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The Edison Blueprint: 5 Steps to Bulletproof Your Business Startup Success
I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.”
-Thomas Edison
Awaken the Thomas Edison within!
Edison claimed that coming up with ideas for inventions is easy but its “the long laborious trouble of working them out and producing apparatus which is commercial” that requires the hard work. Edison Blueprint’s theory is based on YOU playing the central role in the production of goods & services and marketing them.
This post is aimed to hold your hand (almost) and walk you through the exact steps you must take to reach your first profitable idea, verify it and get the first sale even if you have no idea of any product or service that you can provide today.
Remember, this is as far as I can take you. It is your responsibility to take action on these steps. You have to do your own push-ups. I can’t do it for you.
Edison had proved that innovation could be regularized and placed in the format of mass production. His plan was not to create some large scale enterprises, but a focused creation process to bring consumer durable to the mass market.
On top of that, there are only FIVE THINGS you need to do to lay the proper foundation of your financial freedom through business start-up, the way Thomas Edison did it:
- Find the idea with potential for profit
- Test the idea, validate it
- Make the first sale
- Repeat 1, 2 & 3 if required
- Scale like crazy
Despite creating large projects such as introducing electricity, Edison concentrated majorly on small products with high-profit potential and low capital requirements; he planned to supply small items of commerce, “useful things that every man, woman, and the child wants.”
Edison’s whole business was based on the new products coming from his laboratory. In order to come up with things that every man, woman, and the child wants, he first finds what they want. He then heads to his lab, where a solution is developed. He then devises an assembly line for each new product and, if early sales were encouraging, quickly set up companies and built factories.
Edison’s every new product led to a new company and a new manufacturing facility wherever required. That's a business start-up for Edison.
But this was just the beginning, the key to his powerful empire was this: Speed of moving into new areas. Once a demand is met, and he verified the profitability of an idea, he moves to scale it with a speed which in today’s time is horrific for modern businessmen (and my colleague MBAs) who prefer years of preparation and market research before embarking on a new venture.
Edison originated a method of managing his research and product development activity and organizing a business enterprise around the flow of new ideas and products coming from the lab. Exactly what Apple is doing now and you should do too. I am not saying you should have patents too (its great if you have some, but you don’t really need them).
There had been little or no planning in the assembly of Edison’s business empire. He pursued the policy of expansion without regard to the overall development of the organization, forming new companies and building factories as the need arose.
He is quoted for saying that “I honestly believe that I can build up work in 15 to 20 years that will employ 10 to 15,000 men and yield 500 percent to stockholders.”
At the time of his death in 1931, his company, Thomas A. Edison Incorporated was returning an average yearly surplus of $7 million.