Attend Trade Shows
There are national, regional, and local trade shows for everything from hardware, consumer electronics, apparel, and aircraft to nuclear medicine, dental equipment, comic books, and musical instruments. If it is manufactured and sold, you can be sure it has been marketed at a trade show somewhere, sometime.
Bright Ideas
The first safety pins were used in Europe some 4,000 years ago. But people jabbed themselves with their sharp, open tips. It wasn’t until 1849, in New York City, that Walter Hunt invented a pin that was, indeed, safe when he put a clasp over the dangerous tip. Actually, had he not been in debt, he might never have invented the safety pin. A guy he had tapped for $15 said he would forgive the debt and pay Hunt $400 if he could make something useful from a piece of wire. Hunt bent and twisted the wire for a few hours and came up with the safety pin design. His creditor made the fortune, however.
One-Stop Shopping
Trade shows are not the best venues to present inventions to potential licensees. But they are a must for getting the beat on a particular market and its dynamics. It is all there for you to peruse, at your leisure. Competitors line up side by side, allowing you to compare products and pricing and look for industry innovations and trends.
definition
Licensee is a term used in licensing agreements to designate the party buying the rights to commercialize an invention. Licensor is a term used to designate the inventor, or the person selling the rights to an invention.
There is no better or more cost-effective way to acquire product literature than at a trade show. Manufacturers publish product sheets and info kits just for trade show distribution. And many come with a price list!
Although some shows have closed booths to control access to new product, that’s not a problem for you. You’re inventive, and to gain entry you may have to be particularly inventive. Companies pay to exhibit. Depending upon the show and city, costs can run from a few thousand dollars to the millions. The manufacturers’ primary reason for being there is to ring up sales and get leads. They are not there to meet inventors. So you want to blend into the background, observing and picking up flyers, news releases, and so on.
Notable Quotables
Difficulties exist to be surmounted.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sales force does not review new concepts. Sales is responsible for selling, not developing product. It is a waste of time and dangerous to expose inventions to salespeople at trade shows—or anywhere, for that matter. However, sales types can be excellent sources of information about their companies and the industry, and normally love to chat about their products, the state of the market, and so on.
Meet ’n’ Greet
Trade shows are also an excellent place to meet and network with executives to whom you otherwise would not have access. They rarely take their bodyguards to events; after all, they are there to meet new people. Executives make it easy to ID them by wearing name tags. I have made super contacts in hotel elevators, lobby lines, and bus rides, and shared taxi rides to and from the exhibition centers with some big names in the business.
The best kinds of shows at which to meet senior executives are national or international. The heavyweights typically don’t frequent the smaller regional or local trade shows. Nonetheless, such shows provide a less hectic atmosphere and many of the same resource materials.
Worth the Price of Admission
For most trade shows, admission is free to the trade. All you usually need is a business card to enter the exhibition area.
Whenever possible, register in advance by mail, and you may not even have to present a card at the door. Advance registration forms are typically found in trade magazines and online a few months before the event. Allowing people to do this takes the pressure off the registration process at the event. The organizers and the trade want people to be inside buying, not in the lobby waiting for nametags.
Finding the Right Trade Show
You can use a few methods for discovering where and when trade shows for any particular industry will be taking place:
◆ Ask a manufacturer or distributor in your field of invention. The sales and marketing people will have such information at their fingertips.
◆ Contact the trade association that covers your field of invention. More than 3,600 trade associations operate on the national level in the United States. A great way to start is to peruse the Encyclopedia of Associations, available at most libraries.
◆ Look online for information on some of the 15,000 trade shows worldwide. Search “trade show” plus your field of invention.
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