Inventors have a huge issue of letting go of their baby. It is so bad that most Inventors end up ruining their chances of success because they just can’t let go. Until you can see inventions as “things” you will never feel confident when others have your “Baby” in their arms – and the “I’m married to my idea” syndrome doesn’t help either. Being emotionally attached to your idea causes you to second guess everything you do or decision you make to the point you hinder your progress more than help it.
I have seen companies drop an Inventor with a great product just because they can’t deal with the Inventor’s insecurities. The Inventor would not stop bugging them about the changes they made in the design to make the product more marketable. The inventor felt the changes were insulting to their original design.
In one case the company dropped the product 4 weeks before it was supposed to go into production.
The Inventor was stunned. They simply could not understand why the company pulled out. After showing me the letter the company sent, it was clear. The letter plainly stated the reason they dropped the product was the inventor’s difficulty to adapt to the new design elements the company felt (in their experience) were critical to the commercial success of the product. And let’s not forget the company licensed the product form the Inventor, which means they have the right to change the product if they see if to make it fit their target market.
I tried several times to explain what happened and all the inventor could grasp was the company was stupid for dropping it. In the end they never did realize it was their behavior that caused the company to turn away – and because of that, it’s unlikely they ever changed their behavior.
In a perfect world your product would look exactly like you envisioned it, consumers would flock to it in droves and buy every one of them off the shelf. In the real world the rest of us have to deal with this happens very rarely. Most of the time there are revisions, material changes, packaging changes, design changes, name changes, it happens. If these changes are something you absolutely can’t deal with you need to produce and sell the product yourself. Because in the licensing world change happens.