I talk to many Inventors during a years time and one of the questions that is always asked is where is the strangest place you have given a pitch? So, I thought I would ask that question back to the other Inventors here.
Here is my story. I developed a product called the “Super Sleever” while working for Westinghouse at a government owned nuclear facility called Savannah River Site. Westingouse ran the 200,000 acre facility as a subcontractor for the government. You can see the SuoerSleever device on my website and read more on it here http://www.p2pays.org/ref/14/13978.htm . It saved the company roughly 4 million a year in waste reduction. I had gone through the company’s IDEAs program and gotten the device patented. Westinghouse had their own onsite patent lawyer and development group. They had a policy that if you developed a product and it was licensed you got 25% of the royalties from all non-government sales. That was one draw back to the program. They were real big on pushing the device to all DOE sites nationwide and I even won the National DOE Pollution Prevention award. I was the only individual to win that award. Normally it was won by teams of engineers focusing on some research funded project. So, needless to say I was proud of my accomplishment, but was disappointed that it was not being pushed into the commercial world where I would get royalties on the sales.
The development group was supposed to find companies wanting to license the products they got patented, but wasn’t real decent at it. After 18 months of the development group not finding any interested companies I asked if I could give it a try. They were reluctant to let me since I was not a member of their staff, but after a lot of prodding they decided I could try if I notified them of any interested parties.
Two weeks after I started looking I found an interested company. I went to the development group and told them I had a meeting set up for the next day. They asked me who and where. They were stunned when I told them it was the VP of Product Development at Bartlett Nuclear and he was flying in from Massachusetts just to meet us.
The next day I went with a representative of the development group to meet the VP. We met in the lobby of his hotel and he asked where the product was located. I said it was in my car trunk in the parking garage. I told him I would get it and we could go to a meeting room inside the hotel for a demonstration. The VP said we could just do the demo at my car. So, here we are standing in a half lit parking deck as I am giving my pitch and showing how the device worked. I was concerned about doing the demo in the parking garage because the Super Sleever looks like a rocket launcher. All I could think about was some security guard watching us on a video camera thinking we were about to blow up the building. LOL
The demo took about 5 minutes. After the demo I was expecting and prepared for numerous questions. Instead I was pleasantly surprised when he looked at me and said “Can I get an exclusive license on this?”
We went back inside the hotel and dicussed terms on the license. As we were heading out of the parking deck the Development group representative said how he was amazed I could get all this done in two weeks when his department had worked on it for 18 months with no results. I told him it was because I wanted it more than they did and I am persistent.
Now, lets hear your story.
