Northy’s Inventor Mantras: Beware the ‘not invented here’ syndrome

Over the Christmas break, the BBC ran a feature on hot toys for Christmas and what our inventor division of Wow! Stuff, Wow! Labs, was working on for the future.

You can see the edited piece here:

If there’s an inventors mantra in this clip (besides the obvious use of publicity for your products) then I guess it centres around where product ideas, concepts and inventions come from.

In our case, my fellow founder Dr. Graeme Taylor and I created the Wow! Labs business when we acquired another company.

We felt we could work hand in hand with some amazing scientists, and now fellow directors, with a view to merging our ideas and theirs to build something better than we both could achieve alone.

This week’s inventor mantra:

• Beware the ‘not invented here’ syndrome. You can often partner someone else’s ideas with your own to create something better!