All entrepreneurs believe that their ideas and concepts can change the world, make them plenty of money. But many of them soon learn that conceptualising an idea and bringing it to life is not so straight forward.
Entrepreneurship has been identified as a solution that can assist in job creation but the challenges facing entrepreneurs are so many that many of their ideas never see the light of day.
Kgotso Molefe wrote to Your Money on Market Sense about a concept he believes could help in the event of death.
The death of his grandfather traumised a young Molefe and this pushed him to come up with a concept where he could declare death timeously.
“When my grandfather passed on we encountered a problem. We waited for a long time before a medic came to declare him deceased so that a parlour or an undertaker can remove him from the scene, so we just waited a long time. I saw that a lot of people are actually encountering this problem because weren’t the only in our street, there was another family who waited for 10 hours. I identified that this problem within the funeral industry that needs medical support, I could connect and run with it entrepreneurially.”
Armed with a potentially life saving idea, Molefe soon found that executing this idea was not going to be as easy as he imagined it would be. He courted some big companies with it hoping for a partnership but this relationship was not to be.
” You present your ideas to people who don’t want to sign non-disclosure agreements, it’s just something that we have to work with as a country. The ethical side of entrepreneurship and ideas and small business.”
Molefe believes sharing his concept with bigger players prejudiced him. And even though he had protected this idea, he ackowledges mistakes in how he protected it.
He says this may have opened him up to being taken advantage of.
“The concept was new to me, I patented it, it wasn’t the correct way to go about it of protecting a concept. Then I probed further and I trade marked the idea myself, I learned how to do it myself because the attorneys too steep for something that is this easy.”
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