brighthorizon started this topic @ 13:06 on 10/05/2007
Hi everyone,
Have any of you had any experience of working with a large internet company to develop an idea? The problem we have is that we know the idea works, (we have prototyped it), but as well as needing financial resources to take it to phase 2, our critical need is for the resources of a much larger company to support the technical development.
The problems with going to a company like Google are (1) who do you talk to and (2) even if you can get to the right person, what can you do to stop them just taking the idea themselves.
This is a real and very current problem, so any thoughts would be much appreciated... Thanks
------------------------
RE: working with Google
AstarothSolutions | 18/05/2007 01:56 PM
Patents, a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) signed before you tell them anything etc are all good but patents can be difficult to obtain and large corporations receive thousands of approachs a month and firstly they need to know what it is about to know the correct people to pass it to and then will want to know probably more than you are willing to disclose before they will decide if it is something they are interested in or not.
Also as a word of caution... make sure you have the scale of the thing correct!! When I worked for an insurance company in their strategy department I remember having a call from a bloke who had an idea for a new insurance product but wouldnt tell us anything about it until we had agreed to a 90:10 profit share plus £10,000 up front. When we said not acceptable he did point out that by his calculation it would be such a success it will be making £500,000 by the end of year 5 with only £10,000 for IT development.
Obviously not done his research as the company made nearly £1b profit a year so £0.5m really isnt worth the effort of a whole new product launch (and changing a letter costs £20,000 so not much IT for his £10k estimate)
------------------------
http://www.AstarothSolutions.com - Bespoke web development
http://www.AstarothImages.co.uk - Photography
http://www.AstarothSolutions.com/directory/directory.aspx - Free Directory Service
