Why Inventing Is Still A One Man Job by Lynn A. Williams, originally published in September 1961. This piece, a gem from the past, still rings true in our hyper-connected, data-driven present. It challenges the notion that great ideas, the kind that reshape industries, are born from the sprawling labs of corporate behemoths. Spoiler alert: they’re not. Not usually, anyway.
The core message? True innovation, the kind that sparks revolutions, often springs from the quiet, persistent efforts of individuals. These sparks ignite far from the boardrooms, often in surprising corners and under less-than-ideal circumstances. Corporations, for all their might, tend to be masters of execution, not genesis.
The Myth of the Corporate Invention Machine
We live in an age where R&D departments boast budgets that rival small nations. We’re told that big companies are innovation engines, churning out the next big thing. Yet, history and present-day reality paint a different picture. The most significant leaps forward, the paradigm shifts, have overwhelmingly come from individuals.
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Think about it. When was the last time a truly groundbreaking idea emerged from a committee meeting? Ideas, especially radical ones, are rarely born from consensus. They’re often the product of relentless, singular focus. As Williams points out, large corporations excel at turning existing ideas into mass-produced realities, refining them, and marketing them brilliantly. But the initial, raw, disruptive idea? That’s a different beast entirely.
This isn’t to say corporations haven’t contributed. Far from it! The transistor, Freon refrigerants, Nylon – these all emerged from corporate labs. But these were often built upon foundational concepts, nurtured and brought to fruition by individuals within those structures. The corporate role was often one of development and scaling, rather than the initial conceptual leap.
A Pantheon of Lone Geniuses: A Historical Roll Call
Let’s rewind the clock. The giants of industry today often stand on the shoulders of solitary thinkers:
The Power of Steam & Steel: James Watt (expansion steam engine), Robert Fulton (steamboat), Sir Henry Bessemer (steel process), Charles Parsons (steam turbine).
Communication & Computing’s Dawn: Samuel Morse (telegraph), Guglielmo Marconi (wireless), Lee de Forest (three-element vacuum tube, crucial for early radio and TV).
Everyday Conveniences: King C. Gillette (safety razor, a salesman by trade!), Dr. Leo Baekeland (Bakelite, the dawn of modern plastics).
Medical Miracles: Dr. Banting (insulin, discovered outside a big pharma house), Dr. Alexander Fleming (penicillin, stumbled upon in a petri dish), Dr. Selman Waksman (streptomycin), Dr. Jonas Salk (polio vaccine).
The Visual Revolution: Edwin Land (Polaroid camera, started tinkering as a student), Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (early photography, a non-scientist).
The Mechanical Marvels: Nikola Tesla (AC electricity system – though often debated, his individual drive is key), Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler (early automobiles, independently driven).
Materials Science: Harry Brearley and Elwood Haynes (stainless steel, not from major steel firms), Jacques Brandenberger (Cellophane, a Swiss-French immigrant).
The Atomic Age: Ernest Lawrence (cyclotron at UC Berkeley), Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard (key figures in nuclear development).
Even in the automotive industry, often seen as a bastion of corporate engineering, foundational inventions like the four-cycle engine (Otto) and the two-cycle engine (Diesel) came from individuals. Pneumatic tires (Dunlop) and vulcanized rubber (Goodyear) also owe their existence to persistent individual efforts.
Sociological Hurdles: Why Factories Can Stifle Brilliance
Why does this pattern persist? The original article points to sociological factors within large organizations:
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The Comfort Trap: The modern corporate environment, with its extensive benefits and job security, can inadvertently disincentivize risk-taking. When your needs are met, your career path is stable, and failure is heavily penalized, why rock the boat with a radical new idea? The path of least resistance is often the safest.
The Production Imperative: Factories are built for efficiency and predictability. New ideas, by their very nature, are unpredictable. They disrupt schedules, require new processes, and can halt assembly lines. The pressure to meet production targets often trumps the willingness to experiment.
The Emotional Toll of Innovation: Every innovator is, to some extent, an iconoclast. Their new ideas challenge the status quo, which can be perceived as a personal attack on those invested in the old ways. This creates friction, and management often prioritizes smooth operations over the discomfort of disruptive thinking.
Case Study: The Unconventional Coder
Meet Alex, a brilliant software engineer at a large tech firm. Alex noticed a recurring bottleneck in their company’s data processing pipeline. Most engineers would log a ticket, wait for the system administrators, or try a minor tweak within established protocols. Alex, however, saw a fundamentally different approach. This new approach involved a complete rethinking of how data was indexed, something that went against years of ingrained best practices and would require significant, unbudgeted development time.
When Alex proposed the idea, the reaction was lukewarm. Management worried about disrupting the current, albeit slow, system. Colleagues pointed out the risks and the departure from established coding standards. Alex wasn’t the typical ‘team player’ – often seen hunched over their desk late at night, sketching complex algorithms on whiteboards, and occasionally missing mandatory team-building exercises.
Despite the resistance, Alex spent evenings and weekends building a proof-of-concept. The result? A new indexing method that reduced processing time by 80%. It was clunky, undocumented, and initially rejected by the formal review process. However, a forward-thinking junior manager, who saw the raw potential, championed Alex’s project. Within six months, the new system was implemented, saving the company millions and setting a new industry standard. Alex’s unconventional brilliance, initially seen as disruptive, became the company’s greatest asset.
The anecdote in the original article about the engineer who arrived late but created a multi-million dollar invention years later perfectly encapsulates this. Personnel testing, designed for predictability, often screens out the very mavericks who drive innovation.
Important Warning: Corporate ‘welfarism’ and the pursuit of seamless operations can create an environment where ‘good soldiers’ are rewarded, while the unpredictable innovators are marginalized. Be wary of processes that aim to eliminate all risk; they often eliminate groundbreaking ideas too.
The Tyranny of ‘Progress is Our Most Important Slogan’
Many companies plaster slogans about innovation and progress everywhere. But is it genuine, or just lip service? The article suggests that for many, it’s the latter. Large corporations can often afford to be less innovative because they have built significant moats around their businesses through sheer size, brand recognition, efficient production, and marketing might. They can often grow and profit by simply doing what they already do, better.
Accident and the Unpredictable Nature of Genius
Beyond the sociological hurdles, there’s the element of pure chance, or ‘accident,’ that invention often hinges upon. This comes in two flavors:
The Serendipitous Discovery: Think of Fleming and penicillin. A moment of observation, a bit of luck, and a paradigm shift occurs. These moments are hard to schedule or force.
The Unexpected Background: As the original text highlights, many groundbreaking inventions came from people with entirely unrelated backgrounds. A bookkeeper invented Kodak film. A veterinarian developed the pneumatic tire. A painter and sculptor invented the ballpoint pen. A modern HR department might never hire these individuals for the roles they ultimately revolutionized. Their diverse life experiences gave them unique perspectives that corporate specialization often lacks.
Pro-Tip: If you’re a business leader seeking genuine innovation, consider looking *outside* your industry for talent or inspiration. Diversify your advisory board with people from completely different fields. You might be surprised by the fresh perspectives they bring.
The Danger of Homogenization
The article expresses concern that the organizational structures that suppress individual creativity within corporations might eventually extend their influence to society at large. If conformity and risk aversion become the norm, we risk economic stagnation and, more importantly, the erosion of the human spirit’s innate drive to create and explore.
How Businesses CAN Foster Innovation
So, what’s the prescription for businesses that genuinely want to innovate?
Improve the Internal Climate: Create psychological safety. Encourage experimentation, even if it leads to failure. Reward calculated risks.
Embrace the Outside World: Actively seek out and welcome ideas from independent inventors. Don’t let legalistic concerns or bureaucratic hurdles shut down potential breakthroughs.
Streamline the Intake Process: The original author, a lawyer, noted the excessive caution in how inventor submissions were handled, often prioritizing avoiding lawsuits over embracing new ideas. Businesses need to simplify the process and focus on the potential of the idea itself.
Fund ‘Moonshots’ (and Expect to Lose Money): Allocate resources for speculative projects with no guarantee of success. If a leader is only ever talking about successes, they’re likely not taking enough risks.
Hire for Diverse Perspectives: Actively recruit individuals with varied backgrounds and non-traditional skill sets. Don’t just hire people who look and think like your existing team.
The spirit of invention, the engine of progress, might still be a one-person symphony. While corporations are invaluable orchestras for performing and amplifying the music, the initial, audacious composition often comes from a lone virtuoso. Recognizing and nurturing that individual spark, both inside and outside the corporate walls, remains critical for a vibrant future.
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.
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.”
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:
Who are the division’s customers? Obviously, big construction firms, the contractors who build highways and airports.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Case Study: The Power of a Niche Idea – Redyref’s Journey
Walter Haskins invented Redyref, a clever rack designed to hold phone books upright and accessible. His initial target customer? The obvious one: telephone companies, envisioning them in public booths. However, his pitches were met with indifference, and when he managed to place units in offices, the phone companies pressured building owners to remove them.
The breakthrough came not from the manufacturer of the phone equipment, but from a retailer and furnisher of office spaces: W. & J. Sloane. Sloane’s clientele included major corporations like AT&T. By partnering with Sloane, Haskins gained access to the ultimate end-users through a company that understood how to sell integrated office solutions. This highlights a critical lesson: target the channel that can sell to your real customer, not just the one who uses the component. Haskins’ success with Redyref demonstrates that even seemingly straightforward inventions can find massive success when paired with the right go-to-market strategy, showcasing the importance of Service Design Thinking Foundations in understanding customer touchpoints.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the biggest hurdle for independent inventors?
The biggest hurdle is often not the invention itself, but the daunting task of commercialization. This involves market validation, finding the right partners, developing a business model, and effective sales and marketing. Many great ideas fail because inventors underestimate the effort required beyond the initial creation. Exploring resources like [Lean Startup for Creative Ventures](https://innovation-creativity.com/lean-startup-for-creative-ventures/) can provide guidance.
How important is patent protection?
Patent protection is crucial for safeguarding your intellectual property. It grants you exclusive rights to your invention for a set period, preventing others from making, using, or selling it without your permission. This can be vital when seeking investment or licensing opportunities. However, the patent process can be complex and expensive, so understanding its strategic value is key.
Are there specific techniques to generate new ideas or improve existing ones?
Absolutely! Numerous techniques can spark creativity. For idea generation, methods like [Brainstorming Strategies](https://innovation-creativity.com/brainstorming-strategies/) and various [Divergent Thinking Methods](https://innovation-creativity.com/divergent-thinking-methods/) are excellent starting points. To refine or transform existing concepts, frameworks like [SCAMPER for New Product Development](https://innovation-creativity.com/scamper-for-new-product-development/) (using Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse) are highly effective for driving [Business Model Innovation Strategies](https://innovation-creativity.com/business-model-innovation-strategies/).
What if my invention relies heavily on technology, like AI?
If your invention involves cutting-edge tech like AI, understanding its potential and limitations is key. For instance, in artistic fields, tools for [AI Art Generation](https://innovation-creativity.com/ai-art-generation/) and [Generative AI for Artistic Expression](https://innovation-creativity.com/generative-ai-for-artistic-expression/) are rapidly evolving. The same principles of [Design Thinking for Product Development](https://innovation-creativity.com/design-thinking-for-product-development/) apply – focusing on user needs and iterative development, even with advanced technologies.
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.
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
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.
[8] Parthasarthy, R. and J. Hammond, Product innovation input and outcome: moderating effects of the innovation process. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 2002. 19(1): p. 75-91.
[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.
[13] Preez, N.D.d. and L. Louw. A Framework for Managing the Innovation Process. in PICMET 2008 Proceedings. 2008. Cape Town, South Africa.
[14] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], The Measurement Of Scientific And Technological Activities, 2005, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: Paris. p. 92.
[15] Carayannis, E.G. and M. Provance, Measuring Firm Innovativeness: Towards a Composite Innovation Index Built On Firm Innovative Posture, Prospensity and Performance Attributes. International Journal of Innovation and Regional Development, 2007: p. 1-30.
[16] Andrew, J.P., et al., Measuring Innovation 2009: The Need for Action, in A BCG Senior Management Survey T.B.C. Group, Editor 2009, The Boston Consulting Group: Boston. p. 1-23.
[17] Morris, L. Innovation Metrics: The Innovation Process and How to Measure It. An InnovationLabs White Paper, 2008. 1-20.
[18] Guimaraes, T., Industry clockspeed’s impact onbusiness innovation success factors. European Journal of Innovation Management, 2011. 14(3): p. 322-344.
[19] Flor, M.L. and M.J. Oltra, Identification of innovating firms through technological innovation indicators: An application to the Spanish ceramic tile industry. Research Policy 2004. 33: p. 323-336.
[20] Choi, G. and S.-S. Ko. An integrated metric for R&D innovation measurement. in Technology Management for Global Economic Growth (PICMET), 2010 Proceedings of PICMET ’10. 2010. Phuket.
“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).
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.
The Innovation Manager: Architect of Tomorrow’s Success
Innovation. It’s the word every business leader, every public servant, wants to chant from the rooftops. But let’s be honest, how often does that translate into real, game-changing action? We often see brilliant ideas meticulously collected, perhaps even rewarded, yet they languish in the land of "what ifs," rarely seeing the light of day. While many companies abroad have firmly embedded innovation into their strategic DNA, back home, it’s still too often treated as a secondary thought, a nice-to-have rather than a must-have.
This isn’t just about adopting a new buzzword; it’s about a fundamental shift in how we view our people and our potential. Gone are the days of employees being mere cogs in a machine, executing tasks within rigid timelines. Today, we recognize the immense value in human capital – their unique experiences, their honed skills, their sheer willingness to push boundaries. Creative thinking isn’t just a bonus; it’s the engine that drives the essential changes our businesses need to thrive in this dynamic millennium. The human factor has skyrocketed in value. To truly succeed, leaders must see their teams not just as reservoirs of intellectual capital, but as interconnected beings with distinct personalities, adapting to group dynamics and fostering strong interpersonal relationships. Human resource management is now a high-stakes game, where adaptability, collaboration, and strategic foresight are the keys to staying competitive.
The innovation journey is a complex expedition, starting from that initial spark of an idea all the way to its triumphant implementation in the real world. It’s a path that often includes rigorous research and development, securing intellectual property, scaling up production, and finally, bringing the innovation to market. Yet, for many organizations, innovation and its guiding policy remain elusive, not yet woven into the everyday fabric of how they operate. The real hurdle often lies at the very beginning: a surprising number of entrepreneurs and leaders aren’t actively seeking out new theories, practices, or demands. Many are still stuck in the mindset of a bygone industrial era, believing that sheer hard work and a solid product are the only ingredients for success. As Clayton Christensen famously pointed out, this perspective is no longer a winning formula.
Figure 1 – A classic representation of an innovation management system.
This figure illustrates a traditional view of the innovation management system, often a starting point for understanding the process. However, the true magic lies in the people driving it.
The Evolving Role of the Innovation Manager
The right innovation manager is more than just a title; they are a crucial architect of a company’s future. They need a deep, almost intuitive understanding of how the business operates, both its gears and its soul. This means grasping the intricate web of factors that foster an innovative environment, from the ground up. More than that, they must be maestros of the innovation lifecycle, adept at guiding ideas from conception to reality, always prioritizing which initiatives offer the most bang for the buck and possess the greatest potential for reusability.
Imagine the innovation manager as the conductor of an orchestra. They don’t necessarily play every instrument, but they must understand how each one contributes to the symphony. Their primary mission is to orchestrate and steer the inevitable changes within an organization, acting as a responsive sensor to the dynamic forces both inside and outside the company walls. This requires a fresh perspective, viewing the organization not as a static structure but as a living, breathing entity driven by processes. Embracing a process-oriented approach is paramount for cultivating the flexibility and agility needed to not just survive, but thrive in today’s hyper-competitive, information-saturated landscape. Success, for both individuals and organizations, hinges on accessibility, adept management, seamless communication, and the fluid sharing of knowledge. In an era where the sheer volume of knowledge and information required for business operations is constantly expanding, transitioning to a process-managed organization isn’t just beneficial; it’s essential for navigating the challenges of the coming decades.
Why Innovation Management Matters More Than Ever
Every business, at its core, yearns for improvement. We want to produce goods and services more efficiently, to outmaneuver competitors, and, naturally, to boost profits. This isn’t a secondary concern; it’s a fundamental part of a manager’s remit. In today’s rapidly shifting market, the ability to adapt and innovate isn’t just an advantage – it’s a prerequisite for survival. Companies that fail to evolve risk becoming relics of a past era, much like businesses that ignored the transformative power of The Printing Press: Gutenberg’s Revolutionary Impact on Information Dissemination or the seismic shifts of The Industrial Revolution’s Creative Spark.
The Quest for the Ideal Innovation Manager
So, what makes a stellar innovation manager? The original study aimed to dissect the qualities of innovation managers specifically within the "Production, sale and operation of amusement and gaming technology" sector. The secondary goals were to understand the innovation manager’s personal attributes and to define their optimal place within the company’s structure. To gather this intel, a survey was deployed. A scale questionnaire was chosen for its simplicity in gathering data and ease of analysis. The scale ranged from 1 (least important) to 6 (most important) for evaluating various qualities.
The results were compiled and visualized, first to analyze the qualities of current innovation managers and then to define the ideal qualities. The data was crunched using averages, rounded to two decimal places, and presented in compelling visual formats – spider graphs for current managers and bar graphs for the ideal profile.
The survey reached out to 30 companies in the specified sector in the Czech Republic, with 3 focusing on production/sale and 27 on operation. Each company was asked to distribute questionnaires: seven to define ideal qualities and three to assess current managers. To define the optimal position of an innovation manager, a literature review was conducted, focusing on how best to integrate this role into the organizational framework.
The Innovation Manager’s Toolkit: Essential Skills and Qualities
A truly exceptional innovation manager understands that their strength lies not in being the smartest person in the room, but in orchestrating the brilliance of others. They need to be masterful negotiators and inspirational leaders—a far more demanding feat than simply being a technical expert. History is littered with examples of brilliant minds who faltered in leadership roles due to excessive individualism, a lack of connection with their teams, poor communication, or a fear of delegation. The best innovation managers, however, build a leadership authority that complements their expert knowledge.
Here’s a breakdown of the core competencies they need:
Technical Savvy
This isn’t just about understanding the nuts and bolts of a specific field. It’s about possessing the ability to leverage the knowledge and techniques of various disciplines and to effectively utilize specialized personnel. An innovation manager must grasp the technical underpinnings of the work being done, much like the team members they lead, ensuring that projects are not only conceived but also executable.
Human Connection is Key
This is the bedrock of effective management. It’s the ability to foster collaboration, to truly understand and communicate with team members, and to inspire them to achieve collective goals. Without strong human skills, even the most brilliant technical ideas will falter.
The Power of Conceptual Thinking
This involves the strategic foresight to integrate and harmonize the diverse interests and activities within an enterprise. It’s the ability to see the big picture, to connect disparate ideas, and to align individual efforts with overarching organizational objectives. This is crucial for creating new market space.
Empathy: The Underrated Superpower
Innovation isn’t born in a vacuum; it’s born from understanding human needs. An innovation manager must be able to step into others’ shoes, to anticipate their needs, and to recognize that people are not automatons. They have opinions, concerns, and aspirations that need to be heard. If you don’t strive to understand others, you can hardly expect them to understand you. Even the busiest innovation manager must carve out time for genuine conversations. Visiting the team on the ground, showing genuine interest, and offering sincere praise (when deserved) not only builds rapport but also fuels motivation for future challenges. It’s about recognizing that a simple "well done" can be more powerful than any complex directive.
Decoding the Ideal Innovation Manager
The concept of an "ideal" innovation manager can seem broad, as every company has its unique demands. However, the survey revealed some fascinating insights. For companies in the amusement and gaming technology sector, independence emerged as the most critical quality, closely followed by teamwork. This highlights a need for individuals who can operate autonomously yet seamlessly integrate into collaborative efforts. Communication skills also ranked high, underscoring the importance of clear and effective dialogue. Interestingly, deep economic knowledge wasn’t perceived as immediately essential, while qualities like time independence, technical knowledge, management skills, readiness, and flexibility filled out the middle ground, with flexibility being the least prioritized among these.
Figure 2 – Current perceptions of essential innovation manager qualities.
Based on these findings, the indispensable qualities for future innovation managers in this sector are clear:
Organizational skills
Communicative abilities
Punctuality
Decisiveness
Flexibility
Systematic approach
Thoughtfulness
Expertise in their domain
Optimism
Self-awareness (Self-critical)
The visualization of ideal qualities (Figure 3) further emphasizes that for companies in this specific niche, the paramount traits are higher education, flexibility, organizational prowess, orderliness, diligence, and punctuality. Qualities like optimism, gender, or marital status were deemed less critical.
Figure 3 – The blueprint for an ideal innovation manager.
The Innovation Manager’s Strategic Position
Where Does the Innovation Manager Fit?
Regardless of the specific industry, an innovation manager is fundamentally a leader. While their day-to-day tasks and required skill set might differ from other managerial roles, the core principles of leadership remain constant. A manager’s most potent tool is their intellect and cognitive power, which they use to guide and direct their teams. This involves mastering organizational and strategic thinking, planning effectively weeks, if not months, in advance, and knowing precisely what and how to plan. Crucially, they must be adept at leading and motivating their people to achieve objectives, orchestrating not just their team’s work but also their own time management.
High-level communication and negotiation skills are also non-negotiable. In today’s business climate, it’s often beneficial to involve customers directly in the innovation process. After all, innovations are primarily developed for them. However, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach; inviting customers into sensitive internal discussions about process changes might prove counterproductive.
An innovation manager isn’t just an inventor; they are the linchpin of a creative team, the one who synthesizes diverse talents and directs the collective energy towards a common goal. The creative process is inherently complex, and the person at the helm must appreciate the arduous journey from a nascent idea to a tangible innovation. A truly respected innovation manager—one who inspires without intimidating—is emotionally balanced and possesses a significant degree of empathy. They are responsible, persistent, and consistent, guiding their team smoothly through challenges.
While not every individual is cut out to be an inventor, an innovation manager should ideally possess a creative spirit. This spirit is characterized by traits like proactivity, intuition, the ability to forge connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, a knack for using metaphors, inspiration, logic, drive, and a deep understanding of their operational domain.
Creative individuals often push beyond conventional boundaries, embracing calculated risks. They tend to be tenacious, especially when they believe an seemingly impossible goal is within reach. This spirit is vital for driving breakthroughs that align with Value Innovation Principles.
It’s crucial to remember that innovation isn’t confined to the R&D department. While creative minds might be more prevalent there, groundbreaking ideas can emerge from any employee and contribute significantly to company objectives. This concept is central to Open Business Models.
However, not every manager is an innovation manager. The ideal candidate often resides at the forefront of R&D, acting as the champion who not only captures their team’s inventions but also effectively champions them to senior leadership. The foundation of successful innovation management is its integration into the organizational structure. Without a designated champion, innovations can become the neglected ‘Cinderella’ of the company, lacking advocacy. The question isn’t if we should create this role, but how to establish it most effectively.
Learning from the Titans: A Look at Top Innovators
Examining the organizational structures of leading innovative companies can offer valuable insights. A look at the "Most Innovative Companies" list from Fast Company (February 2010) reveals a fascinating pattern:
Facebook: A social media giant that redefined online interaction.
Amazon: The undisputed leader in global e-commerce.
Apple: A tech titan, once led by the iconic innovator Steve Jobs.
Google: Dominating search and expanding into video (YouTube) and numerous other services.
Huawei: A powerhouse in mobile communications, challenging established European giants.
First Solar: Leading the charge in making solar energy cost-competitive.
PG&E: An innovative energy company exploring new power generation methods, including space-based solar.
Novartis: A pharmaceutical leader focused on treatments for rare and complex diseases.
Walmart: Revolutionizing retail through initiatives like sustainable practices and supply chain optimization.
HP: A long-standing innovator in computing and printing technology.
What’s striking is that most of these highly innovative companies operated with a straightforward line structure, emphasizing clear lines of authority and subordination. This structure is often characteristic of companies that experienced rapid growth from humble beginnings, like Facebook (founded 2004) or Amazon and Google (founded 1995 and 1998, respectively).
Notably, only one company on that list had a dedicated executive specifically overseeing innovation or development at the highest echelon. This suggests that embedding a Chief Innovation Officer directly into the C-suite might not always be the optimal or necessary approach. Instead, the innovation manager needs a broad skill set and the autonomy to collaborate effectively across all levels of the organization.
What Would You Do?
Imagine you’re the innovation manager at a mid-sized manufacturing firm. Your team has developed a revolutionary new process that could significantly reduce production costs. However, implementing it requires a substantial upfront investment and a temporary disruption to current operations. The CFO is skeptical about the ROI and the potential for operational hiccups, while the Head of Production is concerned about retraining staff and the impact on existing output targets. Your direct supervisor, the VP of Operations, is supportive but wants a foolproof plan.
How would you approach this situation to gain buy-in and ensure the innovation’s successful adoption?
Finding the Right Fit: Integration vs. Independence
One of the trickiest aspects of innovation management is defining the manager’s place within the company’s hierarchy. Should they be deeply embedded, perhaps within R&D, or operate more independently?
Deep Integration: Being close to R&D allows the innovation manager to be an "assertor," championing new ideas directly to top management. However, this can sometimes lead to a "Cinderella" status, where innovations lack a dedicated advocate.
Artificial Creation: Some argue for creating the role somewhat "artificially" to ensure innovation has a strong voice. The key is to do this effectively.
Separation for Autonomy: An interesting approach is to place the innovation manager outside the direct chain of command. This shields them from pressure from both above and below, granting them the authority to push for initiatives and hold individuals accountable. This separation allows for quicker decision-making and implementation, preventing bureaucratic delays that competitors might exploit.
The Staff Position Approach
For the "amusement and gaming technology" sector, the study suggested that placing the innovation team in a staff position could be highly effective. This offers a clear path for integration without the complexity of elaborate organizational restructuring or the glacial pace of proposal approvals. It keeps the team grounded in the company’s operational reality.
However, it’s worth noting that none of the top global innovators examined used this specific model, indicating diverse strategies for fostering innovation.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is the primary role of an innovation manager?
The primary role of an innovation manager is to foster a culture of innovation, identify new opportunities, guide the development and implementation of new ideas, products, services, or processes, and ensure these innovations align with the company’s strategic goals. They act as a catalyst and facilitator for change.
Can anyone be an innovation manager?
While creativity is a key trait, being an innovation manager requires a blend of technical, human, and conceptual skills, alongside strong leadership and communication abilities. Not everyone possesses this specific mix, though creative potential exists throughout an organization. It’s a role that often requires specific training and experience, as highlighted by the lack of targeted programs mentioned in the original article.
How important are soft skills for an innovation manager?
Extremely important. Skills like empathy, communication, negotiation, and team leadership are crucial for managing creative teams, gaining buy-in from stakeholders, and navigating the complexities of bringing new ideas to fruition. As the article points out, strong technical knowledge alone is often insufficient without these human-centric capabilities.
What’s the difference between an inventor and an innovation manager?
An inventor typically focuses on creating something new – a product, a process, a technology. An innovation manager, on the other hand, is responsible for the entire lifecycle of an innovation, from nurturing the initial idea to ensuring its successful implementation and market adoption. They lead and manage the process, often orchestrating the work of multiple inventors and specialists. They are key to understanding [Characteristics of Disruptive Innovation](https://innovation-creativity.com/characteristics-of-disruptive-innovation/).
How can companies encourage innovation from all employees?
Companies can foster innovation by establishing clear channels for idea submission, providing resources for experimentation (like [Strategic Resource Allocation for Startup Innovation](https://innovation-creativity.com/strategic-resource-allocation-for-startup-innovation/)), recognizing and rewarding innovative contributions, creating a psychologically safe environment where failure is seen as a learning opportunity, and promoting [Holistic Innovation Approaches](https://innovation-creativity.com/holistic-innovation-approaches/) that involve cross-functional collaboration. Techniques like [Brainstorming Strategies](https://innovation-creativity.com/brainstorming-strategies/) and [Divergent Thinking Methods](https://innovation-creativity.com/divergent-thinking-methods/) can be employed widely.
Conclusion: The Future is Being Built Today
The modern business landscape is irrevocably shifting from a focus on sheer productivity to one driven by creativity. Emerging roles like innovative engineers and dedicated innovation managers (IMs) are becoming increasingly vital. We must also acknowledge that the problems we face today are often more complex and demand solutions with far tighter deadlines than in the past.
Our research among top Czech managers revealed a sobering statistic: only about a quarter of companies actively offer the role of an innovation manager. While the majority claim to have an innovation strategy, the question of who is implementing it remains largely unanswered, with the IM role still a relative rarity. The absence of targeted training for this critical function contributes to a slower pace of innovation. In over half of the surveyed firms, innovation management is a shared responsibility, often falling to top management and engineering departments. The imperative is for solutions that are not only realistic and applicable but also swift to implement, maximizing the multiplicative effect of expected benefits. The path from a generated idea to a realized innovation is never easy, and in today’s market, time is the ultimate currency of success.
Discussion Prompts
What’s the biggest hurdle your organization faces in fostering a true culture of innovation? How do you see the role of the innovation manager evolving in the next five years, especially with the rise of tools like Generative AI for Artistic Expression and advanced AI Art 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:
how to make your idea generation equipment turn over faster, and
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:
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.
Welcome wild, ridiculous ideas.
Concentrate on quantity. Forget quality. Don’t stop to assess ideas. The sole object is to get as many on paper as possible.
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: From Garage Idea to Golden Goose
Ever had that "aha!" moment? That brilliant flash of inspiration that solves a nagging problem, streamlines a tedious task, or simply makes life a little bit better? For many, that spark ignites a dream: turning that invention into a paycheck, or even a fortune. But how do you go from a prototype in your garage to royalties flowing into your bank account?
Take George Breen, for example. This sharp-witted electrical-equipment salesman ditched the city bustle for a Vermont farm, aiming to make maple sugaring his new gig. He quickly realized the old-school methods – lugging sap buckets from tree to tree – were a recipe for exhaustion, not profit. Sound familiar? He wasn’t about to let tradition win. Instead of brute force, Breen used brainpower, rigging up an ingenious network of plastic tubes. This wasn’t just a shortcut; it was an invention that streamlined the entire process. He wisely secured a patent and then faced the million-dollar question every inventor grapples with: "How do I sell this thing?"
He’d heard the horror stories about inventions being tough sells, especially to big corporations with their own R&D departments. But Breen wasn’t deterred. He walked right up to the company that sold him the tubing – the industrial titan Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. (you know them as 3M). Their response? They acquired the rights, rebranded it as Mapleflo, and now, George Breen enjoys a steady stream of royalties, with sap flowing through miles of tubing on his farm. Was his smooth sale a fluke? Not entirely. The exceptional part was selling it to the very first company he approached.
The Surprising Truth: The Odds Might Be in Your Favor
Many inventors get bogged down in the myth that most patented ideas wither on the vine. But the reality is far more encouraging. While exact figures are elusive, studies by the U.S. Patent Office and research foundations suggest a surprisingly robust percentage of patented inventions actually find their way to market. Some estimates indicate that over half, and potentially as high as 65%, of recently patented inventions are put to use. The remaining unused inventions often include concepts that were never truly viable from the start – think a self-buttering toast rack or a solar-powered flashlight. This category also snags patents for minor tweaks by corporate researchers that are unlikely to ever see the light of day.
The real secret to a successful sale, whether to a giant or a startup, isn’t just having a patent; it’s offering the right invention to the right company. George Breen hit the jackpot because his automated sap collection system was a natural fit for 3M’s expertise and market reach.
Should you aim for the corporate giants or the nimble startups?
When Size Matters: Big vs. Small Company Targets
Some inventions are simply too complex, too capital-intensive, or too market-disrupting to be handled by a small operation. These are the "big-company" products.
The Case of the Automated Dry Cleaner: Jim Robbins understood this. His coin-operated, do-it-yourself dry-cleaning machine wasn’t something a small appliance maker could realistically launch. Manufacturing, distribution, marketing – it all screamed "major player." Robbins and his lawyer strategically targeted appliance giants. Their second pitch to Norge paid off handsomely, with the company eventually buying his invention and projecting over $2 million in royalties for Robbins.
Stripes in Your Toothpaste: Imagine Leonard Marrafino, a printer, and John Spero, a draftsman, dreaming up a way to put stripes in toothpaste. They devised a clever little gadget for the nozzle. Recognizing that distributing a novel toothpaste product required massive marketing muscle, they bypassed smaller companies and went straight to the pharmaceutical behemoths. Lever Brothers saw the potential and bought it, launching the iconic "Stripe" toothpaste.
These stories underscore a crucial point: not every invention is suited for every company. Identifying whether your creation is a "big-company natural" is key. This often involves inventions that require significant R&D, extensive manufacturing capabilities, or a global distribution network. For insights into how large organizations foster innovation, you might explore their approaches to Transformational Leadership for Innovation.
The independent inventor’s journey often hinges on strategic targeting.
The Power of the Niche: Why Thinking Small Can Pay Big
While the giants have their allure, don’t underestimate the power of the underdog. Smaller companies are often hungrier for unique products, less burdened by bureaucracy, and more agile in bringing new ideas to market.
The Bricklaying Assistant: K. O. Kessler, an invention broker, often favors smaller companies. He points to Henry Ruzza’s bricklaying device, designed for DIY enthusiasts. Too niche for a big corporation? Perhaps. But a small Michigan plant, eager to keep its machinery humming, snapped it up. This highlights how smaller firms might seek inventions that fill idle production capacity or cater to specific market segments.
Taming Static Electricity: Dr. Robin Beach, an engineer, invented the "Magic Wand" – a simple device to discharge static electricity from industrial machinery. Instead of pitching it to a massive conglomerate, he sought out a specialized, smaller firm that he believed would champion his invention. His instinct proved correct.
Childproof Safety: Frank Bellock developed a kid-proof wall outlet after a personal scare with his son. He targeted a modest-sized local company that specialized in safety products, a perfect fit for his invention.
Soothing Sounds for Babies: Physician Dr. Robert Horton created the Slumbertone, a small device emitting calming sounds for infants. He found the ideal partner in a small company already producing baby products. They could easily integrate his gadget into their existing sales and manufacturing framework, offering him far more favorable terms than a larger, less-specialized firm might have.
For many inventors, especially those with niche products or limited initial capital, a smaller, specialized company can offer a faster path to market and potentially better deal terms. This approach often aligns with Value Innovation Principles, focusing on creating new market space by addressing overlooked customer needs.
Finding Your Perfect Match: Where to Hunt for Buyers
So, you’ve got a brilliant idea. How do you find the company that’s itching to buy it? It requires a bit of detective work, but the resources are out there:
Local Resources: Your local Chamber of Commerce can be a goldmine of information on businesses in your area. Many trade associations will happily provide member lists, sometimes even indicating areas of interest.
Government Agencies: The Small Business Administration (SBA) offers invaluable advice and can point you toward potential prospects.
Industry Directories: If you’re near a public library, check out "Thomas’ Register." It’s a comprehensive directory listing U.S. companies by product, acting like a B2B Yellow Pages.
Industry Publications & Online Forums: Keep an eye on trade magazines and online communities relevant to your invention’s field. They often feature new product announcements or companies seeking specific solutions.
The Power of Advertising: Don’t discount classified ads. Sometimes, a well-placed ad in a relevant publication can attract direct buyers. A pharmaceutical process was famously sold for $200,000 this way!
Government Listings: For a small fee, the U.S. Patent Office will list your invention in its "Official Gazette." The SBA also offers a free "Products List Circular" where your invention can be described and pictured.
Patent Pending or Unpatented: What’s Your Status?
Many inventors worry about the stage of their patent. Can you pitch an idea that’s "patent pending" or even unpatented?
The good news is: yes, you can! Many companies are open to reviewing inventions at any stage. Others prefer a patent application filed or a granted patent. It depends on the company’s internal policies and risk tolerance. Some pioneers, like John Trigrett of Trigrett Industries, are known for evaluating inventions at any developmental phase.
The Big Fear: Will They Steal My Idea?
This is perhaps the most common anxiety for inventors. The fear of intellectual property theft is pervasive. However, according to industry veterans like John Trigrett, this fear is largely a myth.
"The idea that companies steal inventions is a myth," Trigrett states. "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."
Think about it: Launching a product based on a stolen idea opens a company up to costly lawsuits and reputational damage. It’s almost always more financially sound and ethically responsible to negotiate a fair deal. For a deeper dive into understanding the innovation landscape, exploring the Impact of Innovation on Business Growth can provide valuable context.
Protecting your IP is crucial, but outright theft by established companies is rare.
Do You Need a Broker? Pros and Cons
Peddling your invention yourself can be exhausting. Consider these alternatives:
Patent Attorneys & Agents: Many patent attorneys offer services beyond just filing applications; they can assist with the sales process.
Invention Brokers: Reputable brokers operate on a commission basis. They leverage their industry contacts, negotiation skills, and market knowledge to find buyers. Crucially, do your homework. Vet any broker thoroughly. Check their track record, testimonials, and with the Better Business Bureau before signing any agreement. Beware of those who promise the moon without a clear plan.
Going Solo: Building Your Own Empire
For the entrepreneurially minded, launching your own company can be the most rewarding path. It means keeping all the profits, but it also requires business acumen, capital, and a willingness to wear many hats.
The "Plastic Steel" Success Story: Al Creighton, a young Boston economist, developed "plastic steel" – a putty-like metal compound. He knew its potential was immense but suspected it would be hard to sell to an existing company. Instead of licensing it, he decided to build his own business. He meticulously prepared batches, figured out a distribution strategy using existing sales reps, and launched his company. Ten years later, his business was doing a cool $3 million a year. His success was built on:
A Proven Product: Demonstrably marketable with clear benefits.
Manageable Production: The manufacturing process wasn’t overly complex.
Accessible Sales Channels: He identified how to reach his target customers.
Viable Capital: He secured the necessary funding to start and grow.
Case Study: The Squangle – From Garage to Market Leader
Ove Hanson of Seattle embodied the inventor-entrepreneur. He created the Squangle, a versatile tool combining a square, level, protractor, and saw guide – a dream for DIYers. Hanson knew it was marketable; he’d already hand-built Squangles that were snapped up by enthusiasts. But instead of selling to a big company where it might get lost, or even a small one, he saw an opportunity to build his own brand.
Production: Hanson didn’t need a massive factory. He had dies made and arranged with local machine shops to use their presses during off-hours at a reduced rate. He handled assembly and packaging in his garage.
Sales: He bypassed the need for a dedicated sales force by partnering with manufacturers’ representatives who were eager to add a compelling new product line.
Capital: Hanson bootstrapped with his own funds and convinced friends to invest. As the business grew, securing $10,000 for new tooling and inventory was straightforward. Community members, seeing the Squangle’s success, readily invested, buying stock in his burgeoning enterprise.
Hanson’s journey with the Squangle demonstrates that with a well-conceived product and a smart business strategy, inventors can create significant value for themselves, often exceeding what they might achieve by simply licensing their creation. This mirrors the principles of Creating New Market Space through focused innovation.
The Inventor’s Checklist: Are You Ready to Cash In?
Before you dive headfirst into selling your invention, ask yourself these critical questions:
Is it truly useful? Does it solve a real problem or fulfill a genuine need?
Is it workable? Does the prototype function as intended? Have you tested its reliability?
Is it producible? Can it be manufactured efficiently and cost-effectively?
Is it marketable? Is there a clear target audience and a viable sales strategy?
If you can answer "yes" to these, then the odds are indeed in your favor. Whether you license it to a giant corporation, partner with a nimble startup, or build your own empire, your journey from idea to income is a tangible possibility. Remember, innovation is the engine of progress, and with the right approach, your invention can be the fuel. For further inspiration on the broader landscape of innovation, consider the Characteristics of Disruptive Innovation or explore Holistic Innovation Approaches to broaden your perspective.
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