About the session

Choose Healthy Acorns if the goal is to grow a Giant Oak

As a sole inventor, do as much as you can to increase IP and enterprise value; and you indeed can, given the resources now available in the digital world.

This presentation is a narration of my personal experiences in building a global company for a one-of-a-kind home and industry safety product to protect people and pets from out of the line of sight hazards like open dishwasher doors. The dishwasher application alone has a global market with a huge TAM of over 350M globally and 85M in the US home markets alone. The aspects I like to touch on will be: (a) Key aspects of product design to make it agnostic to brand and size so that one does not limit the market and not be dependent on manufacturers only; (b) the need for expert designers and how to get and manage them at reasonable cost; (c) how to leverage available sources on the web for market research and segmentation; (d) incorporation of AI in specific enhancements of the product in a way to meet practical needs and constraints of the application and at the same time fend off future competition. I expect this presentation to be of value, as a specific case example, to individual inventors and entrepreneurs with limited resources and help them particularly in identifying and managing things they can control to increase enterprise value before seeking external funding, licensing opportunities, or a sale. The presentation will also include a two minute video of the working of a prototype.

What you will take away

• Design a product so brand or size constraints do not unnecessarily limit the addressable market.
• Use expert design, web-based market research, and segmentation deliberately when resources are limited.
• Increase intellectual-property and enterprise value before pursuing outside funding, licensing, or a sale.

About the speaker

About “Ram”

Vaidyanathan Ramaswami, or “Ram,” has an M.Sc (Statistics) Univ. of Madras, India; M.S., Ph.D. (Operations Research)-Purdue; Distinguished Science Alumnus of Purdue University; Over 75 published journal articles and co-author of the book titled ‘Matrix Analytic Methods in Stochastic Modeling’; Serial inventor with over 10 patents related to several areas like telecom, digital communications, video distribution over the Internet. Previously Chief Scientist at Bell Communications Research. Founder, Suraksha Innovations Corporation specializing in safety devices, and also a (stealth) SaaS platform startup to increase productivity in organizations of all sizes and government for collaborations avoiding wasted time and resources in meetings.