Richard Donat, CEO of the consumer products company AbsolutelyNew, wants to democratize the marketplace.
AbsolutelyNew started out as a marketing services company, but according to Donat, it transformed after he saw that many inventors were being faced with a lot of difficulty finding a means to get their innovations into the marketplace and in front of consumers.
“We found that individual inventors didn’t have that opportunity from big companies,” Donat said. “A company like Wal-Mart doesn’t want to buy products from an inventor.”
For Donat, starting a company that catered to these inventors, who are often pigeonholed by larger companies as “single-product vendors,” wasn’t an act of charity but what he saw as a big business opportunity.
“I saw an opportunity to have the inventor market as a platform to launch many different businesses. I can sit and think of many different ways to get inventors into the marketplace,” he said.
Photo by Jason Steinberg.
Bringing New Products To Market
April 25, 2008 by Rich | 6 Comments
In Creativity, Ideas, Innovation
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Hugh Barton on April 26th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Inventors are one of the world’s greatest assets.
Some big companies are blinded by too much desire for profit. What they don’t know is that they’re missing a lot of bigger opportunities for innovation and unadulterated service by not considering an ‘inventors market’.
Bill Potter on April 26th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
I commend Mr. Donat for this excellent idea.
Now i can sell my crazy inventions for the price its worth.
Rina Phillips on April 26th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
This CEO should provide long term relationships with his inventors. That’s one of the best things he can do.
Tyra king on April 27th, 2008 at 12:39 am
I googled ‘Richard Donat’ turns out that he worked for Apple and Ford which are big companies of course.
Maybe he noticed that inventors were being treated the way they’re not supposed to be so he decided to leave the company and make these inventors worth his time to pioneer what he called an inventors platform.
curt on April 27th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
In most cases inventors are wonderful inventors but not good businessmen, and if somebody merges both in an appropriate way, that’s surely recipe for success.
Melissa Klum on April 28th, 2008 at 5:00 am
People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.