Idea How Much Korean Show
EDIT: If you know where I can watch the past episodes of “Idea How Much,” please send me a message. Thank you in advance!
A late night television show I watch is a Korean “pitch your entrepreneurial idea to the CEO” show on a Directv channel. For those that have the Korean channel package, the show is broadcast by Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) and is on channel 2081 Thursday at around 10:20pm PST.
An inventor is invited to the show “Idea How Much” with their new invention and the goal is to pitch their idea at the highest market price to a group of corporate Chief Executive Officers (CEO). There are exactly 20 CEO sitting on the assigned section awaiting for the live auction. Did you just say auction? The inventor briefly introduces and demonstrates their invention, and the auction begins with the help of a female auctioneer. The CEOs decide beforehand whether they want to participate in the bidding and will compete with each other to claim the rights to the acquired idea. Eventually two CEO are engaged in a bidding war.
Three hours prior to the auction broadcast, the group of CEO gets a chance to listen and watch a demonstration by the inventor. Questions are asked as well as feedback provided to the inventor, and then the CEOs decide whether they will bid on the idea and what their maximum bid amount would be. The last point is crucial because when you are in one of the 20 hot seats engaged on a bidding war, they can get carried away. But I doubt that would ever happen.
Qualifications
In popular Korean shows, the program director (PD) carefully selects the participants to come to their show to increase the show ratings by making it more enjoyable to watch. But in “Idea How Much,” there are three product analysts that calculates the estimated market value of the given invention and determine if there is a potential market to sell the product(s) to. Meeting this few requirement would qualify the inventor into the show. Surely there will be hundreds of applications to get on the show but only the selected few with excellent ideas will get accepted. And many of these ideas fetch into the six to seven digits category because of the potential marketability of the idea. We’re talking worldwide sales and not only in South Korea.
In a recent episode I watched, an inventor introduced a bed pillow that produced relaxing music to help the user get a better sleep. The pillow was unique as only the user themselves can hear the sound and the person next to it won’t hear a thing. A small controller was attached to the pillow so that the user can control the volume and change the music being played. An experiment took place using the invention with six subjects that had difficulty sleeping either from a nightmare, insomnia, or other sleeping disorder. Four of the subjects went into a deep sleep, one had a good light sleep, and only one could not get a good sleep. The fascinating part of the experiment is that the pillow actually helped young students improve their memorization skill after getting a quick nap using the pillow. There are scientific studies that daytime nap do improve mental sharpness and this pillow is like the ultimate tool to restore it. The results impressed several of the CEO.