Every Monday, looking for marketing counsel, Itz-Toys discusses the new product's progress in a conference call with the inventors of the latest game.

But the session can't start until they finish their homework. One of the inventors, Justin Lewis, is 11 years old. The other, Matthew Balick, is 12.

Like a growing number of toy makers, Itz-Toys in Phoenix is turning to youngsters for new product ideas and advice. Although toy companies have always used focus groups of kids to vet new ideas, some youngsters are now playing roles previously reserved for grown-ups.

Five of the 50 board games currently sold by University Games Inc., including Take A Hike and Rapunzel's Revenge, were invented by minors. In an annual contest, the San Francisco company awards $10,000 Savings Bonds to kids with the ideas it likes best. In December, Spinmaster Toys of Canada created an advisory board of 25 boys and girls between the ages of eight and 15, many from the US, who are paid $3,000 a year and file monthly reports on how their peers use their playtime.

Sportime International Inc., a catalogue company in Atlanta, has 15-year-old Chris Haas to thank for a nice spike in sales during the past couple of years. He invented a trainer basketball, marked where kids should place their hands to improve their shots. The ball is one of the catalogue's bestsellers, with more than one million sold. Last year, Chris Haas made about $35,000.

The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which offers gifted children short courses on getting started in business, says many of its 10,000 students last year did so. Many of their new companies are involved in toys, video games or play. "You won't believe the number of remote-control car inventions I've seen," says Steve Mariotti, founder and president.

Youth will also be served for the first time this week at the American International Toy Fair, which is waiving its no-kids-on-the-exposition-floor rule to allow Justin and Matthew of Itz-Toys to present their toy to retailers at the show in New York.

"They know the product better than I," says Itz-Toys' 35-year-old president, Peter Gantner. With big buyers, including Toys `R' Us and FAO Schwarz, assembled under one roof, Mr Gantner adds, "This is the equivalent of getting a papal audience for us."

It all looks like a case of life imitating the movies, specifically, the 1988 film Big, in which an overgrown 12-year-old played by Tom Hanks becomes the star product consultant at a huge toy company. In the real-life version, the kids are getting started at smaller companies, which may be hungrier for new ideas than the industry giants are.

Sinmaster, which makes popular lines of mini skateboards and bicycles, says it got its idea for a kids' advisory board after it received lots of helpful e-mail from young customers. Some of them wanted interchangeable parts they could install themselves. The outpouring led the company to develop its Proshops line, in which the skateboards and bikes come unassembled, with miniature tools to put them together. Proshops ended up outselling the company's assembled toys.

Now the junior board provides regular reports from members, including eight-year-old Brendan Pacella, of Buffalo, New York, who does his market research on the Web and at shopping malls. Among recent insights he has reported to Spinmaster: Serious Web use begins at about nine (before that, he says, parents won't let kids use the computer without permission); boys in Buffalo are wild about the bands Blink 182 and Slipknot; and Razor scooters (made by a Taiwan company) are still hot.

Nine-year-old Linsay Berstein of Narragansett, Rhode Island, won University Games' latest new-ideas contest with a board game that the company brought out for $14.98 at Christmas. The game, called Rapunzel's Revenge, is based on the Western fairy tale, Rapunzel, about a girl with long blond hair who is imprisoned in a tower by a witch and later rescued by a prince. In the game, players move prince icons around the board, where they can collect locks of hair-or run into Witchy Poo. The first to create a braid long enough to let Rapunzel down from her tower wins. University has made 20,000 copies of the game, now in its second printing, and Linsay has made radio appearances, offering tips on board-game development.

"The question I'm most asked by kids," she says, "is `How can I get into the business?'"

Robert Moog, chief executive of University Games, says his 10-year-old daughter, Nina, and her nine-year-old pal Joe Pinsker, son of a company director, played a big role in winning a sub-license to make games and puzzles based on the Harry Potter books for small retail chains and mom-and-pop stores. "I was the one who suggested Dad get the license to begin with," says Nina. Afterward, the kids helped refine the games, and made the final product presentation in late 1999 at the Burbank, California, offices of Warner Brothers, holder of the primary license.

One of University's two Harry Potter games, Quidditch, emulates the game in the books in which wizards and witches ride around on broomsticks and throw balls into circles-a sort of air basket-ball. At first, the board-game version had players roll dice and score broomstick points. But Joe Pinsker thought that was "lame and not authentic". He suggested that players be given little balls with mechanical launchers. Mr Moog and board member Jeff Pinsker followed his advice and got a lot of fan mail from customers who bought the games. "It really raised the game to a different level," Mr Moog says.

Warner Brothers declines to comment on the presentation in Burbank, but someone familiar with it said those in attendance found the two kids "impressive". Each has read the four-book Harry Potter series three times. And what's in it for them? Nina Moog, her Dad says, gets room and board.

The business careers of Justin Lewis and Matthew Balick, the Flip-Itz inventors, began at a Chicago youth-basketball banquet, when the boys were horsing around with the little three-pronged plastic stands put in the middle of pizzas to keep the cheese from sticking to the box. The two suggested that the game they invented could be commercialised. Their parents, sceptical at first, relented. Enter: 2 Bored Boys Inc., a company the families own. It had $150,000 in sales last year.

The business needed capital to grow and went to Itz-Toys for help. Under its agreement with 2 Bored Boys, Itz-Toys bears the manufacturing costs, pays the boys a 7.5 per cent royalty on sales, and splits profits 50-50 from T-shirt licenses.

Despite a busy schedule that includes school, basketball, tennis lessons and Hebrew classes, the boys have already come up with line extensions: Flip-Itz Basketball, Flip-Itz Boxing, Flip-Itz Golf and Flip-Itz Bowling. "We're just a bunch of kids, but we know what kids want," says Justin. "We really think we have a great product," says Matthew.

An Internet Flip-Itz cartoon is scheduled to make its debut later this month on the Flip-Itz website, and will show off several of the 60 Flip-Itz characters the boys have created, complete with baseball-card-like biographies. Bonz the dog loves trees. Bo the boxer tells knock-knock jokes.

The short-term goal is to reach $5 million in sales this year, which would make Matthew, Justin and their families about $375,000. For now, he says, "My allowance hasn't changed." Reports his mother: "He still likes me to tuck him into bed at night."

By an arrangement with the Asian Wall Street Journal