Word: mousetrap
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Robert Dalias was convinced he had a better mousetrap--a new kind of switching device that U.S. telephone companies seemed eager to buy from his start-up company, WaveSmith Networks. But as the telecom crash washed over his customers and prospects, one after another canceled or postponed orders. His venture-capital investors started making nervous noises. So Dalias looked abroad for help. Despite having a meager track record and no multinational distribution channels, the CEO landed his first big sale, to NetOne Systems, a leading tech distributor and systems integrator based in Tokyo, and that success helped Dalias close...
...Dalias' story illustrates, getting an introduction from a well-connected financier, consultant or industry executive helps. Such a champion can entice a potential foreign buyer to visit your lab in the U.S. or accept a visit from you. But then you have to have that better mousetrap. "You need to have a niche-breaking product," stresses Ellenberger. Steven Domenikos, CEO and founder of Telegea, a software firm based in Waltham, Mass., has had success in Japan because his technology automates the service-fulfillment process for telecom companies, cutting their delivery costs more than...
Choice is good. We Americans consider it a measure of our freedom and a source of our innovation and prosperity. Riches flow to the person who builds a better mousetrap--or computer mouse. Yet a grocery shopper blankly staring at hundreds of varieties of toothpaste might reasonably conclude that there can be too much of a good thing. Mark Lepper, a psychology professor at Stanford, and Sheena Iyengar, an associate professor of management at Columbia, illustrated this point with a simple study. In a grocery store, they set up tasting booths that offered either six or 24 types...
...have built the better mousetrap--the world's best mousetrap, you think. But the world hasn't seemed to have got the message and isn't exactly beating a path to your door. What...
...many as 25,000 would-be inventors each year take the bait, and, quicker than you can say "rags to riches," find themselves caught in a very different kind of mousetrap. Consumer advocates, government regulators and industry experts say that virtually everyone who contacts these firms with dreams of riches will in fact end up poorer. The vast majority of these invention-promotion companies, the experts charge, are nothing but massive scams aimed at often naive and sometimes desperate backyard tinkerers, many of whom have more hope than business acumen. Even the companies that operate within the law rarely provide...