When you look over the store shelves at all of the gadgets and gizmos that are on offer, it can be very easy for you to simply say, “I have an idea that’s just as good as any of these.” And it very well might be just as good as anything else out there. But you definitely need to be very careful when you start the process of putting together your own gadget. Contrary to popular belief, it is not just a matter of sketching out something on a cocktail napkin, turning it in to a company and receiving a massive royalty check for your “hard work.” By the time you have finished with the process of going from a simple idea through to a finished product that actually makes it onto the shelves of major stores, the term “hard work” will have long since shed its quote marks.
For one thing, if you are not very technically inclined, building your gadget yourself is probably out of the question. While inventing a new kind of cork screw might be easy enough to do at home in a basically realized sense, if you want to build a new kind of robot or portable techie toy, you have to be prepared to go extremely deep with it. You are going to have to find someone who will physically build it, sign a non-disclosure agreement with them, and then work to get your idea patented properly.
Keep in mind that this is an area where there are a lot of scam artists. In many cases, their contracts will actually say that they only guarantee promises that they make in writing- which means that the “director of new products” (which is just a fancy term for “closer”) that you talk to on the phone can promise you the Moon without incurring any kind of legal risk for doing so. Marketing companies are not the place to start at all.