BizSugar.com › Resources › Online market let's companies buy and sell ideas

Small businesses looking to find a hot idea -- or trying to sell a hot idea to a big company -- are about to get some help.

Next week, Eureka Ranch Technology Ltd. plans to unveil the USA National Innovation Marketplace -- an online registry where researchers and inventors can post ideas they've developed. Businesses can then browse through those ideas by category, much like searching through résumés at a job-hunting site. If the companies see something they like, they can contact the inventor to buy the idea or collaborate on it.

The goal, says Eureka founder Doug Hall, is to have small businesses incubate ideas from researchers and then sell them to large companies. The time is right for the idea, he says, since big businesses are coming under greater pressure to innovate quickly -- but often lack the internal resources to do the job.