Assessing the risk ahead

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You should now perform a vital task that many inventors are too impatient to bother with. That task is to pause and ask yourself: ‘Is there enough evidence to justify taking my idea any further?'

This matters for three reasons:

• Even if an idea is novel and appears to have market potential, that does not automatically make it worth exploiting.
• Up to now, your idea should have cost you little. But if you decide to exploit it commercially, the costs and risks will soon become much higher.
• Thinking about exploiting an idea is easy. Doing it is much more difficult. You will therefore need to be confident of your own skills and abilities before deciding to go ahead.

To help you make the big decision - do I take this idea further or not? - you should address three key questions:

• Is my idea significantly novel?
• Does my idea have significant commercial potential?
• Am I ready for the personal challenge of turning my idea into a business opportunity?

Let us look at each of these in turn.