors become insanely overprotective.

"Inventors become convinced that they have the best solution and become unreceptive to outside input," says Flax. "I've known a lot of inventors who get very defensive about feedback. Their products usually do not get to market. You have to be receptive to what potential users and marketing people tell you. Don't be afraid to rebuild your product."

Actually, the possibility of you taking someone else's idea is just as likely as someone taking yours. "Four and a half years ago, we thought we were the original inventor of the idea [for golf distance-measuring equipment]," says Korba. "But every time you have what you think is an original idea, you can bet 10 other people have already thought of it."

So the race goes not to the inventor who comes up with the idea but to the one who makes it to market first. But ironically, being overprotective of your invention can end up dooming it to oblivion. Flax has seen several of her ideas upstaged by others. The first was a hand-held vacuum, the Bug Sucker, which Flax designed in graduate school to, well, pick up bugs. Soon after she marketed her prototype, a similar product came out-produced by Remington Products and, she says, mysteriously dubbed the Bug Sucker.

Flax also designed a call-waiting simulator that faked the sound of call waiting so people could squirm out of undesirable phone conversations-and then read about a similar product in an airline magazine.

Recently, Flax saw a TV news segment about an orthopedic surgeon marketing another idea of hers-women's shoes with interchangeable heels. "If you have an idea in response to a need, it's not uncommon for someone else to be working on the same thing," says Flax. "That doesn't necessarily mean they stole it. The point is, you have to move quickly. Often inventors want to perfect something before they show it to others because they're afraid it's going to be stolen. I encourage them to do their homework before disclosing it to anyone. But if you don't take risks, you won't succeed."

If someone beats you to market, Flax says, it should only inspire you to do more. "There is a tremendous initial disappointment," she acknowledges. "But I use [those experiences] to light a fire under myself and to pledge that next time, I'll move faster."

Then there's the attitude that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Placing second or even third in the race to retail is perfectly respectable, not to mention extremely profitable, says Flax, "as long as you're improving on [a product] or introducing it to a new market, rather than infringing on a patent or stealing an idea."

For example, when an innocuous little hairstyling device called the Topsy Tail turned into the über invention of the '90s, numerous aspiring innovators dreamed of tapping the trend. One person aiming to reinvent the Topsy Tail is Michelle Johnson, whose Style-a-Braid hopes to do for French braids what its predecessor did for pony tails.

"I read about [Tomima Edmark, the inventor of the Topsy Tail], and my first thought was to come up with a hair-braiding device," says Johnson, a hairstylist in Westchester, Illinois. Currently selling thousands of Style-a-Braids through mail order, Johnson recently won an award at an invention convention and plans to produce an infomercial.

This article was originally published in the January 1996 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Great Minds.