PHOTO: IAN KELTIE

Invention is Doug Hall’s life. In his teens he created and sold magic and juggling kits, and today he is familiar to millions of viewers in the United States as an acerbic judge on the reality TV show “American Inventor”—think “American Idol” but with struggling inventors instead of wannabe pop stars—which recently ended its first season. But in between his teen hustle and his stint on TV, Hall established himself as an innovation guru and in 1990 founded the Eureka! Ranch, in Cincinnati.

Eureka! Ranch works with companies to develop new products, and it counts such major corporations as Ford Motor Co. and Johnson & Johnson among its clients. While the ranch refuses to discuss specific products that it has helped develop, it claims that the average U.S. home uses 18 products or services either invented or improved by its employees. Hall has also authored the Jump Start series of books, aimed at innovators. IEEE Spectrum Senior Associate Editor Stephen Cass talked with Hall about what it takes to stay on top of the invention game.

After your teenage entrepreneurship, you got a chemical engineering degree. How did you go from there to helping blue-chip companies be more creative?

I worked for Procter & Gamble as an engineer for a summer and realized that pulp digesters were not my future! I got into the company’s brand management group, and I worked there for 10 years. My technical degree was a huge help, because I could serve as an interface between the production people and the sales and marketing people. As a result, I ended up creating the Procter & Gamble Invention Team, where we did product development, packaging, and market positioning all at the same time. So I ended up becoming an inventor—not just of products but of marketing ideas, too, because often marketing ideas have consequence for the product and the brand.

What should engineers developing products know about marketing?

There are three laws of what I call marketing physics, three things that matter. The first is “overt benefit,” which, in a consumer’s words, is “What’s in it for me?” The second is “real reason to believe,” which translates to “Why should I believe you?” And the third is “dramatic difference,” or “Why should I care?” The classic mistake that engineers make is to talk about features, not benefits. Engineers will talk about the technology and assume that people will know why it’s important and believe that it works. But it doesn’t work that way. The job of marketing is to communicate the wonders of the product or service in a way that consumers can understand. It’s not very difficult—it’s trivial compared to the technology stuff. But inventors need to have absolute clarity about what their message is: what’s the benefit, what’s the reason to believe, what’s the dramatic difference. And if you’re not dramatically different, give it up. You have a commodity, and you’re going to sell it for commodity prices.

What else trips up inventors?

Lack of flexibility—you’ve got to be flexible, got to be willing to see a flaw and fix it. Lack of honesty, too—you’ve got to have some people who are willing to tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because people get into delusion land. I saw it on “American Inventor,” and you can see in corporate offices where you talk to somebody—they’ve been working on a project for nine months—and you shake your head because they’re obviously wasting their time. But they can’t see it. To use the classic phrase, “You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them.”