Got a $1M Idea?

These ordinary people think they do. Could your brainstorm be the next big thing?

Really, Bright Ideas

What do a 64-year-old grandmother, a married couple with two small children, and a single mom with a bored daughter have in common?

Really bright ideas.

But what sets these ordinary folks apart from others who’ve had that “Aha!” moment is that they’re turning their inspirations into cash.

About four years ago, Maria Pistiolis saw a way to solve a problem. Her daughter, Voula, was planning to fly with her three-month-old to see her in-laws in Boston. Maria, a seamstress who’d come to America from Greece more than 40 years earlier, wanted to make it easier for her daughter to carry the sleeping infant while wheeling a suitcase. Ten days later, she’d made an all-in-one diaper bag with a bassinet/changing table that did the job.

Voula—and the airplane passengers—adored the bag. Maria’s regular customers in her hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, urged her to put it on the market. After much hand-wringing, Maria and her husband, Mike, took out a loan to pay a lawyer to file an application for a provisional patent, a big sacrifice for grandparents on a limited income. The Pistiolises then sent letters to companies that make diaper bags to gauge interest in Maria’s creation. None responded.

About a year later, Maria decided to improve the bag. That’s when she heard about Enventys, a Charlotte-based company that helps inventors— from start-ups to global Fortune 500 companies—develop products and ideas. To Maria and Mike’s surprise, the president of Enventys, Todd Stancombe, agreed to a meeting.

“I knew the inconvenience of dragging a baby carrier all over,” says Todd, father of three. But when he reviewed Maria’s patent application, he discovered a big problem. A provisional application like the one she submitted gives an inventor a year to fine-tune a product and file for a utility patent, which grants the exclusive right to make and sell the invention in the United States for 20 years. Maria’s deadline ran out at midnight that very day. If her application expired, she could lose her chance to get the bag manufactured and into the marketplace.

Todd explained the situation to the stunned couple and offered to help.

“I told them, ‘I don’t know why I trust you, but I trust you,’” Maria says in her Greek lilt, explaining why she turned over her brainchild. After the firm helped assemble materials for a patent application, an attorney sped to get it stamped before the midnight deadline. He made it.

Maria had no idea that Enventys is part owner of Bouncing Brain, a television company that was preparing to launch a show called Everyday Edisons for PBS. They were scouting the country for smart ideas they could turn into actual products on the market, and would document every stage of the process for broadcast. Maria was in.

But the bag needed tweaks. Enventys’s lead designer, Daniel Bizzell, created a laptop-friendly compartment and a space for the bassinet to slide in easily. They named it Korbie (Korb is German for “basket”). Since then, the show’s marketing team has placed it on amazon.com and in Belk Department Stores and created a Korbie website.

Taking a Chance

Maria gets 10 percent of what Bouncing Brain receives, retail or wholesale, for each Korbie sold (Bouncing Brain gets the rest plus full ownership of the product as part of its standard arrangement with the inventors). As long as Korbies sell, Maria gets paid for 20 years. Korbies can go for $179.99 a pop retail, so Maria’s profits could soar. She says any money from the sales will fund the education of her ten grandkids—and, maybe, a beach house.

Prospective inventors usually strut their stuff at one of the regional casting calls held by Bouncing Brain. The judges for Everyday Edisons are open to any idea, whether it’s presented as a notebook drawing or a fully realized prototype. After reviewing some 15,000 ideas from around the country, the Bouncing Brain folks are hard to impress. The most promising concepts are reviewed by Enventys to determine which ones are patent-worthy and whether there’s a market for them. Finally, Bouncing Brain chooses the absolute cream of the crop for the show, less than 1 percent of all the ideas presented.

Brad and Melinda Shepard say if they’d known their odds at the time, they probably never would’ve made the four-hour drive (with two young kids) from their home in Wilmington, North Carolina, to a casting call in Columbia, South Carolina. But they were eager to unveil their creation: a spill-resistant bowl, inspired several years earlier by their messy son, Aidan, then two. Melinda had told Brad she’d dreamed of a bowl that automatically covered the food inside whenever it was tipped. An engineer and inveterate tinkerer, he designed and built such a container. It consisted of two bowls, actually, which rotated on two axes; when tipped, one bowl would gyrate to cover the other.

The Shepards worried that the judges would laugh at their idea. “We expected to be humiliated, like on American Idol,” Melinda says.

At the casting call, attended by more than a thousand, the Shepards had just a few minutes to demonstrate their bowl. The screeners not only treated them kindly but also liked their invention—and asked them to show it again in front of cameras. When the couple learned they’d been selected for the show, they discovered that to get a single Everyday Edisons idea off the ground, the show invests $300,000 to $500,000 (not including production costs for the show) and an average of 1,700 man-hours. “The inventor pays absolutely nothing beyond what they may have spent prior to being accepted for the show,” says Matt Spangard, operations manager for Bouncing Brain. “By assuming the costs of producing the show and the products, we hope to earn a return eventually.”

While the Shepards waited in Wilmington, Enventys faced a snag: When tested among toddlers, one bowl would swivel to cover the other as designed, but “the kids grabbed the bowl while it was open, making the product absolutely useless,” says Ian Kovacevich, Enventys’s head engineer. Back at the drawing board, the Enventys team attached a rim with cutout handles—flying-saucer style—around the bowl. It worked. “The kids grabbed the handles every time,” says Ian.

Bouncing Brain asked Brad and Melinda to come to Charlotte for what the couple thought would be a day of market research. They wound up in a Bed Bath & Beyond, where they were surprised to see their bowl, now named the Loopa, already on the store’s shelves. They were also told their product would be distributed, fingers crossed, in all the Bed Bath & Beyond stores nationwide.

“Early on, we asked ourselves if we should make and market the bowl on our own,” says Melinda, who has an MBA. “Knowing now what it takes, if we had tried, we’d be broke, maybe divorced.” Instead, the Shepards have gained confidence to pursue other ideas. Says Brad, “We have a lot of concepts for new juvenile products!”

Getting It Out There

When Wendy Hampton, a single mom from Lawrenceville, Georgia, heard about the Everyday Edisons casting call at the nearby PBS station, she decided to go. Years earlier, her ten-year-old daughter, Taylor, announced she was bored, so mother and daughter decided to invent a board game.

“I thought it would be fun to make a game based on idioms, those everyday sayings where the real meaning is different from the literal one, like ‘knock yourself out.’” Wendy says. The game soon became a semi-obsession. Wendy worked on it for the next three years, often getting up in the middle of the night to search for idioms. All told, she collected around 2,500.

The judges thought Wendy’s game was original. “But we had to figure out why people would buy it,” says Louis Foreman, CEO of Enventys.

That meant putting Enventys’s creative team to work. They added options—drawing, acting, spelling out the phrases hangman-style—to describe the idioms.

Finding a fun name for the game was crucial. The creative team smashed befuddled and idiom together, and Befudiom was born. The game also needed to pop as customers scanned the shelves. Art director Jason Gammon turned common idioms such as “kick the bucket” and “holy cow” into cartoon-like characters for the box’s multicolored design. “Face it, a cow in religious clothing is just plain funny,” Jason says.

The name, the game and the fresh design worked. Dictionary powerhouse Merriam-Webster loved Befudiom and lent its logo and expertise to the project. Befudiom fever caught on as retailers snapped it up.

Wendy will begin receiving royalties in another year, but money is only part of it. “My daughter and I created this together,” she says, “and now it might become something that brings families together.” To Wendy, that would be the ultimate payback.

Turn Your Bright Idea into Big $$$
1. Find out if anyone has a claim to the idea. Do a quick Google or Yahoo search, and check the website of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Look on gadget sites like SkyMall, Brookstone and Hammacher Schlemmer to see if they have anything similar.

2. Research your invention’s viability. Who’s going to buy it and use it? How much would the product cost to make, and how much should you charge? You can begin to get answers by conducting informal focus groups on playgrounds, in malls and in stores that would sell your product.

3. Protect your invention with a patent. Typically, a provisional patent application, good for one year, will cost around $3,000 (including attorney fees) and $15,000 to $20,000 on average for a utility patent, which lasts for approximately 20 years from the filing date. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office holds free seminars across the country for inventors and small businesses on safeguarding your intellectual property. For more information, go to uspto.gov/web/offices/com/iip/index.htm.

4. Beware the helping hand. Before using a firm that promotes inventions, check on its reputation with the local Better Business Bureau or bureau of consumer affairs before signing on. “Inventors are exploited at an alarming rate,” says Enventys CEO Louis Foreman. Don’t be one of them.