What's a 'product life cycle'?
A product life cycle really starts in an incubation period, where you're really crafting the idea, where you're taking the idea and you're fleshing out prototypes, and you're working on your product design, material selection, and patents. After the incubation period, when you actually sell the product, that's called the product birth. So the first time you sell a product, the first sale -- and it can't be to a friend or family, you have to someone who is into the product -- we call that the birth. From the birth until about age five, all you're doing is learning the customer, learning how to make it, finding a better way to package it, communicating it. The second stage, after birth to first five years, is what we call the developmental stage. That's where you're working negotiations, licenses, distribution, and out. Your third phase, we call that the adolescent phase, where the product is integrated, it gets a little off-track, it gets a little sideways, quality starts to become an issue. The last final phase is what we call consumer integration phase, where if you've done your job correctly, as an inventor, anybody that could use the product and benefit from it, saving time and money, has adopted it and used it.
