Ever had a brilliant idea and thought it was worth millions?

Amanda Tatham asked Maxine Horn of British Design Innovation: “How do you bring designers’ vision and ideas to market?”

How many of us have been told by clients that we are too expensive; we agree to reduce our fees because we think we can get a nice job in our portfolio, let them off the hook, the project is a success (most often design is a big factor) and they walk off with the profits? Don’t do it. Be an entrepreneur.

Instead, broke a deal that shares the risks and rewards, like Maxine does. She says this can make the difference between being paid, say, £6,000 on a £20,000 job, which makes £250,000 profit over time. It’s painful when your design helps the project take off and the client pockets the proceeds at your expense. Maxine gave examples of this having actually happened.

For over 10 years, Maxine Horn has helped designers to profit from their ideas, and the likes of Proctor & Gamble to broker deals with designers. She brings together industrial, service, 3D, digital and brand designers with innovation professionals to nurture viable propositions and bring them into marketable reality.

In her conversation with Maxine, Amanda Tatham, a business-design consultant and co-founder of Designer Breakfasts, asked how the BDI model works. The interview format enabled Maxine to explain her big idea, in principle, and explore it so that design entrepreneurs in the audience could see the opportunities and ask questions.

First Amanda asked about terms like Knowledge Transfer, innovation professionals and soft intellectual property meant. To most people this is jargon.

One big idea is the Open Innovation Challenge, a unique ideas incubator. Imagine a safe imaginary space, a bubble in which you, a designer, can talk about your idea with other people who won’t run off with it. Here you can discuss the idea, test it, add expertise to it and find out if it likely to be a viable runner. Maxine says one simple observation can kill an idea and it can be something so simple you wonder why you didn’t think of it before. On the other hand, you can get the expertise to make it happen and future partners. If you are a product designer, co-operators may be technical specialists, academics at the forefront of new science, manufacturers, marketers and financial partners. The outcome can tell you whether the idea would work in principal and maybe you’d find the right people to develop it.

The propositions may, equally come from the creative scientist or entrepreneurial SME. The business model is to make money on a risk and reward basis. Maxine calls it propositions into profit.

To find out more about BDI go to http://www.britishdesigninnovation.org/