Think outside the Box (and your wallet)

You are an inventor, you have a great idea for a new piece of technology but you don’t have the resources to properly explore your ideas and bring them to fruition. You don’t have any great amount of disposable income and there is no one willing to back you. You don’t want to do a half hearted job as you’re worried that if you don’t get it right first time, then you will have lost your chance and your dreams will be over.

What makes the whole situation worse is that the few people you have told about your idea have been really positive, you’ve approached a few potential investors and they’ve all mentioned the ‘potential’ which your idea has but none of them have been willing to hand over any cold hard cash to actually help you get off the ground and take the time to truly develop your idea to the best of its potential. Until very recently, this was an all too common situation. Major technological developments would need serious investment in order to actually enable those with the ideas to try out and test what it is that they are working on. What then, has changed? Firstly, with technology becoming increasingly virtual and less physical the requirements to have large laboratories in which to develop and test products are no longer needed. Secondly, some of the most financially valuable names in digital technology were quite literally developed in the bedrooms of the creators. It is now not uncommon for companies to only have a handful of employees but generate a major annual turnover, occasionally worth several million dollars or more.

A recent news story about the sale of one digital technology giant to another only came around because the creator of the former had been turned down for a job at the latter so he went away and developed the idea himself.

In some of our recent articles we have been looking at the changing face of technology in the 21st Century and how application development is having to react radically to an ever-evolving user environment.

Traditional methods of technological develop; from conception of an idea, through to the patenting, sourcing funding, development, testing and finally the launch is no longer viable in a world which is dominated largely by instant reactions to new technology and an instantaneous decision is made by users on-mass about its usability and relevance to them.

As developers and innovators then, it is important to think outside the box. If you are reading this on a computer then you have in front of you the technology required to create the ‘next big app’ all you need to provide, is the idea!

Image Credits: © Ivelin Radkov - Fotolia.com