The odds you are up against are staggering. For example, Mike Hirtle, vice president for product acquisition and inventor relations at Hasbro, says his company sees 3,200 external concepts per year. Of these, on average …

And those numbers don’t include the products the company comes up with itself internally and pitches to management.

Other industries are not that heavily bombarded. Once we designed a neat water faucet and found no competition to distract those to whom I pitched, save for the in-house development department. In such instances, companies tend to be all the more conservative. Because their market is steady and loyal, they do not want to do anything that could upset their market share.