Article by Tony Ellis. – Visit Tony’s website at www.conceptioneering.co.uk

This article follows on from part one and part two, if you haven’t read them yet you may want to go back and read them first.

Pitching our ideas to toy companies

When we develop new ideas/concepts, we then try to sell them into the toy companies in what amounts to a ‘Dragons Den’ type situation – in fact the similarities with the show is quite accurate.

The pitch is everything. Over the years I have done many (many) pitches, and still today get nervous, even with people that I have pitched to before a dozen times or more. Thankfully, my enthusiasm wins over my nerves – in my opinion there is nothing better than an inventors passion for what they believe in.

In the early days we were working blind – wondering if manufacturers would like our new concepts. We would pitch in hotel rooms in New York (during Toy Fairs) in a room with up to 10 people at a time, who would sit there blankly as we’d present them with our latest ideas. » Read the rest of the entry..

Article by Patrick Andrews – Visit Patrick’s website at http://iotd.patrickandrews.com

I’ve begun thinking about what I do that seems to make me inventive. Is it the half-bucket of espresso every morning or the temporal lobe seizures (might these be somehow related?)

500+ Ideas

I’ve gradually become aware, over the course of my last 500

(http://iotd.patrickandrews.com/2008/04/27/triggerings/) or so ideas, that there are several modes of thinking from which ideas for inventions emerge. I’ve tried to describe these elsewhere but I think it’s mostly to do with being able to see the world in a connected way.

As children, when we draw things, we seem to know that ‘m’ is the same as a seagull in flight. Only later, when we start to get formally educated, do we begin to divide the world into iconic representations: every hand must have five fingers, every face the standard number and layout of features. It’s why, I reckon, people stop being able to draw

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Article by Tony Ellis. – Visit Tony’s website at www.conceptioneering.co.uk

This article follows on from part one, if you haven’t read this yet go back and read that first.

Our inventions take off

When royalties started to come through, I quickly realised that I couldn’t do everything in the business myself, and my wife (Judie) agreed to join me to undertake the day to day running of company (Conceptioneering), which then freed me up to concentrate 100% on what I do best which is the development of new ideas/concepts.

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Article by Kim Babjak, Visit Kim’s website at http://www.kimcoaz.com

Find Your Hidden Millions by Overcoming Your Nay-Sayers

Imagine yourself on the CNBC show Big Idea with host Donny Deutsch saying  “Bite Me Charlotte” to millions of his viewers. Donny then fires the question, “Kim, how did you overcome your nay-sayer Charlotte to achieve great success?”

The answer starts when my family experienced a financial hardship and I needed to seek employment to get us through a rough patch.Without a formal education, I was forced to seek anything that had a paycheck.

That job came in the form of being the French fry girl at my local Mc Donald’s.After graduating up to the prestigious cashier position, my nay-sayer appeared one day. Her name was Charlotte, an old grade school mate of mine.

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Article by Tony Ellis. – Visit Tony’s website at www.conceptioneering.co.uk

To introduce myself, I have been a professional toy inventor now for around 8 years, and have so far licensed 43 toy, game and gift products. Some have become global brands like ‘Cube World’ (manufactured by Radica/Mattel) and which is currently on sale all over the World.

You can find out more about us via an interview we did for the BBC – Click here

Where and how did it all start?

Based in the UK, my background has always been in electronic engineering, having worked previously in avionics, security, car and truck alarms, biometrics and early GPS systems.

My hobby was robotics and, in the late 1990’s, I started developing a sophisticated robot that could almost think for itself. The robot became to be almost like a family pet – it had learning algorithms and was allowed free roaming around the house.

In early 2000, when a visitor saw it one day, he was insistent that I had to show it to a toy company he knew. I made the phone call and (unbelievably for this particular industry) got an appointment the very next day with a major UK toy company.

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