I’m looking at a news story from MSNBC from November of 2004 and the title was “Staples reinvents the stapler; Revolutionary ‘One-Touch’ lives up to name.” This is the product in question, yes?
MARKS: Yes, that’s not the knockoff — that is our product. If you went to Staples’ own website and looked at their One-Touch stapler or you go into a Staples store today, you’ll see a product that looks different from what you see in the MSNBC story. The new stapler is bigger and clunkier. We no longer supply any products to Staples. We want to. The awkward thing in all of this is that we want to continue to have a relationship with Staples, supplying them with great products.

And if you’re successful in your litigation it would come out in what way?
MARKS: I don’t know if I could say what the conclusion of that would be, and this is certainly not for me to say. My role is simply to license our products to Accentra. If you want to know what Accentra considers to be a successful outcome, you should ask Accentra. But one of the things that I would like to see, not as a representative of Accentra, but from the WorkTools perspective, is Staples selling the product again.

You have to fail a lot before you get to the thing that’s really great.

There are similar problems with some of the other big chain companies, the Wal-Marts and Kmarts. This is not an isolated incident?
MARKS: Yes. That other company, they’re moving to private label programs, but I don’t know of anyone who has done it. It’s one thing to try to label commodity items, such as paper or notebooks or pencils or even pens. It’s another to take genuinely innovative things that are new, that require perhaps a little level of complexity to it, to try and commoditize that. And if Sears and Lowes, as examples, are pursuing private label programs, they need to respect that difference. They’re not trying to reach in to take over the product development function or the innovation function. And I think the reason for that is that product development requires a lot of failure. You have to fail a lot before you get to the thing that’s really great. And it’s not — the retailer if it fails, if the product doesn’t sell, you just take it off the shelf and you bring in the next one. If you’re a product developer, if your first crack at it doesn’t work, you need to keep trying.

Is the One-Touch stapler the most successful product you’ve developed so far?
MARKS: Not yet. I think it will prove to be. It’s certainly headed that way because we’ve reinvented a core category.

So what are you working on now?
MARKS: We’re continuing in office products. The goal is to launch a new generation of desktop staplers, which is even better than what came before. Those staplers that you see now, what WorkTools calls low-start design, are from 2004 and we have improved the mechanism. The internal mechanism is kind of reversed. It’s called a high-start. It has less force, is more compact, and is more robust. That’s part of what’s being implemented, another design of the desktop staplers. There’s a new hole punch, which is fantastic, which I hope to see successful.

Once you’ve centered on an idea, what would you say the typical occurrence of failure is?
MARKS: Once I believe the idea is worthwhile? How much failure is there in the process of taking the idea and really testing it? It’s so iterative, it’s like talking about how much ice falls off of a glacier. It also depends on how much experience you’ve had for the given category. The stapler’s development had very few failures. The ideas that Joel has pursued… he doesn’t have that many dead-ends at all because after more than a decade of working in the category, he’s become very efficient at developing staplers. If you’re truly experienced in development, your failure from conception to commercialization is very low. If you don’t have experience and you’re just learning a great deal, you’re failing a lot. But let’s be clear, successfully developing a product is far different from successfully marketing it. I’ve had my failures in both areas.