After spending time with my mentor and deciding the concept I had was a good one, I felt relieved I’d at last shared my idea and received some very positive feedback. It can be very lonely when you’re the only person holding all the cards.

I had de-risked the opportunity for myself, my family and an independent mentor and now I had to set about creating a product and getting it to market to generate some revenue.

So the idea was to create a product in powder form which, when added to a refilled bottle of water, turned it into a healthy award winning alternative to soft drinks, squashes, vitamin drinks etc.

I wanted the world to become healthier by drinking more water everyday. A really simple idea. However I’m a salesman with a background of 12 years in IT and had no idea how to make a powdered soft drink in a sachet.

The first thing I did was apply to the government for a grant for researching an innovative idea (which is no longer available, I believe). There was an awful lot of paperwork involved but I wanted to make sure I was creating a product that appealed to the mass market.

I’d found that, through a national opinion poll, I could ask, for the princely sum of £1,500, 1,000 people four Yes/No questions.

So the government stumped up half the cash and I sowed in my half to book the questions on the next research round.

The questions were:

1. Would you use a powdered flavoured drink to help you drink more water?
2. Would a powdered drink with added vitamins be something you would buy to help you drink more water?
3. Would you buy a powdered drink with added vitamins and a light refreshing flavor for a family member to help them drink more water?
4. Do you refill ready to drink water bottles from the water cooler or the tap?

I can honestly say this was the best money I ever spent. The reams of research produced by the NOP report from these 4 little questions opened up avenues I thought impossible when I started out.

Quality research opens doors. Investors may believe you and invest in your emotions but they also require hard facts. The NOP poll gave me hard facts.

Armed with this data I was buoyed by the apparent need for my new undeveloped product. So instead of mucking about and spending ages learning how to be a technical food developer, I flew out to Geneva on EasyJet to an ingredients show to see if I could work out how to put together my new market ready product.

The first stand I went to I asked the question “I’m looking to develop a powdered vitamin and mineral drink that is sold in sachets and dissolves clear in water with low calories and no nasties in it, what do I need?” and the man at the desk gave me a lit of ingredients and where to get hold of them.

Really, truly that’s how the first formulation was developed. No three years at food technical college for me thank you very much. I just asked for some help and the guy gave it to me.

I honestly couldn’t believe my luck. He even wrote a proposed formulation on a piece of paper and wished me well. Sometimes it’s luck that helps us overcome difficult hurdles.

Back in the UK I contacted three companies, found through Business Link. I created a brief and asked each company to come up with a formulation that would satisfy my criteria at a reasonable price.

They did, I chose one and we worked on the formulation, taste and solubility for 3 months to get it just right before searching for a co-packer.

The essence of this blog is all about taking a chance backed up with real business sense and making sure those involved understand the research has been done and you can all move forward to the next step knowing that you’re on the right track.

I often look back at the research results from NOP and marvel at how far they got me.

By trendy I don’t mean über flamboyant, or even at the vanguard of cool. But every business worth its salt should have its finger on the pulse of customer behaviour, know what your customer habits and preferences are right now and have a sense of what the trends are for the future.

In a nutshell, developing products and services that meet customer needs, ahead of the competition is what competitive edge is all about. More to the point, today’s savvy customers are likely to respect you more if they think you’re looking ahead and anticipating their needs.

Spotting trends needn’t be an activity that requires time carving out specially – close listening to the customers you’ve already got, reading the signals of prospects you come into contact with, keeping an eye on your industry and trade press, listening to gossip about what other organisations are doing. . . all of this counts. Just so long as you build in the most important activity of all – head scratching – and a bit of time to figure out the ‘So What?’ (does this mean for me and my business).

For a great pdf download on the top 5 tips for getting trendy, try here.

In the second of his posts on intellectual property issues, SmallBizPod’s guest blogger, Steve Van Dulken from the British Library’s Business & Intellectual Property Centre, continues his look at different methods of protecting an innovative product.

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Following on from the discussion of patents in relation to the Reebok© Pump shoe last month, a second form of protection is through registered designs. This is for a look deliberately given to something, but does not cover (in theory) anything useful or how it must look to function. In five pages, American Design Patent 307508 shows the different parts of the ‘shoe upper’, with the ball a minor feature seen in the drawing showing the view from above. It only protects a shoe of this particular look.

Copyright, the third form, could have been used instead. It is literally that – a right against copying. Any manufacturer who claimed that they weren’t aware of the similar looks in another shoe could avoid any penalty. Would the judge believe them ? Or would the plaintiffs be able to find evidence they knew about it all along ? Copyright now lasts for lifetime plus 70 years in most cases but is a weak kind of protection. Instructions for using equipment can also be covered by copyright, but it covers only the wording, not the actual ideas.

The fourth form is trade marks. This is often the cheapest (the normal fee is £200) and most effective kind of protection. It is far easier to come up with a new trade mark than to invent and then write out a detailed description of a trade mark. In Britain, the name Reebok is a registered trade mark and hence is entitled to have ™ after it. The slogan ‘Pump up, air out’ was also used.

There has almost certainly been other work by Reebok: further patents making the idea better or cheaper, new looks, and so on. For several years the concept made lots of money for Reebok in other versions such as running shoes. Air cushions seem to be the flavour of the month now. No sensible company relies on a popular model without thinking: what will happen if people decide they are tired of the idea, or if others attack with better or cheaper models ? Constant innovation is needed. Far too many entrepreneurs forget that the competition will not just sit back watching them make lots of money.

I’m a big advocate of structure. It’s a theme you’ll see time and time again in my blog posts. For me a well-formed objective (in marketing and in life), is the gateway to results.

But a comment from Halina, on one of my recent posts gave me a much needed reminder that rules are made to be broken. But also that structures and frameworks that exclude (or preclude) creativity are fundamentally flawed.

How do the big boys do it?

Coming from a Marketing Agency background, I’ve experienced the Science vs Creativity debate that sits at the heart of the marketing discipline, first hand. In most agencies, you’ll find ‘suits’ (the planners and account handlers, responsible for analysis, planning, goal setting, relationship building etc). And then you have the ‘creatives’ (the art directors, writers and designers who come up with great, campaignable ideas and hopefully have the craft skills to bring those ideas to life). In a good agency, you’ll find a healthy tension between creatives and suits, they hang together like ying and yang – bringing out the best in each other, excelling in their respective roles. In a bad agency the same relationships run to open conflict, rivalry and mutual disrespect, with both sets of bods competing to wear the power trousers.

In the best agencies, these polar roles are almost a misnomer. You have so called ‘creatives’ who understand how to plan, structure and sell. And you have truly creative ‘suits’ who can inspire and innovate, all the way through strategy creation, to the nuts and bolts delivery of each tactical execution.

So what about me?

Knowing all of this is great, if you’re business is big enough to have the budgets needed to secure agency support. But what of the small business?

To be honest the same rules apply. Apply creativity and science in equal measure and you won’t go far wrong. This can be easier said than done. As individuals, we tend to rely on either the left side or the right side of our brains. Getting the two firing simultaneously can be hard.

Left Brainers

For those left brainers, like me, who love order and structure – force yourself to be creative, particularly when it comes to understanding your customers. Try and live a day in your customer’s shoes. Go where they go, see what they see, try and think how they think. This is an exercise in empathy that can unlock some of the mysteries of your customer’s emotional triggers – and knowing this stuff is what really powerful marketing is made of.

If you’re a desk jockey who likes detail, try to spot when you’re stuck in the planning rut. Force yourself to make some instinctive decisions quickly. (Instincts are the sum total of our life’s experience, so they’re great for the fast and dirty marketing that seems to be the hallmark of many great entrepreneurs). If this gives you the collywobbles, take your instinctive ideas and get out and run them by some of your customers. (Go on, get out from behind that desk!!).

Right Brainers

If you’re an innovator and creator, liable to go off on a tangent and a whim, as and when it takes you, I’d recommend nothing more complicated than writing down some objectives and putting a date in your diary to check progress against them.

Being a freestyler is great, but a lot of businesses hit the rocks by losing focus, not having a clear raison d’être. Be opportunist, fine. Be creative, great. But be consistent and single minded enough to have a clear proposition that your customers can cling on to. The most creative and successful entrepreneurs I know, give their ideas free reign, but instinctively keep their overall direction in check …

No Brainer

Great marketing is creative AND scientific. It’s a no-brainer. Embrace the debate. Have a debate about your customers, WITH your customers. Use a rule – if it works for you. Break a rule, if you think it’ll get a result. Be aware of your personal patterns and habits. Mix it up. And whatever you do, don’t forget to have fun with it.

March 23rd saw Under The Radar‘s ‘Why Office 2.0 matters’ event in Silicon Valley. The organisation exists to spot and encourage early stage innovation through its conferences and its blog. And few things are more early stage right now than Office 2.0.

Yes, the 2.0 moniker is tiresome, but it’s a useful way to differentiate applications that run on the web as opposed to any particular operating system. They are highly interactive, just like a desktop program but many of them allow people to collaborate within the software. The applications are usually delivered from a hosted service, but some are provided as an application running on a company server or as an appliance.

The Under The Radar judges and the audience both voted ConceptShare the winner in the ‘web sharing’ category. As the name suggests, it offers a workspace in which various people can share the development of, erm, concepts. Well, to be precise, visual concepts. And it is good.

Anyone who supplies or buys design services can benefit. It allows everyone involved to mark up or comment on designs from their web-connected computer. If they happen to be online at the same time, they can also participate in an instant message chat. Imagine the meetings, laborious email exchanges or motorcycle courier expenses than can be avoided by this simple mechanism.

Multiple comments and markups can be applied to each page, or each part of the design. Using forward and backward arrows or scrolling through a list, you can see who’s said what and how they’ve scribbled on the work. Because this stuff is in layers, they neither clash with each other nor affect the underlying design.

Here’s a bit of one of my experiments:

You will probably see my crudely drawn red line, this is associated with the post-it like comment box below. These boxes can be placed anywhere on the design. There are a few controls, including zoom, which is useful for fine-grained mark ups. At the foot of the image, you can see a couple of entries in the audit trail/instant message area.

The service is free to try for a single workspace. You can change the project within the workspace as much as you like. Or you can start paying, depending on number of workspaces, number of account managers, workspaces and storage. Security is higher for the paid service and, at the upper levels, your own site branding can be used. Monthly fees range from $19 to $199.