Too often, university-based innovators say that they are not
yet ready to do customer discovery because they haven’t yet applied for a
patent. They assume that customer
discovery entails sharing their solution with potential customers, i.e.
selling. Scientists and engineers
generally do not like to sell; they prefer discovery and development, so they tend
to avoid customer outreach. In fact, these
innovators have it backward: outreach to
potential customers is totally about discovery and development. It’s all about discovering customer problems
so that you can develop meaningful solutions.
To quote one of the 7
Habits of Highly Effective People, a self-help book published a generation
ago, you initially should Seek First to Understand. If you share your proposed solution too early
in the customer discovery process, then you’ve cut off conversation. You get a narrow discussion, while what you
need is a broad-based understanding. Open-ended early conversations will help
you refine your technology and potentially strengthen your patent application. With these customer insights, you can refine
a technology and also better articulate how your invention is
useful, novel and nonobvious, several required
characteristics of a patentable invention.
And the nice thing, is that you haven’t prematurely revealed
anything that could jeopardize your patent.
Justin Wilcox’s video
(embedded above and taken from his Customer
Development Labs blog) is a useful guide to what to ask in a customer
discovery interview. Note his first rule
of validating your idea: don’t talk
about your idea.
Of course, as customer discovery proceeds,
you will start revealing your solution, because you need direct feedback on how effectively you are addressing customers’ problems. That’s where the Minimum Viable Product
comes in. An MVP is simply a way to
depict your solution so that potential customers can wrap their heads around it
enough to respond. It may be a diagram
or a video or a wireframe or a crude nonworking prototype or a working
prototype. In fact, as you gain more customer
insights and experience with your technology, your MVP will become more robust. As Eric Reis, one of the primary evangelists of the Lean Startup
movement puts it, an MVP is “an
experiment on the way to excellence.”
When you start sharing an MVP, or presenting at academic
conferences, or publishing journal articles, then premature disclosure can be
an issue. Sometimes, you’ll want to patent
first, publish later. Other times, you can determine specific boundaries
within which you can share in academic settings without undermining
patentability. Sometimes a nondisclosure
agreement will be appropriate. Often an NDA will not be an option, and you’ll
need to decide what and how much to reveal. Don’t try to figure this out on your own! Get help from your university tech
transfer office or an IP attorney.
