Monetising your Idea

Monetising reflects what for some is the final step in their idea commercialisation journey, for others it is just another milestone along the way. Monetising refers to the point where your idea returns an income to its creator. There are three broad strategies for achieving this:

Trade Sale 

A trade sale is an straight sale of your idea and related intellectual property. This can occur at various stages in the commercialisation process, from right at the start to just before a product is ready to hit the market. Exiting via a sale has different pros and cons at the various stages.

Licence 

You can develop your idea to a sufficient point that it is proven, and attempt to licence the idea to an established company. This is a model widely adopted in the consumables and packaging industry for example. A licence can be structured in different ways, but can return an ongoing royalty to the idea creator.

Manufacture 

This model broadly means that you manufacture and sell the product yourself. Typically you will have received investment by this point, so you have the capital to manufacture your product in scale and have developed the relationships to sell it to market. This is possibly the most difficult path, but may provide the greatest rewards.