A
Anonymous
Guest
Sean, I don't know anything about securities law in the UK, but in the United States, the offering of securities is tightly regulated. I would recommend you get some legal advice, if you have not yet done so, before offering shares for sale, as doing it in the wrong way could bring a lot of grief.
It's very hard to sell ideas to an existing company. Many companies won't even talk to independent inventors. There are a number of reasons for this, some smart and some not, but mostly the former.
I gather that the intellectual property you're trying to sell is not just one easily described thing, but a whole pile of technology. Very few companies would be willing to sign a NDA on such a proposal. It creates a huge internal problem for them, having to document everything they are doing or have done in the past, in a way that would stand up in court if there were ever a dispute over priority. And, it effectively puts you in ownership of whatever ideas their in-house engineers might have come up with anyway, similar to your own. Which, of course, they are betting their engineers probably will. Their cost just to take a peek at your IP is enormous. It's usually their perception that there isn't much likelihood that a contract resulting from that peek would include enough profit to make the gamble worthwhile.
Regarding cost, if what you're proposing involves new mechanical tooling, new searchcoils, new software, and heavy duty high performance technology, the works, all-new, I'd put the development cost closer to US$500,000 for an already-existing company. This is a matter I've had to think through on my own prospective projects. Might be able to do it for $250,000 if the company takes a lot of unpleasant shortcuts.
--Dave J.
It's very hard to sell ideas to an existing company. Many companies won't even talk to independent inventors. There are a number of reasons for this, some smart and some not, but mostly the former.
I gather that the intellectual property you're trying to sell is not just one easily described thing, but a whole pile of technology. Very few companies would be willing to sign a NDA on such a proposal. It creates a huge internal problem for them, having to document everything they are doing or have done in the past, in a way that would stand up in court if there were ever a dispute over priority. And, it effectively puts you in ownership of whatever ideas their in-house engineers might have come up with anyway, similar to your own. Which, of course, they are betting their engineers probably will. Their cost just to take a peek at your IP is enormous. It's usually their perception that there isn't much likelihood that a contract resulting from that peek would include enough profit to make the gamble worthwhile.
Regarding cost, if what you're proposing involves new mechanical tooling, new searchcoils, new software, and heavy duty high performance technology, the works, all-new, I'd put the development cost closer to US$500,000 for an already-existing company. This is a matter I've had to think through on my own prospective projects. Might be able to do it for $250,000 if the company takes a lot of unpleasant shortcuts.
--Dave J.
