We've all had those moments—you know, the one where the light bulb goes off in your head and you think to yourself, "I should invent a (fill in the blank)!" Certainly great inventions come from those moments—the personal computer, Facebook, key finders. Then there are those inventions that never make it out of someone's garage. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office received 629,647 patent applications last year alone.

This week, Promotional Consultant Today is featuring a few of our inspiring speakers from the PPAI Women's Leadership Conference taking place right now in Atlanta, Georgia. What does this have to do with inventions? General Session speaker Tamara Kleinberg will rally our industry's women leaders with ways to create an innovative advantage.

Today and tomorrow, we share Kleinberg's seven tips to avoid invention failure.

1. Be disruptive. Create a new consumer behavior or redefine category boundaries. Uber changed how we get from point A to point B. Now we whip out our phones and get rides from everyday people. Cirque du Soleil changed what it meant to be a circus. What was once defined as clowns and animal acts expanded to include full story lines, human acrobats and upscale prices.

2. Be defendable. Find ways to be where your customers are—but your competition isn't—and deliver your product in a novel way. In other words, make your entire business hard to copy.

For example, Infinite Monkey Theorem Winery put its wine in single serve cans, not bottles. That's a hard one for those with glass bottle manufacturing to copy.

3. Recognize customers' pain and symptoms. Customers buy for the symptoms, and stay for the pain. Market to the symptom and then solve their root pain once you have them, not the other way around.

A chiropractic office will advertise that they can solve headaches and hip pain (your symptoms). Once you are there, what they are really solving is your root pain—being out of alignment. The mistake I often see entrepreneurs making is moving too quickly to the pain. Your customers aren't there yet. They have a symptom to solve, so address that first.

Ready for more innovation and invention tips from speaker Tamara Kleinberg? Read tomorrow's PCT.

Source: Tamara G. Kleinberg is serial entrepreneur and innovator. She is the founder of The Shuuk, an online marketplace where awesome people sell innovative products and where entrepreneurial spirits engage. She is a sought-after keynote speaker on innovation and entrepreneurship, and the author of two nationally published playbooks, including her most recent, Think Sideways: a game-changing playbook for disruptive thinking. Kleinberg presents "Up Your Innovative Quotient & Gain The Edge" at the WLC General Session June 29 at 9 am.