Nine Tips for the Second Industrial Revolution

--- Raymond Kurzweil

1. Create an Advertising Brochure for your idea. Hire professionals to make it as exciting and authoritative as possible. It will inspire you and your collaborators. It will attract potential customers and help you line up backers.

2. Let your Customers Invent It. If you've gotten good potential customers excited, they will get on board and work with you to redefine and refine the invention. Nothing can better assure that you'll have met customer needs.

3. Form Multi-Speciality Development Teams. Understand group processes that assure that a team without an understanding of human factors does not do final user interface design, for instance.

4. Cross-Assign Problems. Have an EE work on a linguistics problem while your linguistics expert tackles hand-eye coordination, for instance. Smart people put in unfamiliar situations often arrive at non-standard and marvelous solutions.

5. Learn from Failure. We generally learn nothing from our successes except that "it worked" and we can go on to another problem. Failures carry lessons, while success masks errors.

6. Design for Marketability. Understand what makes your product unique. If you donąt you wonąt be successful in sellling it.

7. Consider the Pace of Change. Don't bring to market a product whose market opportunity disappeared two months ago. Your product must make sense at the time it reaches the market. Technology and demand are ever-changing.

8. Introduce It Before It is Done. Get the customer hungry for your product. Head off competitorsą inferior ideas by having the market alerted to your plans.

9. Fantasize, fantasize and fantasize! Always have dreams and visions you'd love to know how to realize. Wrestle and conjure with them night and day. Some will inevitably sharpen and pathways to realization open.

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Raymond Kurzweil is one of America's most inventive engineer/entrepreneurs. He has invented and created successful companies to develop and market machines which synthesize human speech, read from ordinary books to the blind and recognize human speech. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has received honorary degrees from several universities, including Rensselaer in 1989.