For every business, in every industry and in every country, this is the 6-million-dollar question - what do people want? If a company were to have an accurate and satisfactory answer to that question that fit the majority of needs, then the practice of business would become blissfully easy. Simply choose your target audience, ascertain what they want and provide it at a price they can afford. Et voila - you would have a very successful business.

Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately, depending on your perspective!) humans are a great deal more complex than such a simple philosophy would suggest. Businesses all over the globe perform in-depth market research asking exactly this question and frequently discover that when they provide what people said they wanted, actually they don't want it at all. Or they wanted it for a while but now they want something different. This phenomenon has led to a theory that says that people don't really know what they want and has evolved into 3 basic product development models:

Frequently research your customer base and try to iterate fast enough to keep up with ever-evolving changes in demand ...or

Make a lot of products or services and hope some of them catch fire with your target audience ...or

Make a product that you think they should want and invest in the right kind of marketing to ensure that they will want what you're making.

None of these models for the creation and continuing development of products and services come anywhere close to the RightHub ethos and goals. For us, building tools and services are centred around bringing people together to make a difference in the world - specifically as it relates to all aspects of the IP industry. So, the core question remains: What do IP professionals really want?

Rather more recent research from more of a mindfulness perspective than a strictly business one suggests that people want 'experiences' more than they want 'things’. More to the point, they want to experience a feeling of something and sometimes the 'thing' is simply the mechanism by which that feeling is generated.

This model of thinking makes a lot of sense in the wider context of the human experience. For example, if you asked people what they wanted, a huge number would cite money as being the thing that they most want. As an individual item, an amount of money is a simple enough thing to categorise but really, they want more than just that. Money represents many things but foremost amongst them is freedom.

Freedom from worry about bills. Freedom to choose the jobs that fulfill you as opposed to being compelled to take what is offered. Freedom to provide for your children and other family members. Freedom to travel, live, laugh and love! While money is certainly one of the most obvious contributors to a feeling of freedom or even security, it is far from being the only one.

RightHub was built, not as a 'product' that people should want but as an internal tool to create better communication, better collaboration with clients, better workflows, better processes and better checks and balances in the internal to-do list. It was built to give more control to IP professionals on both sides of the table. To grant freedom from trying to track communications and documents through an email inbox. To dramatically reduce the chances of something getting missed.

Or to filter it through a mindfulness perspective, the RightHub platform was built and continues to develop in the direction of increasing freedom, control and ultimately, peace of mind that everything is taken care of. What IP professionals ultimately want cannot truly be tied down or limited to a list of tools, features and attributes. It can be usefully argued that their goals and ambitions for their business, lives and careers are bigger than that. Consequently, so are ours!