Imagine how satisfying it would be to get a steady flow of cheques coming in for doing nothing. That can be the reality for people who build a number of income streams based on royalties.

Some of the biggest companies in the world pay out millions in royalties every year to people who have come up with something new. Proctor and Gamble for example, now gets half its ideas for new products from outside inventors which it then licences in return for a regular royalty based fee.

For inventors, the licencing and royalty route is definitely the best way to market with an idea. Inventors simply don’t usually have the expertise, infrastructure or financial clout to go it alone with what they’ve developed. Handing the idea over to a large organisation can be a win-win for all concerned.

So if you have an invention which you don’t have the resources to fully develop, give some thought to which companies might be best placed to capitalise on it, and then work towards exploiting the ‘money for nothing’, royalty route.

If you want to know where to focus your efforts, the industries offering the highest profit margins probably have the most potential. A recent study by mathematician Greg Lemmon suggests that finance and banking and computer software offer the highest potential with gross margins in excess of 40%.