It’s already happening - the individual Innovator (capitalized to show it’s “proper” place - at least in this blog) is coming.  Our new B2B Marketplace for Commercializing Innovation has only been up for a little while (with no marketing yet) and we are seeing a steady flow of inquiries from individuals (around the globe) wishing to share, market or license their innovations to an appropriate implementer.

I am excited to see those persistent Inventors continue to look for ways to get their inventions to market.

My first global inquiry was from a group of 4 developers within an R&D Lab at a top petrochemical company in Saudi Arabia.  I’ll spare the name to protect the team (seems bizarre to think that, but you never know-they somehow found us…).  Suffice it to say their employer would hit the F500 deep within the top 100 based on revenues.  They wanted to know if we would represent the individual inventor.  They described a software innovation they had been working on “in their spare time.” and made it clear they did not represent their current company.

My sales instincts to this inquiry are “absolutely!”; however, we want to be smart about our focus and sparce resources. We are focused mainly on the F1000 and the Top 200 Universities.  It isn’t an exclusive approach;  it’s just a small company willing to stay disciplined with a specific target audience for now.  That said, we anticipated this exact type of inflow and our technology platform does account for this eventuality.  I call it architecting for the Fortune One Million.  If we’re right it may actually be the Fortune 10 million.  The Innovation flow across all disciplines is endless.

Another new friend approached us from India and made an inquiry about an IDE for gaming he is working on (outside of his day job), but it wouldn’t be done until early 2009; he wanted to be prepared.  A week later he pinged me back and said he’d finished another desktop application and wanted to go ahead and publish it on our marketplace in search of a licensing partner.

Regardless, I am going to work even harder to hurry our programs and platforms for these indivduals.  Stanford grads and Silicon Valley don’t need to have the corner on the next “Google”.  The treasure hunter, Kid-on-Christmas-Eve in me needs to get a look at all this innovation right away!

And personally, I’ d love to see more than oil pouring out of Saudi Arabia.

Tom