By product of your smarter work

I am a regular reader of Jason Fried's column in the Inc. magazine. In general, I like his idea of sharing his work ethics, his best practices and his entrepreneurial skills with the readers. It provides him a FREE advertisement for his company 37 signals and his products and establishes him as a credible business leader.In the current issue of Inc. he wrote about how a smart business can utilize invisible by-product to generate a hefty sum of income. He explained, just like the lumber industry can sell its sawdust (a by-product of saw mill) a knowledge based business can sell many by-products which can generate money.
He always makes his case by telling his own story with confidence and this time, he explains about how he started using his own company's rented space to conduct training and seminars for his customers and partners and got the entire year rent covered by running few of these seminars.
I have practiced this myself when 13 years ago, I was asked by my employer Pentafour Software to go to Kolkata (India) and setup a training organization for the company to fulfill the great demand for AS/400 developers and system administrators in India and abroad. There were handful of trained and experienced AS/400 and RPG programmers available and the need for those skills were increasing day by day.Though my company was an IBM partner for hardware and software solutions, I don't think we were authorized training partner for AS/400 platform. That means we did not have access to IBM supplied training materials and course work. I was responsible to setup everything from scratch including setting up private network of student terminals connected to one server, creating training and lab exercises, instructing the students and helping them with lab work. It was trualy a one man show. On the first day of the program, I started with few hand written foils and my own coded sample programs. Slowly, I started to identify the by-products of our group effort when I encouraged my students to write their own creative samples and project report. I picked handful of creative samples and reports and selected them to include in my printed materials for the next batch. The by-product of our daily class discussions and random quizzes would serve as end of module tests and final exam. Needless to say that by-product of our daily work was giving us the value that I leveraged to instruct future courses.
Through out my professional engagement, I have used this model, sometime knowingly but sometime unknowingly. I used to speak frequently at COMMON user group conferences in the past and all those topics were by-product of my current work. My advice to folks who are wondering, how do they identify the by-product of their daily work or business they run:

• In software development, testing or services, if any problem in your day job has given you a severe headache and you were successful in resolving it, then there are good chances that a lot of other people might be looking for the solution too. Here, you got an opportunity to write about it, publish as an article or post in a forum. If solution is a novel idea or approach then it may be a candidate for patent. 
• If you have developed a nice system or processes to better support your customer, better supply chain for your products you sell, then chances are your system and processes have a market value too. You can very well productize them and make a good sum of money like Jason did.

If you have more ideas and would like to share, please do so by posting comments. Thanks!