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231 : THE IMPORTANCE OF DEVELOPING STRONG IDEAS

retuning the opportunity In his heartening and witty autobiography
Clock This, My Life as an Inventor,20 Trevor Baylis tells candidly of how
two years of ‘scorn and rejection’ from major manufacturers and
financial bodies brought him close to abandoning his quest to turn his
clockwork radio into reality. In desperation, he followed the advice of a
supportive contact within the BBC World Service and allowed the
clockwork radio concept to be televised on Tomorrow’s World. Luck
had it that businessman Christopher Staines saw the programme,
immediately contacted Baylis and, together with his South African
business partner Rory Stear, quickly joined forces with him.

Staines and Stear possessed the business know-how to turn the basic
underlying idea into a viable business proposition, including the ability
to address the financial audience in a fashion which Baylis by his own
admission could not. Crucially, they had an entrée to influential
investors whose faith and money set the project on its way.

In a sense, Staines and Stear took Baylis’s idea right back to the
opportunity-shaping step in order to initiate a new idea development
process. This fresh development process included market research
which overturned the initial assumption that the radio had to be
miniature; securing funds from the philanthropic arm of the Liberty
Life Group; re-engineering the entire radio mechanism to upgrade
almost every component and to improve the radio’s performance, so
that the sound was not distorted ‘into a mushy squall’ when the volume
was turned up; redesigning the radio’s exterior to give it customer
appeal; and establishing a factory in South Africa using disabled people
as a major part of the workforce.

anticipating objections The idea development process therefore

provides an excellent opportunity to identify upfront the various target
audiences and the different perspectives of their professional expertise
and to add the satisfaction of their likely objections to the various
screening criteria which you apply to your business ideas.

This anticipation of objections raised by the various gatekeepers is
likely to foster the creation of a much more viable, creative and
innovative idea. In addition, you will have the knowledge base from
which you can accurately assess and evaluate the advice they offer you.
It may be the case that the idea development process highlights that