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innovation article

inventing at home

Why Inventing Is Still A One Man Job by Lynn A.Williams first published in September 1961

One of the surprises of modern life is the relatively small contribution of large corporations to the sum total of significant creative and new ideas.

Historically, important new ideas have come through individual initiative. They have come less often from the laboratories of our great corporations.

They have not come from committees, they have not come from teamwork, they have come from individuals, often working almost alone and, very frequently, under surprising and often unpromising conditions.

Despite the tremendous size, power, and wealth of our largest firms, and despite the fact that they are totally immersed in technology, their contributions have been far greater in production and in marketing than in creativity.

I am convinced, both by history and by present circumstances that this is not likely to change. It will not be changed by “brainstorming” or “pyramiding.” It will not be changed by plan or organization. A disproportionately large quota of new ideas will continue to come from individuals. The large industrial giants will continue in their roles as developers rather than creators, and as producers rather than innovators.

History, sociology, and what I term “accident” account for this.

This is not to say that corporations have invented nothing. There have been important inventions by men working within American big businesses. The transistor resulted from an idea suggested by Dr. Shockley at the Bell Laboratories. Freon refrigerants came from Midgely after he went to work for General Motors. Nylon was originated by a man in the DuPont laboratories. There are others.

The modern corporation has often been superb in development and improvement.

But the creative idea is something else. It is the pregnant suggestion that sets in motion a whole series of new consequences. One consequence is the development, improvement, refinement, manufacture, and marketing of the product that rests on the idea.

For history, let’s look at some inventions familiar to us. The expansion steam engine was invented by Watt, and the steamboat by Fulton. The telegraph was invented by Samuel Morse, and the cotton gin by Eli Whitney. And, of course, Edison invented the incandescent lamp, the phonograph, and the moving picture.

The first significant breakthrough in the making of steel was by Bessemer. The steam turbine came from Parson. The process of refining and producing aluminum, still used today was invented by Hall and Cowles in the United States and, almost simultaneously, by Heroult in France.

A salesman for bottle stoppers invented the safety razor. His name was Gillette. Wireless was invented by Marconi. It was not the telephone company or General Electric or Westinghouse that invented the three-element vacuum tube. This was the work of Lee de Forest. The modern plastics industry began with Dr. Baekeland and Bakelite.

Perhaps these things are too old to be relevant today. Very well, insulin was discovered in the 1920s not by anyone in a great pharmaceutical house but by Dr. Banting of Canada. A private experimenter, Dr. Fleming, found penicillin. Streptomycin was found by Dr. Waksman, polio vaccine by Dr. Salk.

The gyrocompass, so important to our rocketry, was invented by a German named Anschutz-Kaempfe. Frequency modulation was invented not by RCA but by Dr. Armstrong. Kodachrome film was invented not by the Eastman company but by Godowsky and Mannes, who did much of their early work in a kitchen sink.

The Polaroid camera was invented by Dr. Land, whose early work on polarizing films was done when he was 20 years old and still a student at Harvard. Stainless steel was developed not by any of the major steel companies but by two scientific entrepreneurs, Harry Brearley and Elwood Haynes. The cotton picker was invented not by International Harvester but by the Rust brothers. Cellophane was not the invention of the Du Pont Company but of a Swiss-born Frenchman, Jacques Brandenberger.

In the field of nuclear development, it was Ernest Lawrence, a University of California scientist, who invented the cyclotron. The major inventions for the atomic bomb and much of the ensuing nuclear work were by individuals like Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Harold Urey, and Leo Szilard.

The automobile? A number of major inventions stem from ideas within the industry. The outstanding one is the automatic transmission, initiated by Thompson while he was at Cadillac and carried by him to Oldsmobile. (The hydraulic torque converter, however, was the work of individuals not associated with any large firm.) Duco body finishing was invented by Du Pont. The sealed-beam headlight came from within the industry.

But the four-cycle engine was Otto’s, of Germany, and the two-cycle Dr. Diesel’s. Vulcanized rubber was the invention of a man named Goodyear and the pneumatic tire of an Englishman, Dr. Dunlop. The self-starter was invented by Vincent Bendix, and by Kettering before he became associated with General Motors.

Four-wheel hydraulic brakes were invented by Loughead power steering by Davis, and chromium plating by Dr. Fink, a professor at Columbia.

So much for history. The second reason that the individual inventor will continue to bulk so large in our scientific progress lies in sociology.

Critics (with whom I don’t agree) have observed that the giant corporations have indulged in welfarism, particularly for the supervisory classes, to a degree beyond the dream of any Utopian socialist. They say that the brass, including many engineers, of today’s big industrial firms, is weaned, fed, clothed, schooled, doctored, and hospitalized, has his adult being in, and can be buried without leaving, the comfortable company corridor. Let him make the company’s first team, and the likelihood of his ever getting fired is remote indeed.

What has such a man to gain by propounding an original idea? Not much. His sure path to success lies in being a good little cooperator and keeping his nose clean.

So say the critics. They may expose a grain of truth in a Sahara of unrestraint. But there are at least four more valid reasons that prevent a factory from being a fertile ground for creative ideas.

The basic purpose of a factory is to produce. To produce efficiently requires planning. Planning requires deadlines, and introducing new ideas along the way disrupts them.

Again, a big factory must avoid mistakes. If I am building a boat in my basement and put a hole in the wrong place, I can plug it and paint it over. But if I am producing 3,000 automobiles a week and put a hole in the wrong place, in a week’s time I have a major crisis. It takes a lot of nerve to change things in a factory.

Creativity also involves emotional costs which most management cannot and will not accept. Every innovator is an iconoclast. His new idea is an attack on an older idea. Through extension, it seems like an attack on the men who are in charge of the old idea – which means then men who are in charge of almost everything.

The oddball innovator is disturbing. His habits don’t fit into a smooth-running organization. I learned this rather poignantly when, as a division manager for a large corporation, I reached the limit of my patience with an engineer whose arrival in the morning must have been timed by a sundial in cloudy weather.

Sometimes he arrived at 10 and sometimes at noon. He was as bright as any engineer we had, and often he worked late into the night. But his unreliability was just too much.

Three years after I fired him, he had made several million dollars from one of his inventions.

Personnel-testing schemes are now arranged to screen out such men. Not every inventor, of course, insists on dressing like a Californian. But there are enough pressures and problems in a big factory without adding the disturbing nature of the oddballs’ creative contributions.

It is necessary to distinguish between some of these facts of business life and the public-relations utterances about our zeal for progress. Because of these statements, I think many commentators have been misled. The fact is that there are important pressures against innovation and that they are highly concentrated in any hard-working productive enterprise. I mean no disrespect to General Electric, which, in fact, has done a good job in creativity, when I say that in many firms “Progress is our most important slogan” – and little more.

Finally, I venture the suggestion that our big corporations don’t really need to innovate. When they do, they take risks which they can avoid by depending less upon creativity and more upon the size, momentum, organization, skill, and advertising.

We come now to the third and last basic reason why I believe our big corporations will not come to dominate creativity as they dominate the marketplace. That lies in “accident” Invention defies planning. It is simply not possible to corral into industrial research laboratories any but a small fraction of the men who contribute significant ideas.

I refer to two kinds of accidents. The first is the legendary accidental inventions – like Dr. Fleming’s observations of an unusual mold in a culture plate that turned out to be penicillin.

The other kind of accident is in the nature of the non-professional inventor. As observed by Jewkes, Sawers, and Stillerman in The Sources of Invention, George Eastman of Kodak was trained as a bookkeeper, not as a technician; Midgely was a mechanical engineer, not a chemist; the men who invented color film were not chemists but musicians; the inventor of the ball-point pen had been at various times a painter, sculptor, and journalist; Dunlop was a veterinarian, and the inventor of the dial telephone was an undertaker.

If the director of a modern research laboratory had hired this motley crew to work on the kinds of things they invented, he would have been fired.

It is important that our big businesses welcome new ideas. I find much of American business far less receptive to new ideas than the businesses of Europe.

So long as our conservatism is confined to our business organizations, I do not fear any desiccation of the well spring of creativity from individuals. The danger lies in this: The organizers, who in business keep the innovators in their place, may extend their dominion to society at large. This could lead to economic stagnation and, more important, to the atrophy of the creative spirit.

If big business comes to want new ideas, it can help itself by improving the climate for their growth within the business. It can help itself much more by opening its doors to creative individuals outside the walls.

As a lawyer, I have written some of the documents that inventors are required to sign before their inventions will be considered. I know something about the kind of reception that inventors usually receive.

I think that our corporations are lawyer-ridden. There is far more concern to avoid a possible lawsuit than there is to get hold of a new idea. This, I think, has to change.

Beyond this, I would urge the manager of any business who is really interested in new ideas to get a new crew of people to interview inventors. He should also set aside an amount of money that he fully expects to lose. If a man is never explaining his failures because he has only successes, it means simply that he is not taking enough risks.

[End of Article]



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what-to-invent

What to invent… For an invention to make a profit it has to create a business. To make a business you need to be inventing something that is cheaper, better and / or substantially different to competing products.

 

What should you invent? by Martin Mann First Published March 1961

The formula for profitable inventions sounds simple. Listen to Jim Rand, one of the most successful of modern inventors:

“For an invention to make a profit it has to create a business. You can create a business if this invention is cheaper and just about as good as the previous product. You can start a business if it is better, even though it costs a little more. The jackpot is something cheaper and better.

 

Rand, besides being an inventor himself, is president of a Cleveland firm specializing in inventions. One of his men is Claud Foster, a saxophone player who first hit it big with the Gabriel Horn, an auto accessory that hooked onto the exhaust pipe and played “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” at the push of a button.

But Foster’s specialty is making things cheaper. Years ago he took a hard look at shock absorbers, which are rather expensive. One day he was driving down a country road and saw a farm boy secure a bull by wrapping its rope around a tree.

“That’s for me,” he said, and adapted the idea to his Gabriel Snubber shock absorber.

bull secured to a tree

 

The famous Charles Kettering leaned the other way to invent the self-starter. He saw that a great many could be sold, even though they cost much more than hand cranks. Boss Ket’s mechanical genius showed up when he seized on a fact that other engineers, blinded by their experience with continuous-running trolley motors, had overlooked: A light-duty motor could be heavily overloaded to crank an engine if it carried the load only briefly.

Either approach works-if the invention is one that enough people will pay enough money for. That’s the point. When considering what to invent, don’t invent just for the sake of inventing. 

Most amateur inventors ignore this and miss the pot of gold. “They do things backwards,” says veteran consultant Charles Welling. 

“They jump right in, inventing away, just because they feel impelled to invent. They don’t think about markets for their inventions until after the inventions are made. Then it’s too late.”

Welling tells of a fellow townsman who rigged up a mechanized bucksaw for cutting firewood. 

“It worked fine. He had used it for several years, and built a couple for friends. Then he came to me for advice on commercializing his invention. But he hadn’t the foggiest idea of how many people might buy such a machine or how much they might be willing to pay for it, let alone what kinds of stores might sell it. He never got anywhere.”

a mechanical bucksaw

 

What to invent – A mechanical bucksaw?

How a new kind of machine was born. The big companies that earn dividends on new products do exactly the opposite. Take Harnischfeger Corp., the heavy machinery manufacturers. At the end of World War II Harnischfeger worried about its crane business. So many cranes had been built during the war that there seemed little chance to sell new ones for years to come.

Welling was assigned to find a way to keep that division busy. So in determining what to invent Welling asked himself two questions:

  1. Who are the division’s customers? Obviously, big construction firms, the contractors who build highways and airports.
  2. Where were these customers using hand labor? Hand labor is slow and costly. Replacing it, even with a fairly expensive machine, usually pays off.

Welling spotted the opportunity in soil stabilization: Harrows, trucks, and gangs with shovels were needed to beef up the dirt foundations under roads and runways.

Only at this point did mechanical inventing begin.

Harnischfeger’s engineering department got the word and duly produced an ugly but efficient single-pass soil stabilizer. Operated by one man, it munches its way across the landscape, churning up dirt, mixing in the required amount of stabilizing asphalt, and patting the strengthened soil back into place, all in one continuous operation.

As it turned out, Harnischfeger’s crane business boomed instead of dying, but that hasn’t made the profits on the soil stabilizer any less pleasant.

So who needs it? Before you begin, stop and think about what to invent. Inventing to please the customers instead of yourself is not always surefire, of course. The biggest corporations have blown millions on market studies only to create monumental disasters (just ask Ford about the Edsel). Yet hard thinking before you decide what to invent does improve your chances greatly.

Some hints from the experts on what to invent. The men who pay their rent with inventions have learned some rules the hard way.

What to invent… here’s what they do:

  • Pick out growing fields: electronics, hobbies, sports, home products, conveniences. (A lucrative example: the Toni home permanent, which Richard N. Harris sold to Gillette Safety Razor a few years ago for $20,000,000.) Stay far away from dying fields an improvement in steam locomotives might have founded a fortune back in 1900, but it would be worthless today.
  • Work on things you know. You don’t have to be a certified expert (the best inventions are usually made by outsiders unaware of what “can’t be done”). But if you’re too green you’l1 spend years reinventing old stuff.
  • Look for products that will be used once, then thrown away, like Reynolds wrap, Kleenex, tin cans. This promises steady sales (and royalties). The guy who comes up with a good five-cent paintbrush will have it made.
  • Appeal to laziness. Wherever you spot hand labor, an invention is needed.

Homeowners will pay extra to save effort even small lawns are now cut by power mowers.

laziness

Businessmen are even more willing to invest in labor-saving machinery because they get their money back (and then some) in reduced man-hours.

Notice the power-operated tailgate elevators on trucks; they’re expensive but they pay off. The success of the quick-copying machines (like Thermofax) rests on plain dollars-and-cents. It costs so much to have a typist copy a letter that the machines-at $100 up-more than pay for themselves.

Small Improvements in small products can pay off big. The pros in the inventing business concentrate on small improvements in standard products. That’s where the money is. A radically new idea takes so long to win public acceptance that the original inventor may get little out of it.

The zipper, for example… It was invented by E. P. Judson in 1891. Not until 1905 was the Hookless Fastener Co. formed to exploit his patent. And not until the 1930s did the zipper really push aside buttons and hooks. The important, profit-making patent was not Judson’s, but later ones issued to Gideon Sundback, chief engineer of the Hookless Fastener Co., for improvements in the zipper and the machines that produce it.

When deciding what to invent, keep it simple: The Case of the Square Clothespin. The simpler the improvement the bigger the rewards. A Texas housewife made a fortune because she became annoyed at the way ordinary clothespins rolled onto the floor-and thought up the squared-off clothespin.

clothespin

 

Another woman made squeamishness pay: Offended by the sight of the toilet-bowl brush, she invented a small disposable mop to eliminate it.

Consider things like these when deciding what to invent, items in everyday use in ordinary homes, are best for independent inventors to aim for. You already know the requirements. You can build and test experimental models with little trouble.

And you’ll get more attentive consideration from manufacturers of consumer goods.

A few rules to follow about what not to invent: It’s easier to pinpoint what not to invent. Some fields are overcrowded. So many varieties of bottle caps and tube caps have been tried that the chances of hitting on a successful new idea are slim. More than 6,000 patents have been issued on self-locking nuts, and dozens of efficient types are already on the market (yet inventors keep right on devising new ones). You can get a patent in a crowded field, but it’s not likely to be worth much. It will be so “narrow”- pertain to such fine details of design that a smart engineer can work his own design around it.

Some fields are tough to crack, among the toughest being automobiles. One automaker looks at about 8,000 ideas a year, but buys only eight. Even when a deal is made, the terms are rarely generous.

You have only five possible customers for an automotive invention; if they don’t buy, you have nowhere else to go. (There is a good market, however, for auto accessories that don’t have to be installed at the factory; the many small and medium-sized manufacturers in this business are looking for new ideas.)

The prospects for an airplane invention are even more dismal. Most aircraft manufacturers pool all patents, so no single firm has much to gain from buying an idea on the outside. While the pool itself occasionally buys a patent from an independent, it is the one and only customer and can set the price.

And perhaps most important of all

You should be ready to break any rule. Last summer one esteemed independent inventor, ticking off his own private list of dead fields not worth wasting time on, included flypaper. It certainly seems obsolete in the DDT age. Yet only recently scientists have discovered powerful chemical lures that will attract bugs for miles around to meet extinction on flypaper.

Maybe there’s hope even for steam locomotive inventions.

[End of What To Invent article] 

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modern inventor

By Norman Carlisle (1963)

Now inventing is easier than ever… Here’s how new materials, ready-made for the inventor, can start those royalty dollars flowing in.

What’s happening to the independent inventor? Is he a dying breed, losing out in the face of competition from team research in the big industrial labs?

Not at all. The Patent, Trademark, and Copyright Research Foundation setting out to look into the whole business of who’s doing the inventing in America today, found that, in the past decade, 40 percent of all patents went to independents – men working alone. The Yankee ingenuity that has always made Americans the most innovative on earth is breaking out all over the place.

“The ranks of basement investors run a wider gamut than ever,”
was the way John Tigrett, perhaps America’s leading invention broker, put it to me. Among the 16,000 idea-getters Tigrett deals with each year, he lists lawyers, teachers, truck drivers, housewives, journalists, engineers, airline pilots, and business executives –a full occupational and educational spectrum.

ancient inventor

 

Moreover, the inventions developed by individual inventors, most of whom have never seen the inside of a research lab, cover an impressive range, from tricky gadgets to processes that are changing whole industries.

Some have earned a few thousand dollars, some are bringing in royalties that run into millions. Inventing is not easy – there are problems that lie between the bright idea and the checks in the morning mail, among them the fact that it takes about three years to get a patent. But in many ways inventing is easier than it used to be.

inventors

Everybody’s in the act these days. Truck drivers, business executives, housewives, pilots – they’re all busy inventing new gadgets.

Whether you’re a weekend home workshop tinkerer or a trained technical man who chooses to go it alone, you’ve got factors working for you. Some areas, of course, are the almost exclusive province of big-lab research. You’re probably not going to develop another nylon, discover a new plastic, or make a portable reactor in your basement. But the very fact that team research is turning out so many new products – plastics, metal alloys, wonder chemicals, transistors, miniaturized batteries, and a host of other materials and devices – gives you new inventive opportunities.

modern inventor

 

I got dramatic evidence of how they’re being used by today’s independents when I investigated the experiences of more than 100 currently active, successful inventors.

BUILDING A PAPER HOUSE

Take Harold Humes and his paper house. Humes, a writer with a technical turn of mind, didn’t have to invent the makings for his new kind of dwelling. That was done for him by chemists for the big concerns that turn out treatments for making paper water-, fire-, vermin-, and just about anything proof. When Humes got the idea that such paper would make a fine summer cottage or low-cost house for underdeveloped areas, all he had to do was design corrugated, honeycombed panels and work out a method of fastening them together with metal strips.

It took a lot of doing, of course, before Humes solved all the problems of making paper pillars, floors, and roofs – but he had all the ingredients and the help of the companies that manufacture them. The result is 27 different patents or patents applied for.

paper house

Huffing and puffing weren’t required to test inventor Harold Humes’ paper house. The work on the materials had already been done for him.


A Texan named Edwin Foster has struck it rich by finding new uses for the marvelous alloys of the steel metallurgists. Among his 50 recent patents are many for special steel springs, which Foster has found a way to coil. They are employed in such items as long steel tape rules (Foster’s springs are used in all that run over 12 feet) and the hose-retracting mechanism used on new gasoline pumps in service stations.

When an aluminum window got stuck, Foster figured that “there must be a better way to get this thing up.” There was. Foster did it with a ribbon of stainless steel, a device now widely used.

When Foster saw how easy it was for electric irons to get pushed off ironing boards or to be forgotten on them, he dreamed up another spring device. It lifts an iron off the board as soon as the user lets go. This invention, sold to a big appliance maker and now in production, took years of work on Foster’s part. But his job of making a spring that could lift when required to do so, but not resist the ironer, was made easier by the availability of the special type of steel used.

SCULPTURE IN A KIT

A new plastic resin brought New Yorker Charles Powell’s invention to reality. Powell had hit on an idea for making anyone a sculptor. There was nothing new about a figure assembled by joining pre-molded plastic components together. They had long been on the market. The trouble was that when you got them together they looked like what they were. Powell had a better idea: Let the person assemble the parts and then cover them with a material that would hide the joints. What kind of material? Powell didn’t know, but he thought that the answer was to embed small particles of wood, metal, or stone in some kind of paint like plastic that would set after application. He found a chemical company that made a vinyl resin that could serve as the binder he wanted. A ⅟16- to ⅟18- inch coating, applied with a brush, made a piece of sculptor look like the real thing. The sculpture was weighted by sand poured through an opening, which was covered by the coating.

Simple? Yes, but it was a patentable invention which, while it may not make Powell rich, will certainly give him a handsome return on his time.

In recent years a number of research labs have come up with new types of cement and glues = marvels of stickiness that will fasten almost anything to almost anything. They’ve been a boon to home craftsmen, industry, and amateur inventors.

James Severino of Encino, California, decided that the method of installing electrical conduits, receptacles, and outlets with nails, screws, or clamps was pretty crude. Why not cement them on? The system he devised is beautifully simple. The wiring units are coated with cement that stays sticky when covered with plastic. To install them, you just peel off the plastic covering and push the unit into place. There it stays, fastened for good. Patentable? It was, as patent No. 3,029,303 attests. Plastics are a happy medium for many independent inventors. Joseph Kitson of Connecticut was impressed with the marvels of polystyrene bubble-type plastic and with it invented a new form of building material. His patented discovery consists of a method of filling the bubbles with a fluid grout after panels of the plastic are in place in the building. He’s hit on a scheme that gives structural strength to a light, and easily handles the material.

SLEEPER

A Minnesota physician, Robert Horton, has the gratitude of many parents now getting a good night’s sleep. With the help of plastics, miniature batteries, and transistors, he invented a device that put squalling babies to sleep in a couple of minutes.

Noticing that babies are soothed by a humming noise, Dr. Horton tracked down the sound they like best—B flat. A few years ago he’d have been stumped by just how to make a gadget small enough and safe enough to utilize this discovery. It was no problem today. A buzzer that gives the right vibration, a tiny battery, a transistor to cut power demands and give it a 2,500-hour life, and a neat, smooth, plastic housing suitable for placing in a baby’s crib were the ingredients that gave the doctor his now widely sold Slumbertone.

The miniature battery that powers Horton’s baby-comforting buzzer is one of the hottest ready-made invention components ever to emerge from the big labs. Independent inventors have used them to power everything from pencil sharpeners to swizzle sticks. At least 100 battery-powered toys – games, tanks, planes, submarines, boats, and animals – are the brainchildren of freelancers.

slumbertone

Silencing the baby (without violence) is easy with a box that produces a steady B-flat hum. Transistors made invention possible.

COMBINING THE PARTS

An invention that’s typical of the way inventors profitably team up peanut batteries and small electric motors is that of Ingle McAda of Wichita Falls, Texas. He took an ordinary duck decoy and installed a propeller shaft, a small electric motor, and a battery. His tethered duck decoy could thus be moved realistically. His patent is broad enough to cover plastic decoys of his own design, but McAda got a running start by using existing ones.

moterized duck decoy

Invention for the birds: These mobile duck decoys with motors and propellor shafts use tiny batteries and motors on the market.


While new developments offer virgin territory, a lot of successful inventors advise: Don’t ignore older materials and devices. Plenty of opportunities await the alert amateur who is aware that big-business researchers can miss some pretty big bets.

Offhand, you’d hardly think there was any new way to exploit the small gasoline engine, yet Harry Leedom, a California engineer, found one. He evolved a unique wheel-power combination in which power from a small motor is delivered directly to a wheel by a belt running in a deep groove in the circumference of the rubber tire. Leedom’s powered wheels in various sizes, along with the forks and brackets that adapt them to everything from scooters to cultivators, are now in production.

NO PATENT PROBLEM

A question frequently asked by would-be inventors who would like to use ready-made parts is the one about patents. Isn’t it harder to get a patent on a device that utilizes components previously patented? The answer is no. An amendment to the patent law, passed in 1952, says, “Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor.” Furthermore, the definition of that word “process” is spelled out to include “a new use of a known process.”

Another practical question is “Where do you obtain the makings for an invention?” You’ve dreamed up something that calls for a particular kind of plastic – how do you find a manufacturer of the stuff you need?

The answer’s prettv simple. If you don’t find it on the shelves of your local hardware store, and you don’t see a suitable company listed in the telephone book, you turn to the inventor’s friend, Thomas’ Register of American Manufacturers.

If you live in a town of any size, your local public library is likely to have it. In its 9,030 pages you will find the names of everybody who makes anything. An index will lead you to the right page. You can then contact the manufacturer and get the names of dealers or suppliers, or such product information as you need.

HELP FROM MANUFACTURERS

This can be a wonderful lubricant to easing your invention along its way. Most companies, and all big ones, publish reams of technical literature, full of hints for inventors. For instance, Bakelite’s “Technical Release No. 12” gave (Charles Powell the information he needed about the company’s polymerized vinyl resin to make possible his do-it- yourself sculpture.

The help may go beyond printed literature to discussions with company technical representatives, especially if your invention gives promise of providing a sizable market for the company product.

“A technical reps” says Harold Hones, who estimates he talked to a couple of dozen of them in developing his paper house, “can be a gold mine of information for the inventor.”

Just how much company information can help an inventor is demonstrated by the experience of Michael Meyerberg, a New York theatrical producer who though American women deserved decent light to put on their make-up. Even in the theatre Meyerberg hadn’t seen a properly lighted make-up mirror. Fluorescent lights of low wattage around the mirrors didn’t provide enough light or distribute it right. Incandescent lamps of sufficient wattage were too hot; low-wattage incandescents didn’t give enough light.

Meverberg got in touch with GE. Sure company engineers told him, they had just the thing—a 15-watt lamp, with a special frosting inside, that gave a strong, diffused light but didn’t get hot.

“I had my invention made the minute I found out about that lamp,” he says.

He rigged up a compact, three-part mirror suitable for theatre or home use, mounting five of the bulbs on each post and four above the center mirror. That was all there was to it—but it won him a patent.

MORE DEVELOPMENTS ON THE WAY

One think is sure. The basement inventor isn’t going to run out of opportunity. Thermoelectric plates, to deliver power without batteries or outside source; new plastics like Delrin, which is tough enough to secure automobile parts; pinhead-size microphones that can make all kinds of mechanisms respond to the spoken command – the list of new developments that are almost wholly unexploited is growing daily.

Among them will you find the makings for your million-dollar invention?

[End of article]



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Barcelona football shirt

Peter Swann, University of Nottingham

As the Premiership juggernaut rumbles back to centre stage, bringing with it the usual impassioned debate about footballing philosophies and the respective merits of “parking the bus” and possession, spare a thought for innovation policy. Innovation is often defined as the successful application of new ideas to create wealth. But innovation policy is itself in need of innovation – and a footballing analogy goes a long way to explaining why.

Route-one football is especially associated with the traditional English game. The ball is booted directly from defence straight to the forwards, who try to control it and mount an attack on goal. Although it can sometimes lead to exciting surprises, the tactic is not held in high regard. It is considered uninspired, limited and sometimes comical.

Contrast this with tiki-taka – the head-spinning passing game associated with Spanish football and, in particular, with FC Barcelona. Here an attack is made up of a long sequence of passes involving defenders, midfield players, wingers and forwards. Anyone and everyone may be involved. In contrast to route-one, it is highly inventive and offers myriad routes to goal.

Business-centric

Most innovation policies are in the route-one mould. Their rationale is based on the assumption that innovation and wealth creation are business-centred and that the activities of other sectors of society – science, arts, education and so on – can contribute only if they have an impact on business.

Activities that have no such impact may be culturally interesting, the argument goes, but do not contribute to innovation and wealth. Like route-one football, such a view is profoundly unimaginative – and yet it goes almost entirely unchallenged.

In truth, there are many innovative activities that happen outside business, and many of them contribute to the creation of wealth and well-being. I call these common innovation.

Everyday life

Common innovation is the work of ordinary people in everyday life – individuals, households, clubs, communities – with well-being, not profit or revenue or market share, as the principal goal. While business innovation revels in the swirl of Joseph Schumpeter’s “perennial gale of creative destruction”, common innovation represents a gentle and benign breeze. Rather than destroy what is already there, it creates where there is nothing.

Common innovation is much more akin to tiki-taka, because it involves numerous positive interactions – in this case between different sectors of society and the economy. For example, intelligent consumers can draw on education, arts and sciences to consume wisely; the public and third sectors might draw on science to transform an industrial wasteland into a nature reserve; online health forums routinely draw on the goodwill of contributors to create valuable resources; and so on.

These interactions may take place at some distance from business, but they can still play a part in creating wealth and well-being. They accumulate over time to create wealth from an economy in which different sectors are in harmony with each other.

A narrow vision

Yet the route-one view dominates UK policy. While this clearly serves business very well, it is not necessarily best for society as a whole. And it seems that the UK government has become too business-centred to engage with alternative perspectives on innovation.

The route-one approach to innovation policy gives business an undue level of bargaining power. Business has not been slow to take advantage of this. Across the political spectrum there has been a sense of outrage that many of the largest and most profitable companies pay no corporation tax. And then there are the generous subsidies and grants given to companies – even some that pay no corporation tax at all.

The route-one approach can also be used to justify some very controversial policy proposals. Under its aegis, factors such as the natural environment, science, arts, education and health are deemed to create wealth only if they enhance business innovation and productivity.

From this perspective, parts of the country that are underperforming should fear for their future. A release of files in 2011 revealed that senior Conservative ministers sought to persuade Margaret Thatcher to “consider abandoning Liverpool to a fate of ‘managed decline’” after riots in 1981. They argued that spending public money on such “stony ground” would be like “trying to make water flow uphill”. Similar proposals have since been made for other cities, which show that a narrow conception of innovation and investment will only serve the interests of certain parts of the country and economy.

What businesses don’t do

Another major downside of such a narrow view of innovation policy is that we lose sight of the things that common innovation can do and which business innovation does not. A striking recent example has been the transformation of derelict terraced housing in Stoke-on-Trent, where the city council introduced a policy of selling off properties for £1 each and providing loans to local buyers who could commit to restoring them and so make a positive contribution to the community.

William Morris described commerce as “once the servant and now the master of civilisation”. A route-one approach to innovation policy only reinforces this transition. As we face continuing austerity, an ever-more unequal distribution of wealth and grave concerns about sustainability, it is time to give serious consideration to an own-goal in the making.The Conversation

Peter Swann, Emeritus Professor of Industrial Economics, University of Nottingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

inventor

By Martin Mann (First Published in February 1961)

Invented something?

This is the Great American Dream. Particularly something that will make at least a million dollars. Lots of people realize the idea/creation part of the dream. Every week the U.S. Patent Office issues 1,000 magnificently engraved certificates attesting to it. Some of them make money. A few hit the jackpot.

 

George Nelson, for example. In 1940 he was a mechanic bolting down deck plates in a San Francisco shipyard. Too slow for wartime. So he created a flux-filled stud and a semiautomatic gun for welding the stud to the ship’s frame. Together they eliminated a finicky drilling and tapping operation.

limo

The next year Nelson got three patents. By 1942 he was the Nelson Stud-Welding Corp. He hit up his friends for $16,000, sank $4,000 of his savings, and borrowed several thousands more. And the Nelson Stud-Welding Corp almost went broke.


 

One year later, however, the gross exceeded a million. In 1944 the company was sold for $15-million. Nelson’s personal share: $3-million.

So it does happen. Independent inventors-bucking the degree-loaded research teams in laboratory palaces – get two out of every five patents. More surprising, they win the lion’s share of the valuable patents. Sixty percent of the important inventions come from the loners working at home or in small companies.

Two young musicians started working on what became Kodachrome color film in the bathroom of a New York apartment; one employee of a two-bit St. Paul company invented Scotch tape; an obscure RAF officer created the jet engine; a couple of lab men at a small fabric-printing outfit in England discovered Dacron.

film developing
 

THE STAKES ARE HIGH – AND SO ARE THE ODDS AGAINST YOU

There’s a dark side to the picture, too. So many new ideas are born, and the struggle for acceptance is so fierce, that all but a very few languish and die without earning a nickel.

One respected broker, who has built a profitable business for himself by promoting other people’s inventions, confides that he serves about 1,000 clients a year. On the average, he completes a sale for three of those hopeful 1,000.

A GOOD INVENTION IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

You have to start with a good invention. (Naturally, yours is.) But that’s the small part of the job. Commercializing it requires more ingenuity and hard work than the original idea did. Today public and private agencies are anxious to help you. New products and processes are in greater demand than ever before.

UNCLE SAM OFFERS INVENTORS A HELPING HAND

At least three Federal agencies make an effort to help independent inventors: The patent Office, besides offering advice on patent procedure and a roster of patent attorneys, make a stab at publicizing inventions. When your patent is issued, it is described in the widely read Official Gazette. For $3, you can have it summarized in a special list of patents available for sale.

The Small Business Administration (local offices in several cities) gives advice and also publishes a listing of inventions for sale.

The National Inventors Council (Washington 25, D.C.) hunts ideas for the Armed Forces, which take over the development of promising ones.

BUT HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT SELLING IT?

Anyone who counts on Government listings to fix him for life with royalty checks is more likely to end up broke.

inventor on bench
 

A successful inventor has to be a persistent salesman.

You can advertise your invention (wall Street Journal, New York Times Sunday financial section), but cheaper and closer to the bull’s-eye is letters direct to manufacturers (address the patent department). Your chances? A survey of top patent counsels by the industrial magazine Design News revealed this: You’ll get polite consideration from two out of three companies. However, only one in six encourages outsiders to submit ideas, and a bare 1 in 20 actively solicits them. Among the least receptive: automobile and airplane manufacturers.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT COMPANY TO APPROACH

This is probably the biggest secret of success. The pros go after firms that can sell the product, not the ones equipped to manufacture it. A leather-goods outfit will be less interested in a new idea for tool cases than a tool manufacturer. The tool company already has customers for the cases and gets somebody to make them up.

This problem solves itself if you invent an improvement for a standard product. Jacob Rabinow, the genius who developed the magnetic clutch, knew where to offer licenses for his self-adjusting watch movement (a tricky linkage automatically resets the regulator every time you correct the hand setting). Only watch and clockmakers would be interested. They were. It is now a feature of many wristwatches and auto clocks.

Things worked out differently for Walter Haskins. He was sick in bed one day but kept busy on the phone. While juggling phone directories, he thought up Redyref – the rack that suspends a row of books on a rod so that any one book can be swiveled up to flop open, atop the backs of the others. The obvious customer for this was the telephone company (for the rows of directories at busy public boots).

Haskins made his pitch and was cold-shouldered. Not only that but when he sold a few to hotels and offices the phone company angrily ordered them removed. One building owner retorted that if Redyref went, the phones went, too, winning the skirmish. But total victory didn’t come until Haskins interested W. & J. Sloane, the home-and-office-furnishings outfit. One of its big customers is AT&T. Having sold the firm that already served his ultimate consumer, Haskins had it made.

ONE WAY: SPEND MONEY TO MAKE MONEY

Invention brokers will take on the job of pushing your idea for you. They usually charge a flat fee plus a small commission on the sale. The honest ones (and there is plenty of the other kind) tell you frankly what they do for the fee: circularize manufacturers who might be interested, follow up on those who respond to the enquiry, and finally attempt to close a deal.

This panned out for Fred F. Cannon. A small-scale contractor, he created a post-hole digger, built a couple for his own use, and found that they saved time and manpower. As soon as the patent was issued, Cannon signed up with K.O. Kessler of Fremont, Ohio, one of the better-known brokers.

Kessler’s staff mimeographed a page-long letter describing the digger and sent copies to some 30 prospects culled mainly from a private file. Most (including the Government’s National Inventors Council) replied no, they didn’t see any great advantage over diggers already on the market.

A few were interested in a closer look. To each of them, Kessler sent a “folio”: a folder containing a Photostat of the patent, photographs of models, and a discussion of the merits of the machine.

This brought more than a nibble. Roper Manufacturing Co. had a contract to equip a fleet of jeeps for shipment abroad, and the Cannon digger was the accessory they were looking for. Cannon didn’t get rich (on this idea, anyway), but he did clear several thousand dollars in royalties.

ANOTHER WAY IS TO SET UP YOUR OWN BUSINESS

The biggest returns (and risks) await the inventor who goes into business for himself.

Dr. David Richman gave up dentistry (after an automobile accident) to sell plastic swimming pools in Florida. Then he contrived a gun that sprayed fiber-glass onto pools, boats, and molds. Two years ago he set up shop in a concrete-block building in Hialeah, investing some of his own money and raising more in small bites.

The gun is an efficient tool. Dr. Richman is a powerful salesman. He sold 100 units. The price of the units were high enough to interest Wall Street. The underwriters floated some of the stock to enable Spray-Bilt Inc. to expand its business. Dr. Richman’s original stake grew by 33 times.

Only a going concern can expand by selling stock to the public. You have to get started on money raised privately. Maxwell Mangold, the chunky, fast-talking Wall Streeter who set up Spray-Bilt’s stock issue, explains where to find that dough. Look to lawyers and accountants, he advises. They can introduce you to well-heeled citizens.

WHY INVESTMENT DOLLARS SOMETIMES COME EASY

The fat cats are ready and eager to ante up because of the way the Federal income-tax laws are rigged.

fat cats

Uncle Sam plays heads-I-win-tails-you-lose with high-bracket taxpayers – and willingly takes the short end.

Take Mr. Gotrocks who earns so much money he is in the 80-percent tax bracket. If he places $10,000 of income in the bank, Internal Revenue will demand $8,000 of that nice round sum. Suppose instead he invests the 10 grand in your invention. Maybe the invention, a power-operated buggy whip, proves not very commercial. Old Gotrocks deducts this $10,000 loss from his tax return and is out of pocket only $2,000.

But the sweet part appears if your creation is a never-dulling razor blade, and really takes off. Gotrocks’ investment could easily double in value. His $10,000 profit would be a capital gain, taxed at only 25 percent. Now he can keep $7,500. This deal works fine for everybody: The inventor gets capital, the Government covers most of the losses, and the investor gets to keep most of his profits.

HOW MUCH CAN YOU MAKE IF YOU’RE LUCKY?

Bendix paid $649,000 plus a percentage for James Rand’s patents on the Economat washing machine (the one that squeezes clothes inside a plastic bag). Only an old pro like Rand can drive that kind of a bargain; ironically, the machine never caught on, and Bendix later sold out its appliance business.

A more realistic deal is an initial payment – against a royalty of three to five percent (on selling price).

If you beat the bushes for backing for a company of your own, you quickly find out that it won’t be your personal company. The investors and their managers expect an 80 to 90 percent share of the new fir. They take a big risk and shoulder 80 to 90 percent of the responsibility for ultimate success.

The inventor’s cut may seem small, but it can turn out to be a nourishing slice. George Nelson’s piece of Stud-Welding Corp was just 20 percent. Twenty percent of $15 million is $3 million.

innovation process

by Suriati Zainal Abidin, Sany Sanuri Bin Mokhtar, and Rushami Zien bin Yusoff

College of Business 

Universiti Utara Malaysia 

Sintok, Malaysia

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 

ABSTRACT

Innovation process is one of crucial activity in the innovation implementation of an organization. It is the heart in managing the whole process innovation management. Numerous studies have been conducted and this indirectly established reliable measurement for innovation research. In simple terms, innovation process would describe the ‘how’ innovation is undertaken into organization which involved the management, employees and also collaboration between organization with suppliers and customers. Some may refer it as process, activities, phases, stages, creative circle, cyclic, or technical progress. Nevertheless, it is indeed strategic and highly integrated process. Due to the complexity, researcher is required to determine suitable measurement. Previous studies have produced various measures which is independent and complex. Therefore, in order to confront with this issue, innovation process requires a balance set of innovation metrics. These metrics would assist research process turn out to be systematic. This paper has proposed two kinds of measurements: objective and subjective innovation process measures. The objectives measures establish result oriented style while subjective measures refer to the how to manage each process in innovation. Some reviews on innovation process definitions, characteristics and activities are presented so that it would be easy for management, practitioners as well as academicians to tailor with their innovation management and research objective.

KEYWORDS: Innovation, innovation process, measurement, output, input, objective and subjective measures. 

 

1. INTRODUCTION

Innovation is everybody matters. Importance of innovation discourse leaps out from the organization mission, innovative team, value creation to customer, survival and growth, competitiveness and to the consumption of everyday gadgets ranging from products and services. Although much has been argued by scholars and practitioners, the innovation process become the heart of the success of innovation implementation. Innovation process is viewed as a sequence of activities involved in turning ideas and possibilities into reality [1]. Due to the crucial role of innovation process, organization needs to accentuate the measurement of innovation process so that the result of innovation is managed and observable. Emphasize to measure innovation is always be the priority task and is proven by most of the high achievers companies [2].

This paper reviewed the innovation process measures from the perspective of objective and subjective measurement. The following discussions will point out why we need to measure innovation process and highlighted several measures that would contribute to innovation research. Furthermore, the highlights would be beneficial points to ponder when researcher intent to embark on a study. The need to measure innovation process occur because the strategic intend of innovation itself varies across organization [3]. It is reported that organization with high growth generated from the innovation projects measured their innovation portfolio and use metric across the whole innovation process [2].

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

The complexity of innovation process demand researcher to understand the details of innovation process [4]. In this context, understanding definitions of innovation process is essential since this would assist researcher to apply on whether objective or subjective measures. According to Gerybadze, Hommel [5], innovation process is describes as a phases of processes started from strategy planning, idea generation, screening, project development, market test, production, market introduction and innovation controlling. It is noted that the definition has showed the long route of innovation process. Among others, innovation process is also referred as cyclic process [6, 7] and integrate organization mechanism [8]. However, this definition is described in a more simplified view by other scholars such as [9] and [1]. These authors have identified three main stages of innovation process: generate, select and implement. As innovation process involved several stages about development in innovation activities [10], a procedure is needed to evaluate, screen the ideas, establish process from their inception to commercialization [11]. Therefore, by identified and utilized proper definition of innovation process, it might be easier for researcher to use a better measurement in their research.

In establish the working measures for innovation process, common characteristics, inter-relationship of innovation process and deliverables must be identified [4]. Gupta [4], has proposed three measures to show innovation performance at various stages: CEO Recognition of Employees for Exceptional Value Creation, Employee Ideas for Improvement and Innovation Sales for new products, services or solutions. Other measures are also included such as allocation of time in percentage for research innovation management, new idea deployment degree of differentiation, time to innovate, and rate of innovation. Besides the characteristics, the measurement for innovation process is explored through different types of innovation process generation. This has been simplified into five types of innovation process generation: technology push, need pull, coupling model, integrated model and system integration and networking model [12]. The open innovation (six generation of innovation process) is later add to this category where the internal and external of ideas and paths to market is combined for new technology development [13]. In this context, objective measurements cover the science and technology indicators such as patent while the subjective measurement cover the soft factors that related to the management such as organizational integration and user-producer relationship [12].

According to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] [14], there is are enormous variation in innovation process measurement from the perspective of objectives, organization, cost, used of research and others. This is because the tendency of firm to innovate depended on technological opportunity, technological capability (labor force) and firm characteristics. Hence, three importance areas to measure innovation process are strategic, R&D and non R&D [14]. A study of how firms influence capacity to innovate and resulted performance, has proposed input indicators to measure the resources for innovation process and process indicators to reflect the innovation process management system [15]. Another approach is focused on the input, process and output measures of the innovation implementation however this only limited to objective measurements which are divided into financial, customer perspectives, resources, learning and specific service measures [9]. 

Due to the strategic intend of innovation itself varies across organization, innovation process is defined as ideation, evaluation, selection, development and implementation of new or improved products or services that must tie with the intended objective. These objectives include an increment numbers of new ideas, its quality, efficiency in the implementation of quality ideas as well as improvement in result achieved from the new ideas implementated [3]. From the perspective of common accounting practices, Return on Product Development Expense (RoPDE) is used to measure those intended objectives. In this context, RoPDE is derived from the percentage of gross margin (GM) from expenses that fully burdened enterprise [3].

A survey which is responded by senior executives acknowledged to measure innovation process rigorously [16]. The survey has used the ‘innovation-to-cash’ process which considered all efforts required from to take an idea and turn it into cash (inputs, processes and output) [16]. Other approach used to visualize the innovation activity is the funnel approach which consist of nine stages: strategic thinking, portfolio management, research, ideation, insight, targeting, innovation development, market development and sales [17]. Principally, this approach works in an organization but require extensive attention to matters inside the funnel. Although the method portrayed nine elements, the one that referred to innovation process is from the research process to the market development stage whereby each of the stages is proposed with suitable measures [17]. 

The characteristic of innovation process is identified as one area alongside with strategic leadership, competitive intelligence and management of technology that will determine the innovation success [18]. In this context, innovation process is viewed as the extent to which companies support the desired innovation activities. As a result, innovation process measures is established through ten areas by using the seven-point Likert type scale [18]. In a study of product innovation, Parthasarthy and Hammond [8] has elaborated innovation process through three types of integration mechanism: functional integration, tool integration and external integration. This is because a high degree of integration and innovation input will benefit innovation frequency. Functional is an operational activities such as job design, task goals, procedures and rules of work routine. Tool integration connected the operation of design and manufacturing tools via computer. External integration link firm operation with suppliers and customers for product development activities [8]. In addressing the measure for technological innovation firm, Flor and Oltra [19] has reviewed several indicators which is based on inputs or output of the innovation process and sources of primary or secondary information. It is found that the information from manager’s self assessment is useful for product and process innovation and the literature-based innovation output is best method to identify product innovator [19].

3. DISCUSSION

Based on the arguments from previous studies, the innovation process measurement is summarized into the following table. From the perspective of objective measurement, Table 1 indicated that most of the measures would emphasize on the physical number or output at the end of each stage These output include number of employees, ideas, products, services, solutions, projects, working time and patents occurred. In addition, measurements were also established in terms of percentage and allocation of R&D expenditure, cost, sales and training hours involved during each stages and acquisition of machinery and external knowledge. This information was prepared in numerical value, dichotomous scale and ratio scale.

Table 1. Innovation Process – Objective Measurement

AUTHOR/S

Gupta [4]

INNOVATION PROCESS MEASURES

1. CEO Recognition of Employees for Exceptional Value Creation 

2. Employee Ideas for Improvement and Innovation 

3. Sales for new products, services or solutions

Chan, Musso [2] 

1. Number of idea or concepts in the pipeline 

2. R&D spending as a percentage of sales 

3. Number of R&D projects 

4. Number of people actively devoted to innovation

Organisation for 

Economic Co-operation 

and Development 

[OECD] [14] 

Dichotomous scale : Yes or No

During the three years (e.g: 2002-2004), did your enterprise engage in the following innovation activities:

1. In-house R&D – Creative work undertaken within your enterprise to increase the stock of knowledge and its use to devise new and improved products and processes (including software development)

2. Extramural R&D – Same activities as above but perform by other companies, public or private research organization of purchased by your firm.

3. Acquisition of advanced machinery, equipment and computer hardware or software.

4. Acquisition of other external knowledge such as purchase or licensing patent and non-patented invention and other types of knowledge from other organization. 

5. Internal and external training for personnel for new or improved products and processes. 

6. Market introduction of innovations 

7. Other preparation in implementing new product and processes.

Ratio Scale

Please estimate the amount of expenditure for each of the following four innovation activities in 

2004 only (include personnel and related cost): 

1. In-house R&D (include capital expenditures on building and equipment) __________ (in RM’000) 

2. Acquisition of extramural R&D ___________ (in RM’000) 

3. Acquisition of machinery, equipment and software (exclude expenditures on equipment for R&D)_______(in RM’000) 

4. Acquisition of other external knowledge ______(in RM’000) 

5. Total of these four innovation expenditure categories____ (in RM’000) 

Carayannis and 

Provance [15]

Ratio Scale 

Innovation Process Inputs: 

1. Sales of share of R&D expenditure (%) 

2. Sales share of internal venture capital (%) 

3. Average training days for employees (%) 

4. Average training days for employees (%) 

5. Top management working time on Innovation (%)

Malinoski and Perry [3] 

Return on Product Development Expenses (RoPDE) 

RoPDE = (GM – PDE) / PDE 

Where: 

GM = gross profit by subtracting cost of sales from revenue or cost of goods sold (material, labor and overhead associated with delivering a production unit) 

PDE= include engineering, technician, product marketing and associated management labor expenses (benefits, facilities, IT, depreciation).

Andrew, Haanaes [16]

Input measures: 

1. Number of new ideas 

2. Business unit investments by type of innovation 

3. R&D as a percentage of sales 

4. Full-time technical staff and how (and where)it is used 

Processes measures 

1. Idea to decision time 

2. Decision to launch time 

3. Project type and launch date 

4. Sum of projected net present value 

Outputs 

1. Patents granted 

2. Launches by business segment 

3. Percentage of sales and profit from new products 

Innovation ROI 

Morris [17]

Research Stage: 

1. Number of customer groups that have been examined 

2. Application of research result in new products, services and processes 

3. Extent of participation from throughout organization in the research process 

4. Time invested in research 

5. Money invested in research 

Ideation Stage: 

1. Number of idea developed 

2. Number of ideas contributed by our staff 

3. Number of idea introduced 

4. Percentage of ideas from outside 

5. Number of people inside the organization who are participating in the ideation process 

6. Number of ideas collected in the idea gathering system 

7. Number of collected ideas that were developed further 

8. Number of collected ideas that were implemented 

Insight Stage: 

1. Unsuccessful technology and customer mash-ups attempted 

2. Successful technology and customer mash-up achieved 

Targeting Stage: 

1. Percent of investment in non-core innovation projects. 

2. Total funds invested in non-core innovation projects 

3. Senior management time invested in growth innovation 

Innovation Development Stage: 

1. Prototyping speed 

2. Number of prototypes per new product 

3. Average time it takes to get from Stage 1 to Stage 5 

4. Number of patents applied for 

5. Number of patents granted 

6. Percent of ideas that are funded for development 

7. Percent of ideas that are killed 

Market Development Stage: 

1. Return on marketing investment 

2. Number of new customers added 

3. Growth rate of customer base

From the perspective of subjective measurement, Table 2 indicated that measures of innovation process were established by structured questions on how each activity was performing in each stage. It is noted that the details of innovation process are reflected in terms of how the new idea is managed, how to control innovation project, employee participation and communication, how the new product developed and marketed and finally the integration between internal organization mechanisms, external (customers and suppliers) and manufacturing processes (tools and materials). One important point that could be observed from both Table 1 and Table 2 is the tendency of objective measurement to depict the result oriented style in terms of input, processes and output measures while the subjective measurement deliberated the descriptive style which elaborates each of the activity into the innovation management approach. This argument is in line with the proposed study conducted on integrated metric for innovation measurement [20]. Although it is limited to the R&D innovation, the subjective measurement for innovation process lies on the R&D Management Capability, Integration, Openness and R&D Environment. These measures are analyzed towards the impact on products and delivery to the organization.

Table 2. Innovation Process – Subjective Measurement

AUTHOR/S

Gupta [4], Carayannis and 

Provance [15] 

INNOVATION PROCESS MEASURES

Ordinal Scale – 5 point Likert Scale ranging from is always done / clearly organized to seldomly used 

Process oriented measures: 

Design of innovation management 

1. Idea evaluation 

2. Concept test 

3. Profitability Analysis 

4. Innovation strategy 

5. Construction / development 

6. Ex post analysis 

Project management and controlling 

1. Project management employed 

2. Project controlling employed 

Involvement of marketing in innovation process 

Guimaraes [18] 

Using 7 point Likert-type scale ranging from extremely below average to extremely above average. 

1. All significant innovation must conform to company objectives 

2. All affected departments participate in the innovation process 

3. Individual employee input is important 

4. Customer input is considered important 

5. Business partners input is considered important 

6. Ability to balance risk taking with cost/benefit 

7. Clearly define measures to monitor progress 

8. Innovation objectives and progress are clearly communicated 

9. Responding quickly to required change 

10. Responding effectively to required change

Parthasarthy and 

Hammond [8] 

Functional integration: 

How are your product development activities organized? (1: strongly disagree, 4: somewhat 

agree, 7: strongly agree). 

1. Our product teams are always organized with diverse functional specialists. 

2. In our firm, communication amongR&D,manufacturing, and marketing groups is always 

formal and in writing (reverse coded). 

3. In our firm, R&D single-handedly decides what new technologies will be pursued (reverse 

coded). 

4. In our firm, manufacturing engineers actively participate in product design. 

5. We rotate design and manufacturing engineers frequently. 

6. We always undertake product development sequentially, from R&D to production to 

marketing, to achieve better control over each activity (reverse coded). 

7. In our firm, top management plays a supportive role in product development. 

8. Our reward system is more group-based than individual-based. 

9. Our structure and control mechanisms strongly promote cooperation among R&D, 

production, and marketing groups. 

External integration 

Describe your unit’s relationship with suppliers and customers (1: strongly disagree, 4: 

somewhat agree, 7: strongly agree). 

1. We always consult suppliers/customers on new product ideas. 

2. We always include suppliers in our product development teams. 

3. We always include customers in our product development teams. 

4. We freely share technical ideas with suppliers and customers. 

5. We always seek supplier/customer collaboration for developing new technologies. 

6. We always assist suppliers in improving component quality. 

Tool integration 

To what extent are the following manufacturing processes computer-integrated? (1: not 

integrated, 4: moderately integrated, 7: completely integrated). 

1. Product design/development and production planning. 

2. Product planning and component manufacturing. 

3. Component manufacturing and assembly. 

4. Assembly and quality control. 

5. Quality control and materials handling. 

6. Materials handling and storage/distribution.

4. CONCLUSION

Based on the above reviews and arguments, it is noted that innovation process is one of important part that contribute to the success of the whole implementation of organizational innovation. Due to its combination of complex activities, the need to come out with a good measurement is highly appreciated in the innovation research. One of the approaches is to divide between the objective and subjective kind of measurement. In establishing these indicators, researcher needs to identify the suitable operational definition of innovation process, characteristics (firm level, departmental level, group level or individual level) and innovation process generation. Nevertheless, being a researcher the rule of parsimonious must be applied due to the cost and time constraint. Hence, it is good to decide the measurements that are suitable, sufficient and efficiently used within the context of study. 

REFERENCES

[1] Bessant, J. and J. Tidd, Innovation and Entrepreneurship2007, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 

[2] Chan, V., C. Musso, and V. Shankar, Assessing innovation metrics, M.G.S. Results, Editor 2008, McKinsey & Company: Philadelphia. 

[3] Malinoski, M. and G.S. Perry How Do I Measure “Innovation”?!? 2011. 1-5. 

[4] Gupta, P. Firm Specific Measures of Innovation. Measures of Innovation Proposal, 2007. 1-10. 

[5] Gerybadze, A., et al., Innovation and International Corporate Growth, ed. s. edition 2010, Heidelberg: Springer. 452. 

[6] Bernstein, B. and P.J. Singh, Innovation generation process. European Journal of Innovation Management 2008. 11(3): p. 366-388. 

[7] Björk, J., P. Boccardelli, and M. Magnusson, Ideation Capabilities for Continuous Innovation. Creativity And Innovation Management, 2010. 19 (4): p. 385-396. 

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[9] Goffin, K. and R. Mitchell, Innovation Management Strategy And Implementation Using the Pentathlon Framework2005, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 

[10] Ortt, J.R. and P.A.v.d. Duin, The evolution of innovation management towards contextual innovation. European Journal of Innovation Management, 2008. 11(4): p. 522-538. 

[11] Desouza, K.C., et al., Crafting organizational innovation processes. Innovation: management, policy & practice 2009. 11: p. 6-33. 

[12] Dodgson, M. and S. Hinze, Indicators used to measure the innovation process: defects and possible remedies. Research Evaluation, 2000. 9(2): p. 101-114. 

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berlin

by: Stoyan Tanev, Mette Præst Knudsen, Tanja Bisgaard, and Merethe Stjerne Thomsen

“Innovation policy design has to be based on a double principle, namely, the existence of real problems hindering innovativeness of an economy, and the ability of public agents to proactively solve or mitigate them.”

– Charles Edquist, Leif Hommen, and Maureen McKelvey Innovation and Employment: Process versus Product Innovation

 

The objective of the present article is to discuss innovation policy issues related to three emerging innovation paradigms: user-driven innovation, open innovation, and value cocreation. It provides a summary of insights based on innovation policy practices and challenges in Denmark. The choice of Danish innovation policy practices is not accidental. In 2008 Denmark implemented 40 different national innovation programs by allocating about 400 million euros. Since the three emerging paradigms have become globally relevant, the discussion of Danish policy development challenges and practices is expected to be insightful for innovation experts from other developed countries that are currently dealing with the adoption of these paradigms. 


INTRODUCTION

Market competition is becoming increasingly driven by new products, processes, business, and organisational resources that integrate inputs received from customers, suppliers, universities, or other external partners in multiple forms, such as new market insights, new technological knowledge, or through specific customer interactions. Von Hippel (1978; http://tinyurl.com/3aoq3uv) explains this as a move from a manufacturer-active paradigm, where the manufacturer of goods survey customers needs using market data analysis to identify new product ideas, to the customer-active paradigm, where the manufacturer more actively screens customer needs and generates product ideas based on these customer inputs. This fundamental paradigmatic shift implied a new understanding of innovation management leading to the emergence of at least three new innovation paradigms: user-driven innovation, open innovation, and value co-creation.

USER-DRIVEN INNOVATION

There is no unique way of summarizing the different approaches to user-driven innovation (von Hippel, 2006: http://tinyurl.com/3trcqff; Buur and Matthews, 2008: http://tinyurl.com/5whluou). One example of such summary was provided by the Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority’s division for research and analysis focusing on the development of proposals for business and innovation policy. It defined a user-driven innovation framework consisting of four main areas: user tests, user exploration, user participation, and user innovation. User innovation takes place when companies actively involve experts or advanced users in some of the key steps of the innovation process. In many cases, users are more knowledgeable on specific areas regarding specific products or services (von Hippel, 2006; FORA, 2010). Here, users are actually able to innovate for themselves and not only provide feedback to a specialized manufacturer (von Hippel, 2006). The user innovation area includes the lead user approach as suggested by Eric von Hippel (2001; http://tinyurl.com/3dwqxlw). Lead users can be found based on a systematic search using well defined criteria or within the activities of existing innovation-driven communities. They are users (but not necessarily customers) that are ahead of a trend by having spent the time and resources to develop their own solution and at the same time would have a much greater use benefit from the commercial implantation of a given innovation. Companies gain insights from lead users and therefore have better chances to overcome the challenges with “sticky information” (von Hippel, 1994; http://tinyurl.com/3tsw3t3), which is information that is costly to acquire, transfer, and use in a new location.

The user innovation approach also includes the development of innovation toolkits (Jeppesen, 2005: http://tinyurl.com/6hezgg8; von Hippel, 2001; Piller & Walcher, 2006: http://tinyurl.com/6zfykzh). Companies using toolkits set up a framework where the users are empowered to create their own products with the features they need. Well-designed innovation toolkits could be of great benefit for both users and manufacturers in sectors where the user needs are rapidly changing (von Hippel, 2001) and it is therefore more difficult for the manufacturers to keep ensuring that their products meet the actual needs of their customers. 

The next steps in user-driven innovation need to embrace a more holistic perspective on user heterogeneity and a more refined systematic perspective on using “technology” as an innovation enabler and not merely as a “feature” of the market offer. Technology goes beyond its integration into specific products and services and should be seen as a driver for innovation by the facilitation of real-time analytic capabilities during the collection and processing of larger amounts of data and, at the same time, as providing a platform focusing on the participatory and interactive aspects of innovation processes. 

OPEN INNOVATION

Recent views on the open innovation paradigm argue for the involvement of a wider range of actors, including firms, universities, and research and technology organisations that may be either public or private. The paradigm has received significant interest from the business community as well as from researchers that have articulated a set of relevant questions but are just beginning the search for the answers. “Firms that commercialise external (as well as internal) ideas by deploying outside (as well as in-house) pathways to the market” have adopted the open innovation model (Chesbrough, 2003; http://tinyurl.com/455m3q6). Chesbrough and Crowther (2006; http://tinyurl.com/ 4xjse3r) deepen the understanding of openness by pointing out that open innovation involves flows in two directions; first “the inbound open innovation which is the practice of leveraging the discoveries of others”, and second outbound open innovation where firms “look for external organizations with business models that are better suited to commercialize a given technology than the firm’s own business model”. Simard and West (2006; http://tinyurl.com/3oftvn2) point out that “in open innovation, some firms need to identify external knowledge and incorporate it into the firm; others seek external markets for their existing innovations”. 

Fundamentally, open innovation leads to: i) the reactivation of internal capabilities by complementing them with external inputs, and ii) the identification of potential new sources of returns from projects that no longer fits firms’ strategies. 

Pisano and Verganti (2008; http://tinyurl.com/67bcd3b) distinguish between the truly open collaboration that can include virtually anyone in the architecture (the participant decides to participate, as seen, for example, in crowd sourcing) and closed networks, where (normally) it is a company or existing consortium that decides whom to select and include in the innovative activity. The first type of network innovation, involving companies, academic researchers, and others, has increased and many central corporate laboratories have become more open to various types of cooperation of this type. Nonetheless, it is generally still the latter approach that is seen as providing the primary evidence for open innovation practices. 

VALUE CO-CREATION

Value co-creation is an emerging business, marketing and innovation paradigm describing how customers and end users could be involved as active participants in the design and development of personalized products, services, and experiences (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004: http://tinyurl.com/3up3mhr; Etgar, 2007: http://tinyurl.com/3h75f4c; Payne et al., 2008: http://tinyurl.com /3by88xx). It is based on the design and development of customer participation platforms, providing firms with the technological and human resources, tools and mechanisms to benefit from the engagement experiences of individuals and communities as a new basis of value creation. The active participation of customers and end users is enabled through multiple interaction channels, very often by means of technological platforms through the Internet (Sawhney et al., 2005: http://tinyurl.com/62sm59n; Nambisan and Nambisan, 2008: http://tinyurl.com/6dwt78w; Nambisan and Baron, 2009: http://tinyurl.com/6bpnnw7). The advancement of information and communications technologies (ICT) enabled customers to be much more active, knowledgeable, globally aware, and willing to use interactive virtual environments to personalize the existing and shape new products and services. The multiple channel open interaction and dialogue between the firm and its customers, between the firm and its suppliers and partners, between the different customers, and between the customers and firms’ suppliers and partners, constitute a fundamental part of the value co-creation philosophy. The emergence of the value co-creation paradigm creates unprecedented opportunities for firms in dealing with the impacts of the ongoing globalization processes, which include a much faster degree of technological change; the necessity to be more innovative and, therefore more competitive, by accessing and managing globally distributed resources; and the need to enhance their international competitiveness by addressing multiple markets and heterogeneous customer needs within and across different market segments (Prahalad and Krishnan, 2008; http://tinyurl.com/4yowma2). The ability of value co-creation platforms to enable the personalization of new products and services challenges the operational regime of traditional marketing by moving it to a new service-dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2004; 

http://tinyurl.com/3enpsr7), which redefines the terms of existing market segmentation techniques (von Hippel, 2006) and enables firms to address a broader market with a higher degree of customer satisfaction.

The new dominant logic of marketing entails a new vision of the topology and the dynamics of the entire value creation system (Hearn and Pace, 2006; http://tinyurl.com/ 4u9ldxn). Such vision promotes a new understanding of the customer centricity of traditional value networks which are now considered dynamically, as people-driven webs of potential value configurations that could be actualized on the basis of specific customer demands (Norman and Ramirez, 1993: http://tinyurl.com/3j9d6cy; Flint and Mentzer, 2006: http://tinyurl.com/3de4uvw; Gattorna, 2009. The dynamic recognition and alignment to highly heterogeneous customers and customer groups requires the development of appropriate technological infrastructures that are able to seamlessly integrate contributions from globally distributed resources to real-time analytics information and flexible business processes (Prahalad and Krishnan, 2008). Technology, therefore, plays a double role in value co-creation: it could be part of the specific products and services, but more importantly, it becomes a key enabler of co-creation experiences independently of the industry sector and of the nature of the particular products and services. In other words, it is becoming even more pervasive than before, although within a completely different context. 

A COMPARISON OF THE THREE PARADIGMS

Comparing the three paradigms is a challenging task since they seem to express different and, at the same time, interrelated visions about business innovation practices. They could be considered as three complementary perspectives on an emerging stronger market driven vision about the management of innovations. The three perspectives can be visualized by means of a multi-level framework (Warnke et al., 2008; http://tinyurl.com/3w47b6w) that distinguishes three analytical levels: innovation niches, regimes, and landscape (Figure 1). The first micro-level is that of user innovation niches – specific places, or smaller technological sectors, in which novelties are created and developed, building on learning processes among producers and users of a specific product or technology. Such niches are the most appropriate places to position the user driven innovation paradigm. The second level is the meso-level of regimes. A regime refers to the dominant practices, rules, and technologies, including the logic of appropriability pertaining to the domain, giving it stability as a platform for guiding decision-making. There could be different types of sub-regimes, such as technology regimes, production regimes, marketing regimes, user regimes, or policy regimes (Warnke et al., 2008).

user driven innovation

Figure 1. Multi-level representation of the user-driven innovation (UDI), value co-creation (VCC), and open innovation paradigms

The second meso-level seems to be the proper place for the positioning of the value co-creation paradigm with its dominant customer participation and marketing orientation building on linkages to the first innovation niche level. The third level is the socio-technical landscape (i.e., the wider context or environment in which the regimes are embedded). The landscape consists of the social values, policy beliefs, worldviews, political and business coalitions, and dominant IP appropriability culture, but also the physical and geographic settings, prices and costs, trade patterns, and incomes in which processes of regime change are embedded. In our view, this is the place to position the open innovation paradigm. It can be seen as the existential fabric of the first two levels that could be potentially influenced in the long-term by the transformative changes in the dominant marketing regime empowered by advancements in specific user innovation niches. 

POLICY ISSUES RELEVANT TO THE THREE PARADIGMS

The emergence of the new innovation paradigms definitely challenges existing national innovation policies. At the same time, while the three paradigms are relatively new worldwide, some countries and organisations did already develop some initial policy responses aimed at their more systematic promotion. The insights suggested here were derived from an analysis of the recommendations discussed by policy related organizations in Denmark. The focus on Denmark was driven by the existence of multiple national innovation programs that provide a good basis for reflection on policy issues. For example, the Danish program for user-driven innovation aimed to strengthen the diffusion of methods for user-driven innovation by focusing on a broader, multiple-stakeholder innovation perspective. The program had a yearly budget of 13.4 million euros and ran for four years between 2007 and 2010. It was administered by the Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority, which is part of the Danish Ministry for Economic and Business Affairs. After looking at the existing Danish policy framework, five areas were found to be particularly relevant to the three emerging innovation paradigms. These areas are: 

1. Innovation support (targeted innovation programs)

2. Innovation networks (matchmaking between companies and in some cases knowledge institutions)

3. Education and competencies (the development of new skills related to innovation)

4. Entrepreneurship (enhancing the creation and growth of new companies)

5. Intellectual property (IP) issues

The five areas are not unique to the Danish innovation environment. Therefore their discussion will be highly relevant for other developed countries dealing with the implementation of the three emerging innovation paradigms. 

1. INNOVATION SUPPORT

National innovation policy strategies emerge within the context of the different innovation programs that are offered by various ministries. While there are usually multiple programs focusing on innovation, most often the dominant perspective is technological. Such dominance implies the need of broadening the innovation policy development perspective by, first, adopting a more holistic business innovation philosophy and, second, by promoting practices enabling the adoption of the three emerging innovation paradigms. For example, promoting mechanisms enabling and enhancing users’ participation in innovation by creating relevant infrastructures and platforms has thus far not been an area of any substantial policy focus and could become a relevant innovation policy area to target in the future.

2. INNOVATION NETWORKS

Policy organizations highlight the need to foster networks and partnerships among companies, as well as between companies, the public sector, and other research organisations. Typically, innovation networks are seen as part of a vision that has two main targets: i) more innovative businesses, and ii) an enhanced  knowledge-sharing mechanism between public and private institutions. While most networks are sector specific, there are already multiple examples of networks created around the experimentation with new innovation methods. On average, the total funding received by innovation-related networks has increased over the last few years. However, to enhance the ongoing emergence of the three paradigms, a much more structured governance of the networks should be used (Pisano and Verganti, 2008). The focus on the need for more efficient network governance is a key issue across the developed world. 

3. EDUCATION AND COMPETENCIES 

Most of the developed countries need to enhance their educational systems by gearing them towards the creation of new skills and competencies that could enable or enhance user and employee involvement in innovation processes. The problem is that educational systems usually fall outside of the ministries that formulate innovation policy. In addition, any potential changes in the educational system would only underline the need to formulate broader national innovation strategies cutting across and integrating the efforts of the various ministries. While there has been a stress on the need to add entrepreneurship to the teaching agenda in schools and universities, little attention has been paid to preparing graduates for the newly emerging types of workplaces and innovation tasks. Fortunately, there is a visible trend in the development of program components to teach students how to work in multidisciplinary teams and obtain new skills that will enable them to be innovative employees and leaders.

4. ENTREPRENEURSHIP 

During the last decade, entrepreneurship has become a hot topic for policymakers worldwide. Many developed countries perform relatively well in terms of the amount of new companies that have been formed. In addition, there is a growing trend related to the development and implementation of innovative business creation programs. However, there is a common weakness when it comes to both sustaining the businesses and enabling growth among startup companies. There does not seem to be a clear understanding of the type of policies that are necessary to create innovative companies by enabling them to become globally successful and ensuring efficient job creation and stability. 

5. IP ISSUES 

Creating a new system for IP and copyright rules, as well as the adoption of a more open entrepreneurial orientation by both new and existing firms, were also mentioned as relevant policy areas that could enhance the adoption of open innovation practices. While reforming the IP system is vital to enhancing the adoption of new innovation paradigms, it is not an issue to be dealt with on a purely national level. The entire discussion of intellectual property rights must remain high on the political agenda. Why is this the case? To answer this question, one could point out that a patent owner is granted the right to exclude others from commercially using, selling, offering, and keeping in stock an invention as specified in the claim section of the patent (Junghans and Levy, 2006. In return for these exclusive rights, the patent owner is obliged to make the patent available to the broader audience, which is secured by the patent authorities publishing the patent documents a period after the application date. The fundamental rationale for granting intellectual property rights to innovators is to increase private investment in innovation. However, it is also known that there is a social welfare loss caused by the owners restricting the use of their legally protected information in order to increase private profits. In other words, intellectual property rights are thought to be good for innovation and bad for competition (von Hippel, 2006). 

Furthermore, it is important to understand that the company can protect one particular technology from being exploited by other companies through the patent application. However, it is more often becoming the case that the inventor of the technology attempts to “disguise” a real invention by “patenting around” the original invention. Already in the early 1980s, when researchers really started to use patents to assess firm technology strategies, the situation of defensive patents surrounding the core patent was highlighted by Campbell (1983; http://tinyurl.com/3auj6z9) as a key issue. Campbell also described how competitors may position offensive patents close to the defensive ones. This practice has two implications. First, the company can hide the invention and thereby gain a competitive advantage based on time before the competitors discover the patent, which ultimately may provide the company with additional profits. Second, the cost of inventing around the patent carries large costs for the patent granting authorities, but also for general knowledge generation in the society. 

These practices underline the particular challenge of developing an effective patenting system, and it is therefore our argument that a well-functioning international patent system is needed both in order to lower the cost of applying for protection, but also to ensure an effective protection of the invention. However, as mentioned earlier this is not a task for a single country, but should be a coordinated international effort. It is quite vital that, while opening up the innovation process, companies are encouraged to reveal proprietary knowledge to collaborators. The current trend towards a changing weight of the innovation ingredients (from technologies towards other types of innovation sources) as well as towards more open and collaborative paradigms raises the question about the proper IP protection systems.

CONCLUSIONS

This article addresses the question of how national innovation policies may reflect the emergence of three new innovation paradigms: user-driven innovation, open innovation, and value co-creation. Five areas were found to be particularly relevant to the three emerging innovation paradigms: innovation support, innovation networks, education and competencies, entrepreneurship, and intellectual property issues. The discussion of these five areas leads to the conclusions that, even though many national innovation policy organizations have taken significant steps towards promoting a modern innovative business environment, the new innovation paradigms can only to a certain extent spread and flourish under the current innovation policies. Hence, there are still areas that need to be addressed with new and improved policies. Another important conclusion is that new innovation policies will prove relevant and highly impactful only if they are developed within the context of integrated national innovation frameworks.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Stoyan Tanev is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Technology and Innovation and member of the Integrative Innovation Management (I2M) Research Unit at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark, as well as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering  at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he was previously a faculty member in the Technology Innovation Management Program at Carleton University. He has a MSc and PhD in Physics (jointly by the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, and the University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, France), a MEng in Technology 

Management (Carleton University, Canada), and a MA (University of Sherbrooke, Canada). His main research interests are in the fields of technology innovation management and value co-creation in technology driven businesses. Dr. Tanev is also on the Review Board of the Technology Innovation Management Review.

Mette Præst Knudsen is a Professor in Innovation Management at the Department of Marketing & Management (Faculty of Social Sciences), University of Southern Denmark. She is the research manager of the Integrative Innovation Management research unit. She holds a PhD from Aalborg University (Denmark) on technological competencies of high- tech companies. Furthermore, she holds a Master of Economics from Odense University (Denmark).

Tanja Bisgaard is the founder of Novitas Innovation, a company that facilitates complex innovation processes and is working with clients such as Copenhagen University Hospital, Agro Food Park, and Copenhagen 

Cleantech Cluster. Previously, she was Manager of Policy Analysis at FORA, the Danish Ministry of Economics and Business Affairs, where she identified and analyzed new forms of innovation in companies. Within the areas of user-driven innovation and corporate social innovation, Tanja has worked on several projects documenting the successful results of companies’ innovation processes. She holds a MSc in Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and a BSc in Business Economics from the University of Surrey, UK.

Merethe Stjerne Thomsen a PhD student in the Institute of Technology and Innovation in the Faculty of Engineering in the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. 

This Article has been released under a Creative Commons license which means that it is available for free and legal sharing. If you intend to use this article yourself then please ensure that you check the exact terms of the license before doing so.

managing innovation

by KATEŘINA HRAZDILOVÁ BOČKOVÁ

1 INTRODUCTION

Innovation is the magic word in business and public administration. However, huge potential for improvement has only minimal use, even in companies where ideas and suggestions are more or less systematically collected and implemented and some authors rewarded.

While domestic companies often do not pay sufficient attention to innovation management, this area has been gaining a key role in corporate strategy abroad. 

Czech top managers should, therefore, master the principles of innovation.

At the moment, the personality is no longer seen as a labor force only to perform specific commands within the given time span, but it is treated in a qualitatively higher form of leadership and human potential is utilized in a more meaningful way. More space is devoted to professional as well as personal development of personality. Greater emphasis is placed on personal experience, skills, will, and discretion of employees. Creative skills are becoming building stones to implement and solve changes, so much needed in this millennium. The value of the human factor increases significantly. If managers want to be successful, they must understand the staff not only as an entity with its intellectual capital, but also the adaptation to the group and sense of interpersonal relations. Human resource management is subject to very high new claims, which should ensure the company’s competitiveness. 

The innovation process in the firm covers a wide range of activities undertaken from the very initial idea to putting them in life. It thus includes research and development, industrial-legal protection, the establishment of production and final application of innovations in practice. Innovation and innovation policy in the company is not something that would be widely extended, what would be a normal part of the organization and functioning of the company. The problem is already in the beginning when the fact is concerned that not all entrepreneurs and managers are interested in new theories, practices, and requirements. Among them are many who have ingrown their managerial roots in the former industrial period, regardless of age. An essential characteristic of such people is the idea that for successful business a person needs to work a lot and deliver an honest product. This is now of course no longer true (Christensen, 1997). 

The current innovation management system is shown in Figure 1. 

Qualifications and personal skills of innovation managers are one of the main conditions for further development of the company. It is clear that a successful business strategy is built on the so-called evolutionary management, the managers who are oriented to deal with situations and have the ability to create and develop visions with appropriate time horizon.

innovation management system

Figure 1 – Innovation management system (Christensen, 1997) 

2 METHODOLOGY

An innovation manager should be equipped with comprehensive knowledge of the structure and dynamics of company systems, he should have an overview of the key causes and factors creating an innovative environment, both to be an expert in the field of processes for managing the entire life cycle of innovation and determination of their priorities, particularly in terms of value-added and reusability as written in (Hofbruckerová, 2010).

The main task of innovation managers should consist of managing and controlling changes in the organization based on the responses to internal and external stimuli of environment, in which the organization operates, familiarization with a new look at the organization from the perspective of the processes. The process view should enable to assure the flexibility and effectiveness of organization responding to changes and thus survive in this hyper-competitive information age, where success of both individuals and organizations depends on important measures such as availability, management and proper communication as well as information sharing. In entrepreneurship where an amount of knowledge and information needed to ensure business is increasing, the transition to a process-managed organization is essential for the coming millennium (Jaterková, 2008). 

Each company is interested in improving the way is conducts its business, wants to produce goods and services more efficiently and thus increase its profits. Each manager should be aware that meeting these goals is part of his work.

The primary aim of the paper is to analyze the characteristics of innovation manager in the market section focused on “Production, sale and operation of amusement and gaming technology”.

Secondary aims are:

  • Analysis of the qualities of innovation manager from the perspective of his own personality assessment, definition of ideal qualities of innovation manager,
  • Definition of the position of innovation manager in company. 

A questionnaire survey was used to explore the qualities of innovation manager working in “Production, sale and operation of amusement and gaming technology”. A scale questionnaire was chosen for this purpose. The spectrum represents the degree of agreement expressed by the evaluation scale. Its various levels are coded and can be summarized and averaged in the end. The simplicity of filling scale questions and easy workability of results were decisive factors for selecting this form of data survey. 

The selected questionnaire consists of evaluation scale ranging from 1 to 6. One indicates the highest and six the lowest (unimportance) importance of qualities. 

The evaluation is processed in a graphical form. 

The assessment of qualities of innovation manager takes place in three steps: 

  • Analysis of the qualities of present innovation managers, 
  • Definition of ideal qualities of innovation manager, 
  • Summary and synthesis of results. 

The values acquired are evaluated by the arithmetic average rounding to two significant figures. The observed data is compiled into a spider graph for qualities of innovation manager, and a bar graph for an ideal innovation manager. 

The questionnaires were sent to 30 representatives of companies operating in “Production, sale and operation of amusement and gaming technology” in the Czech Republic. 3 companies are engaged in production and sale of amusement and gaming technology, 27 companies are only providers of amusement and gaming technology.

The representatives were asked to distribute the questionnaires to innovation managers and to send them back in sealed envelopes (to protect anonymity and evaluation views). There were 7 questionnaires distributed to define ideal qualities of innovation manager, and 3 questionnaires to determine the qualities of present innovation managers in each company.

To define the position of innovation manager in company, literature search was used, in particular web links. It was proposed to involve an innovation manager into the organizational structure of companies operating in “Production, sale and operation of amusement and gaming technology”. 

3 RESULTS

A high-quality innovation manager must have in his team greater specialists than he is. He has to be a good negotiator and leader, which is basically more demanding than being an expert. Several studies, e.g. (Newton, 2008), (Němec, 2002), (Gido,Clements, 2003), (Taylor,2007), (McAvoy, 2008) and (Jaterková, 2008), have shown that many recognized experts have failed in this function. 

Their weakness is the excessive individualism, lack of interest in associates, lack of tact in the argumentation or hesitation. In other words, although they had the authority of an expert, they did not gain the authority of a leader. The innovation manager should have the following personal skills:

  • Technical skills: These are technical skills, or the ability to use methods, knowledge and techniques of theoretical and practical disciplines, to use specialized personnel; a manager must have the specific skills of a technical nature the same as people he manages. Hence, he must be able to ensure the implementation of the work. 
  • Human skills: Ability to collaborate, understand and effectively communicate and motivate other staff. 
  • Conceptual skills: Ability to manage, integrate and mutually reconcile interests and activities taking place within the enterprise. 
  • Ability to empathize: To be able to feel with the position of the other, to know how to guess other person’s needs. People are not machines. They have their opinions and concerns to be addressed. If we do not want to understand the other, nor we cannot wonder that he does not understand us. Even the busiest innovation manager should make the time to speak to his people. A manager who is able to lower from his boss position and follow his personnel into the field, shows his friendliness and is much better perceived. Communication with employees at such tour should not go without recognition. Praise, if justified, is not only a recognition of the preceding, but motivates to meet the next challenge. 

The qualities of ideal innovation manager are a very generic concept, because each company has different requirements of their leader. Most of them are still unaware, which of many qualities are just the most essential, and which should be favoured in their managers.

The survey of companies showed that of those evaluated qualities is independence currently the most necessary for an innovation manager (Figure 2). The independence was very closely followed by teamwork, which means that managers are both separate units and able to give good performance in teamwork as well. Communication with people placed as next. Economic knowledge is not felt as actual by managers at the moment. Other qualities ranked in the middle of an evaluation field in the following order: time independence, technical knowledge, management skills, readiness and flexibility in the end.

qualities of innovation manager

Figure 2 – Qualities of innovation manager 

It is now evident what qualities are for future innovation managers of addressed companies indispensable, and which, on the contrary, are currently considered to be less important. Now we can order values according to importance:

  • Organizational skills, 
  • Communicative, 
  • Punctual,
  • Decisive,
  • Flexible,
  • Systematic, 
  • thoughtful,
  • Expert in a given topic, 
  • Optimistic,
  • Self-critical. 

Graphic illustration of the ideal qualities of innovation manager (Figure 3) shows the necessary qualities for companies operating in “Production, sale and operation of amusement and gaming technology”. Qualities that should an ideal innovation manager have at this moment are primarily “higher education, flexibility, organizational skills, orderliness, diligence and punctuality”.

Qualities such as “optimism, gender, or marital status” are for companies not so important.

ideal qualities of innovation manager

Figure 3 – Ideal qualities of innovation manager

4 DISCUSSION

4.1 QUALITIES OF INNOVATION MANAGER

Whatever work a manager does, he is always viewed as a leader. An innovation manager has only a different job content and skills from other managers, but the basis is always the same. Manager’s greatest weapon is his intelligence and intellectual powers, through which he dominates and controls his subordinates.

Each innovation manager should have in his set of skills organizational and strategic thinking, must be able to plan several weeks in advance and must know what and how to plan. Must also be able to professionally and properly lead and motivate people in their work, so that all the objectives are met. He must properly organize his work as well as the work of others and not only work but also his time. Among the essential skills are also a high degree of communicability and negotiation skills.

Lately, it is proven as very convenient to also invite customers to the innovation process. This step has undoubtedly its logic – innovations are provided mainly for customers. However, not in all cases is such initiative necessary and desirable – while making changes to internal communication in a company, the presence of our customers will prove as useless. 

An innovation manager is not just a person who invents something new, it’s the person who leads a team of creative people, it is up to him to combine and lead his team. The creative process is very complicated and it is necessary that a person in a managerial position is able to understand the long path to the desired innovation. 

A successful innovation manager, whom his subordinates respect and at the same time are not intimidated by him, should be an emotionally balanced person with a certain degree of empathy. He should be also responsible, persistent and consistent, able to lead his team without any undue problems. 

An innovation manager should have a creative personality. But not everyone is the right to invent new and new ways. There are people who do not have such thinking at all. 

The creative personality is characterized by qualities such as activity, intuition, finding associations, the art of working with metaphors and inspiration, logic, energy, knowledge of the area in which the person operates and many others. 

Creative people can often exceed the rules and limits and are willing to take risks. They tend to be stubborn and persistent if they feel that what cannot be achieved is actually achievable.

4.2 POSITION OF INNOVATION MANAGER (I.M.) IN COMPANY

It should be noted that innovators are not only employees in research and development department. Yes, the representation of innovation and creative personalities is quite certainly greater than in other departments. Still, we may assume that inventions are not strictly defined to only a few chosen ones, any staff member can get an original and feasible idea, which will contribute to achieving the company goals (Chesbrough, 2006).

But we cannot say that each manager of each department is an I.M. The I.M. should be at the forefront of research and development department, because this is exactly the place where creativity is mostly concentrated. The I.M. should be right there to acquire inventions of his team and be able to assert them at the top management.

The fundamental prerequisite for successful innovation management is his anchoring in the organizational structure. From a mere glance at the nature of innovation is clear that while most of the tasks and roles in the enterprise has its exact recipient, innovations are in this respect to some extent Cinderella who lacks her “assertor”. Therefore, it is necessary to “artificially” create one. The question we must ask in such a thought is not “Create?” but “How to create it the most effectively?” 

An interesting insight could be into the organizational structure of the ten largest innovative companies in global market. To compare them we will use a chart compiled by American magazine Fast Company, published in February 2010. 

The sequence is as follows according to (Fast Company, 2010):

  • Facebook – a well-known company providing a world-famous social network project. Recently it has broken the limit of 400 million users worldwide. Currently, the most widespread social network in the world with great influence. 
  • Amazon – a worldwide provider of Internet commerce in the world.
  • Apple – a company operating in the field of computer technology. Led by charismatic Steve Jobs, considered to be one of the greatest innovators of the turn of the 20th and 21st century and innovation guru. 
  • Google – a provider of the world’s most successful search engine google.com, beside search is involved in streaming video – Youtube.com server and many other services. 
  • Huawei – the largest provider of mobile communications services in Southeast Asia, slowly comes in on to Europe – awarded the contract to build 4G network in Norway. Was given precedence over giants such as Nokia or Ericsson. 
  • First Solar – the company is a leader in reducing the cost of generating electricity from solar energy. First it managed to reduce the price below $1 per watt and anchored the price at $0.85.
  • PG&E – a big energy company in the U.S.A. Produces electricity from all types of energy and is innovative in the view at the new possibilities of obtaining electricity. Has a contract for placement of panels into orbit and supply of electricity on Earth.
  • Novartis – a Swiss manufacturer of medicines, the third largest company engaged in the manufacturing of drugs. Recently has come to market with several drugs to treat rare diseases and diseases difficult to cure.
  • Walmart – the largest retail chain in the world. Started mainly in the U.S.A. Currently focusing on areas such as environmentally friendly light bulbs, reusable bags, better design of business places, or improving the supply chain.
  • HP – a company famous mainly for computer and printing techniques. 

All these companies are highly recognized innovators in their field. Their organizational structure is certainly adapted to the innovation process. An interesting fact is that all the above mentioned companies have a line structure. 

Its advantage is undoubtedly a clear definition of superiority and subordination. 

Mostly it involves firms founded by one or a few people who have undergone a very dynamic growth within a few years. As the most illustrious example we can mention Facebook, founded only in 2004, or Amazon and Google, founded in 

1995 (Amazon) or 1998 (Google).

Only one of the above leaders in innovation has at the top a person in charge of innovation or development. We can therefore assume that the integration of an IM to company top management is not appropriate and desirable. On the other hand, he should be equipped with a wide variety of competences and opportunities to work with people on both higher and lower positions in the company. 

As the most suitable seems to be the separation from the company structure, to avoid pressure from both above and beneath. He should have clear authority to require and reward or punish the performance or non-performance of innovations or tasks that individual workers undertook (or which was imposed on them).

An IM on the lowest level of management has a long way above to realize his job description. Suggestions for improvement will therefore have a long way to persons who will assess them and thus it will lead to their delay and lack of penetration in the onset of innovation process, which could competitors due to bureaucratic process implement much faster.

As a good opportunity I see the location of an innovative team in “Production, sale and operation of amusement and gaming technology” to the staff position. 

There is a clear possibility of integration into the structure and no need to worry about complex organizational structures, or lengthy process of his proposals for changes, as well as separation from the reality of company operation. 

Unfortunately, this type is not used by any companies mentioned above.

5 CONCLUSION

As current trends indicate, the world of productivity will be gradually replaced by the world of creativity to support newly emerging professions such as innovative engineer, creativity and IM, etc. It is also necessary to realize that the problems of today are completely different, and for their solution is usually far less time than in the past.

The field surveys during the last period among the top managers of Czech companies have shown that the position of I.M. is offered by approximately a quarter of firms only. While the vast majority representatives of the companies in the survey confirmed that their company has a processed innovation strategy. Quite logically, the question is who are the implementers, while I.M.’s held accountable are in this direction a unique phenomenon indeed. Targeted training for this function is still completely lacking, which can result in our slow pace of innovation. In more than half of firms, by contrast, are in charge of innovation management several departments at once. Most often it is top management and engineering department. Solutions must be realistically applicable, as short time for implementation as possible and multiplying effect of the expected benefits. The journey from a generated idea to innovation realization is not easy. Still, time is a crucial factor of market success.

6 REFERENCES

CHESBROUGH, H.W. (2006), “Open Business Model: How to thrive in the new innovation landscape”, Harvard Business School Press, 1st ed., 256 p. ISBN 1-4221-0427-3

CHRISTENSEN, C. J. (1997), “The innovator´s dilemma: When new Technologies cause a great firms to fail”, Harvard Business School Press. 1997. Boston. 225 p. ISBN 0-87584-585-1

FAST COMPANY STAFF. Most Innovative Companies. 2010, Retrieved 2010-03-28, from http: //www.fastcompany. com/mic/2010

GIDO, J., CLEMENTS, P.J. (2003) Succesful project management. Second edition. Thomson learning, 460 p., ISBN 0-324-07168-X

HOFBRUCKEROVÁ, Z. (2008), “Manažer kreativity a inovací”, In Jakost proživot, 4/2008, Retrieved 2010-03-15 from http://www.dtocz.cz/casopis.php?id_article=311

JATERKOVÁ, L. (2008), “8 praktických tipů, jak si vychovat dobrého manažera”, Inovace.cz., Retrieved 2010-05-30, from http://www.inovace.cz/forbusiness/manazerske-dovednosti/clanek/8-praktickych-tipu–jak-si-vychovatdobreho-manazera-i-/

McAVOY, J. (2008), The role of project management in ineffective decision making within Agile software development projects. European journal on information system, 2008, vol. 8, pp. 372-383, Retrieved from ProQuest (DOI)

NĚMEC, V. (2002), Projektový management. 1. edition, Praha: Grada Publishing, 184 p. ISBN 80-247-0392-0

NEWTON, R. (2008), Úspěšný projektový manažer, Translation A. Svozilová, 1. edition, Praha: Grada Publishing, 264 p., ISBN 978-80-247-2544-4

TAYLOR, J. (2007), Začínáme řídit projekty. 1. edition., Brno: Computer Press, 215 p., ISBN 978-80-251-1759-0

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kateřina Hrazdilová Bočková, Ph.D. graduated from the Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering in the field of Economy and Management of Construction (2000). The postgraduate course at the same faculty focused on the study and application of project management. Since 2002 has worked at Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Faculty of Management and Economics, as a lecturer. Between 2004 – 2005 was responsible for leadership of the Department of Enterprise Economics. As guest lecturer of project management of PROFIMA Zlín (since 2004), an external consultant of several companies in the field of business strategy and a project manager for sporting events in her own aerobic studio Uherské Hradistě and VZP Oriflame Aerobics Tour. She is the author of numerous articles and books on project management.

Since 2004 is a certified project manager and since 2006 a member of IPMA (Project Management Association). Faculty of Management and Economics, TBU in Zlín, Mostní 5139, 760 01 Zlín, Czech Republic, bockova@fame.utb.cz.

idea generation

by Max Gunther

How to boost your idea generation.

Every year companies shell out millions for employees’ suggestions. That’s just one small part of the payoff for getting bright ideas on the job. YOU’RE riding home from work, or cleaning the garage, or shaving.

~ Suddenly it hits you: “Hey! Why don’t I . . . “

You’ve got a bright idea. It came from nowhere. You weren’t hunting for it. But here it is, a diamond dropped in your pocket by nobody, for nothing. It’s an idea for making extra money, or solving a problem, or simplifying your job, or face-lifting your house. Or maybe it’s an idea for a gadget or a part-time business.

When will you get another idea like that? No telling. Bright ideas- really bright ones don’t come often. They don’t, that is, unless you know how to make them. And you can learn how.

History is full of men who had that incalculably valuable knack. Edison, who started with little education, ended with 1,200 patents and a tidy fortune. On a smaller scale, there’s the guy at Remington Rand who collected 300 times on ideas he dropped into the suggestion box These are the men who move ahead Says General Electric: “We’re always hunting for idea men. No big company can stay alive long without them.” One indication of the value of ideas: the $20, 000,000 given away by U.S. companies every year for employees’ suggestions.

You can cut in on the bright-ideas benefits yourself, whether it’s to impress the boss, get a better job, hit the suggestion system jackpot or just make things run more smoothly at home.

For today, the art of idea generation is close to a precise science. Psychologists have analyzed it. Big companies that live on new ideas have spent millions refining it. Their conclusions:

  • You get bright ideas by combining old ideas in new ways.
  • You can improve your idea generation ability by doing this without much effort.

You may find a course on ideas being offered by your company or a local college. If not, ask your librarian for Alex Osborn’s book, Applied imagination, or Charles Whiting’s Creative Thinking in Management. Both are written with businessmen in mind, but anyone can use their teachings in any area of life.

Or YOU can train Yourself. There are only two closely related things you need to understand:

  1. how to make your idea generation equipment turn over faster, and
  2. how to shove aside mental blocks so that your ideas can come out.

IDEA GENERATION

Natural-born idea men, tests at the University of Chicago showed, are likely to be people who have trouble making friends, who show a “need to retreat” from the human world into the world of ideas machines and things. But everybody has the mental equipment for idea generation and can speed up the process.

To do that, you must consciously push “Like a machine, the creative part of the mind suffers from inertia,” says Willarc Pleuthner, vice-president of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, big New York ad agency that has done much of the thinking about idea generation.

“The first step for any individual or group in need of ideas,” he says, “is to define precisely the kind of ideas wanted Then set a definite quota and time limit— so many ideas in so much time. Without this deadline, we’ve found, the mind just doesn’t function at top efficiency.”

Suppose you want extra cash for your vacation. You need ideas on how to get it. Pick a quiet time of day and a comfortable chair, or tackle some easy job around the house that doesn’t take much thought. Put a pad and pencil nearby. Tell yourself: “I want 10 ideas by noon.” Probably to your own surprise, ideas will chatter out of your head like machine-gun bullets. “You’ll get more ideas this way,” says Pleuthner, “than in a week of moping around, waiting for ideas to come.” 

THE BLOCKS

Once the ideas start flowing, you have to keep them alive at least until you know whether they’re any good. Most people don’t. They kill them off the instant they’re born with what psychologists call inhibitory mechanisms mental blocks. You can get around the blocks (and save good ideas) if you watch out for them. Among the commonest idea killers:

TIMIDITY

Your mind usually allows too big a margin for error. Walter Brzoza, a creative-thinking expert at General Electric, illustrates this block with a closed, empty box the size of a shoebox. Almost always, says Brzoza, people asked to guess its contents list things so small that they’d fit into a box a tenth that size. Anything bigger than a pack of cigarettes seems risky and the mind blocks it. To hurdle this block, force yourself to take rash, even wild chances—mentally, that is.

TRADITION

Your mind rejects ideas if they reverse the way things are usually done or trample on cherished feelings. In a classic demonstration of this block, a group of MIT students was shown an iron pipe bolted upright to a wooden base. Down inside the pipe was a Ping-pong ball. Nearby on a table were an assortment of tools and a rusty, beat-up pail of water. Problem: Get the ball out of the pipe. The students figured it out fast: They poured the water into the pipe.

Then a second group was given the same problem. This time, in place of the rusty bucket there was a sparkling-clean pitcher of ice water with a drinking tumbler. The students tried everything but water. Seeing it in the pitcher, they also elated it so strongly with drinking that they couldn’t think of its other uses.

This mental block often disappears, if you purposely “turn things upside down.”

VISUAL BLOCK

Once you’ve seen a thing one way, you have a hard time imagining it any other way. To illustrate this, GE’s Brzoza takes one group of men and shows them arty drawings of flower vases. He shows second group drawings of faces. Later, he brings the two groups together and shows them a single vague picture. One group says it’s a vase; the other says it’s a face. Again the cure is the conscious search for something different.

FALSE REQUIREMENT

Your mind fences off whole areas of ideas by assuming requirements that don’t really exist.

This block almost upset a good-will gesture a few years back. Connecticut children had been presented a baby elephant by children in India. Problem: How to raise $1,000 to bring over the elephant.

Adults and kids stewed over the problem until someone broke through the mental block and pointed out that the true requirement was not money but transportation. Sure enough, an airline agreed to deliver the elephant for nothing. 

IDEA GENERATION TECHNIQUES

The experts have worked out new idea generation techniques that remove blocks at the same time they speed up your creative mind. Most famous is “brainstorming,” formulated in 1939 by Alex Osborn, co-founder of BBD & O. Its main principles:

  1. Rule out all critical judgments during your idea generation session. If it’s a group session, make it absolutely against the rules to criticize any idea, or laugh at its or deflate it in any way.
  2. Welcome wild, ridiculous ideas.
  3. Concentrate on quantity. Forget quality. Don’t stop to assess ideas. The sole object is to get as many on paper as possible.
  4. When the brainstorming session is over—and only then—go back over the list and begin judging the ideas.

One classic example of brainstorming concerns the group that set out to solve the dishwashing chore. Prize solution: Use edible dishes and eat them after dinner for dessert. A more prosaic example is the bicycle repairman who got publicity and doubled his business by staging races for the kids.

Down-to-earth ideas about solving common problems can be very effective. So can fanciful ones like edible dishes. You won’t know until you try them. And you can’t try them until you force your brain to produce them. That’s the important thing to remember.

You can set up brainstorming sessions where you work. Or set them up with the men in your carpool, your wife or your neighbors, to tackle everything from boosting your neighborhood to winning suggestion-box awards.

The best brainstorming group includes people with different personalities and backgrounds. If possible, bring in somebody who doesn’t know anything about the problem at hand—your wife, for example, on a semi-technical or business problem. She probably won’t know certain things are impossible, so she’ll suggest to them— and maybe they’ll turn out to be possible after all.

You can brainstorm by yourself. Groups produce the most ideas, simply because more creative heads are at work. But according to some researchers, you yourself will create more and better ideas when you are alone. Yale University Prof. Donald W. Taylor found that lone thinkers turned up twice as many ideas per person as people in groups. What’s more, the individuals’ ideas were as original and useful as the groups’.

Another kind of idea generation system, first developed at Hotpoint Co., is called “reverse brainstorming.” In this system, criticism isn’t ruled out; it’s emphasized. The idea is to look at something long and hard, then list as many things as you can think of that is wrong with it—including wild and ridiculous criticisms.

For instance, suppose you figure you can make some money by inventing something—an improved bicycle, say. Go out in the garage, sit down and ponder your son’s bike. Search out every detail that might possibly cause trouble. Follow the usual brainstorm rules: quota, deadline, no judgment of ideas. Very possibly you’ll come up with an idea for improving the bike- something that was blocked in other minds.

Still another idea generation system was developed at MIT by Prof. John E. Arnold. Its main purpose is to get you into the habit of thinking along untried, unorthodox paths.

Arnold told his industrial-design students to imagine a planet named Arcturus IV. This planet has gravity 11 times Earth’s, a methane atmosphere, ammonia seas. Its inhabitants are manlike creatures with two Earth-type eyes and one X-ray eye, three-fingered hands, fragile bones, and so little dexterity that they’d kill themselves in minutes if handed the wheel of your car. Arnold’s students were assigned the job of designing products to sell on Arcturus IV.

This kind of exercise gets you used to traveling in totally new regions of thought. Paradoxically, that’s where you’ll often find the best ideas. 

The above article was first published in 1959. 

how to cash in on your invention

By Norman Carlisle (This article was originally published in October 1963)

When George Breen a young electrical-equipment salesman, moved to a Vermont farm with the idea that he’d make maple sugaring pay, he soon tired of the backbreaking labor involved in doing it as it had been done since the Revolution. Extracting sap from the trees and conveying it by bucket to the evaporating tanks was a tedious business. Breen, using his head instead of his back, decided to automate the process.

He rigged up an intricate network of plastic tubes that ran from tree to tree and ended up in the vat. Realizing he had an invention that others could use, Breen, applied for a patent. Then he asked himself the question that plagues every inventor: “How can I sell it?

Breen had heard that inventions were hard to sell, especially to big firms with their own research departments, but he boldly discussed his device with the company that had sold him the tubing – the giant Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. It promptly bought the rights to Breen’s invention, and now markets it under the name of Mapleflo. Royalties flow into Breen’s pockets as easily as the sap flows through the 20 miles of plastic tubing in his 65-acre sugar bush.

Was the ease with which Breen sold his invention to a big company – which holds hundreds of patents of its own – just a freak? Not at all. Only the fact that he sold it to the first company he offered it to is exceptional.

THE ODDS ARE WITH YOU

How many inventions are actually sold and used? Statistics are hard to come by because the U.S. Patent Office keeps no records of what becomes of an invention after it’s patented. But studies by the Patent, Trademark, and Copyright Research Foundation of George Washington University revealed that a surprisingly high percentage are actually sold or used.

While authoritative estimates just a decade ago ran as low as 20 percent, a study by the Foundation indicates that between 55 and 65 percent of all recently patented inventions are actually used. And the remaining 35 to 45 percent of unused ones include some that obviously had little chance of a sale, to begin with – like a recently patented bagel slicer (a bagel is a doughnut-shaped hard roll); a balloon-supported, flying landing field for rescuing stricken airliners; and an improved dowsing rod that uses copper tubing instead of the familiar “witching” stick. That unused category also includes “back-up” patents taken out by company researchers who have simply patented embellishments, which may never be used, on existing inventions.

What’s the secret of selling an invention to a big company? The success stories of independent inventors, research directors, patent attorneys, and invention brokers indicate that the trick is to offer the right invention. George Breen picked the ideal concern to approach because 3M had much to gain from marketing his pipeline sap-harvesting system.

sell to big or small

Sell to a big or small company? The small one is probably more anxious for new inventions.

THE “BIG-COMPANY” PRODUCTS

Some inventions are, by their very nature, “big-company” products. Jim Robbins, the man who devised the coin-operated do-it-yourself dry-cleaning machine, knew from the start that only a big appliance maker could buy it and put it on the market; a small concern could hardly have coped with the manufacturing and distribution problems.

While he was working on his machine, Robbins and his lawyer studied various appliance makers. They picked two as the first targets. The second Divas Norge, which sent a team of top executives to the lime Michigan token ~ which Robbins had built his sample machine. Norge bought it on royalty teams that promise over $2,000,000 for Robbins.

A few years ago, Leonard Marrafino, a Mount Vernon, N.Y., printer, and John Spero, a draftsman, joined forces to develop a “crazy” invention: a way to put stripes in toothpaste. By much tinkering, they devised a tiny plastic gadget that goes on the top of the tube. When the tube is squeezed, coloring matter comes through the slots, making stripes in the toothpaste. The inventors decided that no small company could make a go of distributing the novel toothpaste, and offered it to the pharmaceutical giants. Lever Brothers bought it. The result: Stripe.

While most big companies are receptive to the right offering, only a few inventions are really big-company naturals.

independent inventor

What’s the secret of success for the independent inventor? Offering the right invention.

THINK SMALL

Aim for the littler fellows. “I generally seek out small companies,” says K. O. Kessler, an invention broker. “The big companies rarely need an invention—lots of smaller concerns do.”

Kessler cites cases like the bricklaying device developed by Henry Ruzza of Eau Claire, Wis. It enables a do-it-yourselfer to erect brick walls and maintain a level line. “No good for the big companies—but we found a small plant in Michigan that snapped it up because the firm needed something to keep its machines busy.”

There are hundreds of similar examples. Dr. Robin Beach, a Brooklyn engineer who invented the Magic Wand, a simple wood-and-wire device for bleeding static electricity from industrial machines, could have sold to a big firm. Instead, he decided on a small specialized one that he felt would really push his invention.

A small firm was also the choice of Frank Bellock of Chicago whose invention is a kid-proof wall outlet, developed after his son received a bad shock when he thrust scissors into an ordinary outlet. Bellock picked a modest-size local company that needed specialty items.

When Dr. Robert Horton, a Minnesota physician, developed the Slumbertone, a small transistorized gadget that emits a sound soothing to a baby, he found the ideal maker – a small company already making a baby product, and which could easily handle another with its sales and manufacturing setup. The terms for the inventor were much more favorable than he could have obtained from a company in less need of his invention.

HOW DO YOU FIND THE COMPANY?

Your local Chamber of Commerce will be eager to give you information about any firm that might be interested. Many trade associations will provide you with a list of members, and with information about which ones might be interested in your invention. A visit or letter to a field office of the Small Business Administration will get you advice about firms that might be prospects. You can get the “Directory of National Associations of Businessmen” by sending 50 cents to the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington 25, D.C. “Thomas’ Register,” available in most public libraries, lists all U.S. companies by products.

It’s not impossible to get firms to come to you. Classified advertisements in newspapers have attracted buyers. A man with a pharmaceutical process sold it for $200,000 through an ad in a New York daily. For a fee of $3 the Patent Office will list your invention in the “Official Gazette.” The Small Business Administration puts out a “Products List Circular” in which, without charge, it will describe and picture your invention.

You can offer your invention to a company in person or by mail. If you’ve got a patent on it, the basic document, of course, is the patent application. A lot of inventors wonder about offering a patent-pending invention, or one on which they haven’t even applied for a patent. You can offer either. Many companies will look only at patented or patent-applied-for inventions; others will consider unpatented ones. One firm that takes inventions at any stage is Trigrett Industries, of Jackson, Tenn. It’s headed by John Trigrett, one of the country’s top invention experts.

The question that Trigrett hears most frequently from inventors is: “How do I know they won’t steal my invention?”

“The idea that companies steal inventions is a myth,” Tigrett told me. “It’s cheaper for them to negotiate a royalty agreement than to risk litigation. I’ve handled hundreds of inventions, patented and unpatented, and I’ve never heard of anyone stealing an invention.”

do companies steal inventions

DO COMPANIES STEAL INVENTIONS?

A myth, says an inventions expert. It’s cheaper for a company to pay royalties than fight lawsuits.

SHOULD YOU USE A BROKER?

If you want to eliminate the nuisance of peddling your own invention, you can. Many patent attorneys will help you follow through on sales. There are reputable invention brokers and patent agents, such as K.O. Kessler, who operate on a percentage basis. With their considerable know-how in negotiating agreements, as well as their knowledge of markets, they are well worth patronizing. You should be warned, however, that there are some “brokers” who don’t do much for you. Make sure that the man who undertakes to sell your invention really has the experience and facilities he says he has. Check with the Better Business Bureau before signing up.

Another possibility is to set up your own company and keep all the profits for yourself. To do that, of course, you have to want to run a business and have some business qualifications. Take the case of Al Creighton, a young Boston economist who cooked up a concoction of resin and metal powder into “plastic steel.” He figured that his putty-like metal, the formula of which he didn’t want to disclose, would be hard to sell to an existing company. He knew just what his product would do; he’d mixed up considerable batches of it in his kitchen. And he thought that he could get salesmen carrying other lines to take on his product and show it during their calls on hardware stores and other outlets.

Creghton rightly figured that he had a perfect setup for his own business – a conclusion since confirmed by the fact that now, 10 years later, he does a comfortable $3,000,000-a-year business.

His story, like those of almost all successful inventor-operated companies, has the ingredients necessary for success:

  • You’ve got a demonstrably marketable product.
  • The production problem is not heavy
  • A selling method is available
  • You can raise the capital

THE SQUANGLE STORY

For an instructive blueprint, an inventor pondering making his-own could hardly do better than to study the way Ove Hanson of Seattle worked it out. Hanson invented the Squangle, a combined variable-angle square, level, protractor, and handsaw guide. He had a real handy item for home craftsmen, and knew he could find a company to buy it. He reasoned, however, that his device might be lost in the line of a big company. Sell it to a small one? Yes – but Hanson figured he had his problems so well under control that he might as well start his own business.

First, he knew that his invention was saleable: He had made up a number of Squangles by hand, and they had been snapped up by craftsmen.

Production? No problem there. He didn’t need a factory. After he had his dies made, Hanson found a number of local machine shops that had presses standing idle at odd hours. He arranged to use them at lower than-usual rates. Assembling and packaging he did in his garage.

As for selling, Hanson didn’t need a sales force. He had no difficulty finding manufacturers’ representatives who were glad to take on an extra line.

The all-important matter of capital was handled locally. Hanson put in some of his own money and persuaded friends to put in the additional money needed for getting started. Later, with a going enterprise, he had no trouble raising $10,000 more for new dies and larger inventories. The success of the Squangle was now well known enough in his community to make it easy to sell stock to 25 local people.

Squangle may not have made Ove Hanson rich, but it has brought him a return far beyond anything he could have expected by selling it any other way.

Does your invention meet the basic specifications for success? Is it useful, workable, producible, and marketable? If it is, no matter how you decide to sell it, you can figure that the odds are in your favor.

End of article 

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