During a recent flight on Southwest Airlines, one of their cocktail napkins caught my attention. “Southwest Airlines was born on a napkin in 1971.”
The design had a simple triangle with three pinpoints: Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. I have come up with so many ideas in my lifetime, but the ones that mean the most, I had to take the time to write them down. It was usually sketched on the closest thing I could find. Ideas, products and companies are crafted daily on a piece of scratch paper or cocktail napkin.
My latest idea: Needworking.com, my social media networking platform, came from just that. I was attending a Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses session on networking. I looked around the room and everyone had a need that others were trying to solve. I came up with the concept of needworking vs. networking process and started scribbling the basic premise of what the "Needworking Philosophy" was about. It all just started flowing like a grand symphony with sheet music.
Baltimore’s Orange Element, a marketing and branding firm, was crafted that way in 2002.
Aaron Moore, the founder of Orange Element, had conceived his idea on the back of several cocktail napkins at a bar in Burlington, Vermont called The Red Square.
He says he was interviewing for a brand position role with an agency that managed Burton Snowboards. Moore said this is how it played out:
"At that time, I thought it was going to be my dream job. After three interviews and being narrowed to a semi-finalist, I did not get the job. So my wife and I found a bar to have a sorrowful pint and figure out plan B. The business plan, identity and initial model was conceived as Orange Planet. And then we moved to Baltimore and learned of Planit, at which time a naming exercise and study revealed Orange Element, founded in 2003.”
All of this began on the back of napkins.
The Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" was supposedly conceived in the mid 1980’s during a brainstorm session at a bar. According to an article in The Atlantic, "Shark Week" Executive Producer Brooke Runnette stated that the idea behind this cult phenomenon, “was definitely scribbled down on the back of a cocktail napkin."
Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, also says he wrote "A Few Good Men," the play that would become his first movie, on cocktail napkins when he worked as a bartender at a Broadway theater during a production of "La Cage aux Folles. "
When you have that brainstorm idea, here are three things you should do to see if it’s a viable concept or name.
- Google the name or idea to see if it might exist and how your idea stands out from the competition
- Check to see if there is an appropriate domain name that you can get for the idea. I was shocked to see that Needworking.com was available and I snatched it up right at that moment while I continued to keep working on the idea.
- Check the U.S. Patent and Trademark office, USPTO.gov, to make sure your name or idea isn’t already protected. You should engage the help of a trademark attorney if you believe your concept or idea is available.
That Southwest Airlines cocktail napkin was a good reminder of how it all started and where it is now. Not all ideas come to fruition, but the true gift is the time you’ve spent exploring new ideas and then cementing that great idea in your brain — and eventually onto something that can be shared with others when the time is right.
David Carberry, the CEO of Baltimore's Enradius and Needworking.com, can be reached at dave@enradius.com.
