Demonstration, Validation and Funding

If you are an inventor and do not have experience in manufacturing, the best approach is to obtain intellectual property protection and license the idea to a manufacturer. A good demonstration makes licensing much easier.

If you are an entrepreneur, you need a good demonstration to convince yourself that this is a good idea, and to show potential customers and consumers to gain their feedback and orders.

If you are a program manger, you need a good demonstration to show your colleagues in Sales, Manufacturing and other parts of the organization to obtain valuable feedback.

In all cases, you demonstrate it first to yourself. You make sure it works like you want it to. You come up with new ideas and ways to improve the idea. You get a sense of it and then show it to some of your closest advisors. They have feedback and more ideas. The product starts to take shape and you feel confident it can sell, or you might find that people are not very interested in your idea at all.

It's crucial in this first stage to invest enough to properly demonstrate your idea, but you do not want to spend more time and expense than you need to.

Demonstration allows you to better know your market size and target selling price. It helps determine the value of your idea. It can help secure funding from outside investors. Taken all together, it helps validate your idea and gives you confidence to move forward.

Every product is different. Some are very design sensitive, while others require specialized uses of technology. A good demonstration may include photo-realistic renderings of the shape of the product. It often includes prototypes to show how the product works.

It's important to note that it may take many demonstrations and validations to move your product through the development cycle. As more effort is made, the demonstrations become more refined and tuned to the feedback you are getting from your stakeholders and customers. Prototypes move from the proof-of-concept stage to the functional, demonstration and show-quality stages. Not all stages are required, and some can be skipped. The idea here is to refine and validate the idea quickly and incrementally to reduce risk, reduce time-to-market and improve the final product.