ThinkUSA's founder is Murray Ansell, whose early life and formal education were in New Zealand, where he earned a Bachelor's of Commerce and Administration (Accounting) from Victoria University of Wellington, membership of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand, and worked in the public accountancy, investment banking and commercial banking industries.
Since coming to the US in 1990, Murray has spent his career in consulting roles, starting by helping New Zealand and Australian exporters find markets in the US and Canada. He noticed, however, that the small size of these exporters meant they had less marketing resource than comparable US competitors, limiting their ability to follow through with opportunities he would find for them.
However, he noticed that they were often highly innovative, so decided to specialize in providing licensing services for his more innovative offshore clients. This exposed him to the invention marketing world, and the high levels of distrust between inventors and their potential licensees. Murray also noticed that there was a major gap between what most independent inventors were offering their licensing prospects, and what these potential licensees needed in order to be comfortable licensing from them.
While the inventors seemed to have high levels of creativity, they also generally lacked business acumen, and often did not appreciate the risks they were asking potential licensees to assume. Meanwhile, business owners and CEOs were seeing an increasing number of patent infringement lawsuits from aggrieved inventors who felt businesses had stolen their inventions when, in most cases, they had either disclosed them without legal protection or been unaware those businesses had been developing their own solutions independent of them anyway.
There was a low level of trust between inventors and the business community, and very little licensing being done between these groups. Murray saw an opportunity to become involved as a trusted intermediary who also brought a high level of professionalism that business owners and CEOs could rely on when developing a collaboration with Murray's inventor clients.
Using his deal structuring mindset from his days in investment banking, Murray devised a new invention commercialization system called Turn-Key Licensing that bridged the gaps he had identified, increasing deal closure rates by 600% and royalty rates by more than 100%.
Prompted by his experiences with inventors, Murray has also become an expert in helping them and others improve their success levels by identifying and releasing their subconscious blocks to success.
Through ThinkUSA, Murray offers inventors a unique coaching program called Conscious Creator that helps them release their inner blocks and barriers to conceiving, developing and successfully licensing their highest value inventions.
His other coaching program is called Creating Success, and is for those interested in developing successful IP-driven new product commercialization businesses that use the Turn-Key Licensing success model.
Murray also leads ThinkUSA's Consulting practice, which helps US and international businesses increase their new product pipelines while decreasing their product development investment, through relationships with independent Turn-Key Licensing businesses.