How can I sell my idea to a big corporation?

Though it may initially not make sense, corporations really don’t want to hear from you and they don’t want your ideas.

Yup. Sorry about that.

Why? Because imagine this scenario: you have a great idea for a different way to organize email, a way that’s far better than what we have now. You contact Google’s Gmail group and eagerly share with them what you’ve come up with. What you don’t know, however, is that they already have that idea and are busy implementing it in secret. Two weeks after your chat they release the new email organizational system and you say “Hey! You stole that from me!”

See the problem? If you’re part of the company then it’s different because your inventions and ideas are covered under your employment agreement, but if you’re just part of the general public, they have no claim or ownership of your invention, which makes things dangerous for them.

And there’s a second scenario that’s just as risky for a corporation: let’s say that you do approach them and they really like what you propose. Then they meet with Susan, and after with Bill and Chetan, and guess what? They’re pitching the very same idea. Who wins? And what stops them from claiming the company stole their idea?

There’s another factor at work here too, something that investors talk about all the time: ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s all about the implementation.

You can imagine suggesting your idea to a Yahoo and they realize it’s a good one, but will cost tens of millions to implement because what you propose actually isn’t very practical. If you were to implement it and have a so-called “production” version, however, then the picture changes because you’ve proven that it’s doable, and by a team that likely doesn’t have millions in resources.

Indeed, building a small company to create and deploy your idea, to turn the idea into a business, is really the only fruitful path, even though it’s a lot of work.

Turns out that these big corporations buy small startups all the time, often 50-100 companies each year, to get the intellectual property and the team. Not a week goes by that there’s not a story about a nimble startup with some great tech being acquired by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.

But that’s because they’ve put the work in to go from an idea to a business, a huge journey.

So don’t look for the online contacts, they’re not likely to do you much good. If you have a really groundbreaking idea, I instead encourage you to start exploring how to turn that idea into a startup business, then let your success be what gets you on the radar for one of these large corporations. And good luck!