InventionLand Review
Invention Land, also known as Davison, is a company that promises to turn your great idea into a workable prototype. Find out how Invention Land works today in our review.
What is Invention Land?
Invention Land is a company that calls itself an “idea incubator”. Anyone can use the company’s website, InventionLand.com, to submit a product idea. Then, Invention Land will create a prototype of that product and search for a corporate licensee. If Invention Land can find a corporate licensee, then Invention Land will keep 10% to 20% of the royalties from sales of that product.
In a 2006 article, Forbes.com reported that Invention Land was launching 200 prototypes per month and was licensing a new product every three days.
The company launched in 2006 and, according to its Wikipedia article, currently employs 250 people. You can find the company at the following address:
585 Alpha Drive
Pittsburgh, PA 15238
The company refers to itself as Davison and Invention Land interchangeably. As you’ll learn below, the original “Davison” company attracted FTC attention throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, so it doesn’t have the best reputation online to this day.
Who Created Inventionland?
Invention Land was created by a guy named George McConnell Davison, who previously rose to fame for running Davison Design & Development, also known as Davison & Associates or simply “Davison”. While running that previous company, George Davison was ordered by the FTC to pay $26 million in consumer redress for “misrepresenting its services to inventors”.
Specifically, Davison was charging inventors high fees without delivering on the products he promised.
Davison has been working in the invention marketing industry since 1989, which is when he launched Davison Design & Development.
The FTC lawsuit arrived in 1997, when Davison was one of 11 companies caught in an FTC investigation called Project Mousetrap. Project Mousetrap was specifically designed to protect investors against invention promotion scams.
Today, the Invention Land company is headquartered in a unique building called Inventionland, which is a 61,000 square foot facility that consists of 16 themed rooms (like a pirate ship, giant robot, and tree house). The company’s staff work within Inventionland to create everything from holiday products to pet products to hunting, sporting, fishing, and electronics products.
Can You Actually Make Money with InventionLand?
The reason Invention Land has been the target of FTC investigations is that it’s a company where the vast majority of customers never earn income through Invention Land’s services.
As part of the 2006 FTC investigation, Invention Land was forced to reveal the number of consumers in the last five years who have made more income in royalties or sales proceeds than they paid the company.
As of July 2, 2015, that number was 16 out of a total of 62,000 applicants who had signed a pre-development agreement with Invention Land. Davison displays that number on its site here.
Keep in mind that each of the 62,000 applicants actually signed a pre-development agreement with Invention Land. That 62,000 figure doesn’t take into account the total number of applicants who submitted product ideas to Davison in some form or another (that total number is 875,336 according to Davison).
No matter how you slice up that number, your invention has a very low chance of experiencing success with Davison.
The 2006 Forbes article found similar numbers:
“37,000 or so people have contracted Davison Design’s services in the last five years; but only eight of those who have signed up have realized royalties exceeding their fees to Davison. If those odds aren’t discouraging enough, consider this from a document the Pennsylvania federal judge ordered sent to inventors: As of late October, only 0.001% of Davison’s revenue was derived from royalties paid on licensed products. Assuming the company doesn’t have trouble with decimal points, the royalty business provides Davison $250 a year in sales.”
What does that mean? It means the vast majority of the company’s earnings come from fees paid by inventors. The company does not earn a significant amount of income from royalties on products it developed. So even when customers have earned back their Davison fees, none of those products have been wildly successful.
The Inventionland Process
Invention Land uses a seven step process to bring products to market for its customers. That seven step process includes:
-Research
-Design
-Prototyping
-Packaging
-Licensing
-Manufacturing
-Patenting
You can read a detailed breakdown of Invention Land’s process here.
The Inventionland building itself is filled with all sorts of different manufacturing facilities. At the InventionLand.com website, the company advertises all of the following facilities:
-Cut Hut
-Mold Shop
-Paint Shop
-Laser Shop
-Metal Shop
-Model Shop
-Rapid Prototype Shop
-Textile Facility
-Wood Shop
-Electronics
-Video Production
Together, these shops keep your product rolling through the production cycle from the early stages of prototyping to the final stages of marketing it to potential licensees.
How Much Does Invention Land Cost?
Invention Land doesn’t have a fixed pricing scheme. Instead, the cost of marketing an invention varies widely from invention to invention. In their 2006 article, Forbes claimed that the company’s invention fees ranged from $800 to $12,000 in total.
You can submit your idea to Invention Land using the secure online form here: https://secure.inventionland.com/submit_idea/index.php?source_id=1169
That online form simply asks for your idea name and idea description. After submitting your idea, the company will contact you within 3 to 5 business days to give you a free consultation about your idea. At this point, you can begin to discuss the amount of fees the company would charge to create your invention.
Conclusion: Who Should Work with InventionLand?
The invention promotion industry has a fundamental flaw: the vast majority of inventions are bad inventions that will never make it to market. Nevertheless, these companies still treat every invention as if it could be the next big thing.
These companies always hope for a “home run” product – something that will earn huge royalties for both the company and the consumer. Nevertheless, these home run products are few and far between. Thus, the companies must charge inventors high fees to recoup the anticipated costs of failure.
The pessimist would point to numbers like the fact that 0.001% of Davison’s revenue is derived from royalties paid on licensed products, which means that very few products ever market it to market.
The optimist would say that Davison and Invention Land is doing everything right: it just needs the right product to start earning huge royalties for the company.
Nevertheless, the fact that only 16 people out of 62,000 applicants have earned a positive ROI from Invention Land in the last 5 years is damning. Making matters worse is that few of those 16 people have made much profit beyond their initial Invention Land fees. With Invention Land, your invention has a chance of success dangerously close to 0%.
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