How deal with an innovation from outside academia
I would recommend e-mailing the authors of the original paper. (In general contact information for academics can be very easily found via googling.) Briefly explain your discovery and pose your questions.

In general, such e-mails are quite welcome in academia. There is some possibility you might get no response, but I think it is likely that you will get a polite response, and that the authors will be encouraging and helpful if your work is worth publishing.

If you don't want to do much of the grunt work yourself, you may be able to coauthor the paper with the authors and/or others whom the authors might put you in touch with. (But don't propose this until you get an initial positive response.)

Good luck!