Emboldened by the feedback, you begin creating additional features.  Your idea is taking off as you speak, until you are convinced consumers need your product, that there’s no way it wouldn’t make millions.  Your friends agree, add aspects to your plan, and confirm, “You totally need to do it, man.”  In all the excitement, someone makes the mistake of carrying the brainstorming into the realm of practicalities.  “Do you think they could make it over in China or what?”  This turns the tide from dreaming to doing. 

“What would you call it?”  Ideas for catchy names stumble out of everyone’s mouth at once, followed by much laughter, then more names, until the suggestions turn first ridiculous, then lewd, until no one can further the conversation through all the laughs.  The whole thing made for a good evening with friends, and provided material for side jokes throughout the coming weeks, as you all return to your day jobs.

You are not the only one.  Louis Foreman, founder and CEO of Enventys, says that 100 percent of people have good ideas, but 89 percent of those people will never actually take steps toward becoming an entrepreneur to see those ideas through.  Foreman is of the 11 percent of the population willing to not only begin taking those steps, but also to take the risk required to launch his “pipedream.”  Foreman executed on his sophomore idea for a dorm-room business, and after graduation parlayed University Sportswear into the nation’s 24th largest screen-printing company.

In 2002, he created Enventys so that you, too, can turn your great idea into a money-making reality.  Enventys launched Everyday Edisons, a nationally televised PBS reality show designed to fully support amateur inventors.  The show holds casting calls around the nation, giving the public a chance to show off their brainchildren.  Ten to 14 lucky ideas are chosen each season.  Up to $500,000 is invested toward the refinement, development, packaging, branding, marketing, and sales placement of the product.  The show has been a success, and is currently filming its third season, but Foreman is not content.  “We can only choose a relatively small percentage of all the great ideas we see out there.” 

Foreman aims to break the old paradigm that if you want to invent a new product and get it to market you either have to be rich or risk everything.  Traditionally, a would-be inventor is responsible for securing a patent (up to $10,000) and then building a working prototype (another $20,000 to $40,000).  Then, the inventor still has to somehow get the attention of a retailer or manufacturer.  Issues of production, distribution, packaging, and marketing haven’t even been addressed yet!  “Many people can’t, or aren’t willing, to spend the time, energy, and money it would really take to act on a business idea.  Others just don’t desire the style of work that being an entrepreneur demands.” 

Foreman has a radical twist: treat intellectual capital as a form of currency.  To accomplish this, his company created Edison Nation (at edisonnation.com), a website that connects innovative thinkers and creative professionals with one another as well as with product development and commercialization opportunities.  Foreman sees it as the “MySpace or Facebook of the inventing world,” with the goal of making product development accessible for anyone interested in bringing an idea to the market and reduce the time, energy, and money that manufacturers and retailers pour into research and development.  Companies can use the site to make specific design calls, or search the site for new concepts.  Individuals, while keeping their day jobs, can post their brilliant innovations and earn money for just that—their ideas.

Enventys is more than a TV show and a website.  Walk back through a refurbished industrial area known as Third Ward Warehouse District.  At the end of a dead-end road, just as you are about convinced you are lost, there’s a gorgeous brick and mortar warehouse.  A fully rehabbed gristmill, built in 1904, it is the perfect creative space for Foreman’s company of engineers, industrial designers, branding and marketing experts, web designers, sales and commercialization specialists, and sourcing experts.  Enventys is a full-service product development company.  While Enventys works mostly with mid-sized companies to either revitalize a product by fine-tuning its design, packaging or marketing, or to launch an entirely new product to the companies’ existing distribution channels, they have the capacity to work on all steps of the process, from a sketch on a napkin to sales. 

By the time Foreman created Enventys, he had already owned, run, and successfully sold two major businesses.  He was in semi-retirement, taking time to see what was next for him, and had began running out of friends who could take days off to play golf with him.  “I began thinking about how I could give back.”  Foreman started volunteering, teaching small business classes at CPCC, and got interested in the idea of mentoring.  But Foreman wasn’t thinking on a small scale.  He combined the idea of mentoring with his business experience.  He knew that companies often have huge departments:  PR, marketing, development, and so on.  This model is great as long as products are selling well, but when something isn’t successful, there’s no accountability.  Was it the packaging?  The branding?  Maybe the pricing or market placement?  It’s hard to tell, especially since each department tends to put the blame elsewhere, even as the company loses money.  Foreman developed Enventys to provide a cost-effective and accountable way to bring products to market, envisioning his firm as a “mentor” to companies, helping them improve products or invent new products while providing a streamlined, accountable approach.  Companies can cut back on costly research-and-development efforts and focus instead on manufacturing and distributing its product. 

It was in running Enventys that Foreman saw the need for his other ventures, Everyday Edisons and Edison Nation.  “Along the way, while working with these companies, we always ended up talking to a lot of inventors, and were willing to listen and give advice, but it wasn’t very efficient.  I realized I couldn’t help everyone.” 

Foreman also spends a lot of time in speaking engagements or giving seminars—all pro-bono—all in an effort to “give back.”  This format, though he might speak to 300 people and outline his approach to entrepreneurship, is not very scalable.  “Even a couple of hundred people at a time, when you think about it, that’s a slow process.”  He’s hoping the website will finally propel Enventys’ concepts to the full population of potential inventors. 

“What if you could actually monetize your ideas?  What if you could create liquidity without doing anything more than presenting your concept?”  Foreman asks these questions hoping they will entice you, but they also state the very goals of Edison Nation.  The next time you have that unexpected brainstorm, Foreman’s advice is not to brush it off, but to try to capitalize on it.  He warns that there are many scams out there, people trying to harvest other people’s ideas without compensating them.  Edison Nation is a good place to start, a place to learn about the process and what pitfalls to avoid.

Foreman has an even larger context for the new paradigm he advocates, beyond helping individual inventors get paid for their ideas and helping companies develop products more efficiently.  “The common thread of all my current businesses are that they enable innovation.  All of them are ways of helping people and companies be more creative.”  He explains the global importance of this, that since the U.S. doesn’t have low-cost manufacturing or a cost-efficient work force, the only thing left to separate it from other countries is great ideas.  “If we lost this edge, it is then that we are in trouble.  Just because things are made elsewhere, they can continue to be created here.”  In short, Foreman envisions an idea nation. 

To learn more:

www.enventys.com
www.edisonnation.com
www.everydayedisons.com
www.inventorsdigest.com

~ Celina Mincey