Brett Stern - Inventors at Work: The Minds and Motivation Behind Modern Inventions

Inventors at Work

The Minds and Motivation Behind Modern Inventions

Brett Stern

Inventors at Work: The Minds and Motivation Behind Modern Inventions

Copyright 2012 by Brett Stern

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4302-4506-3

ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4302-4507-0

Trademarked names may appear in this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark.

President and Publisher: Paul Manning

Acquisitions Editor: Jeff Olson

Developmental Editor: Robert Hutchinson

Editorial Board: Steve Anglin, Mark Beckner, Ewan Buckingham, Gary Cornell, Louise Corrigan, Morgan Ertel, Jonathan Gennick, Jonathan Hassell, Robert Hutchinson, Michelle Lowman, James Markham, Matthew Moodie, Jeff Olson, Jeffrey Pepper, Douglas Pundick, Ben Renow-Clarke, Dominic Shakeshaft, Gwenan Spearing, Matt Wade, Tom Welsh

Coordinating Editor: Rita Fernando

Copy Editor: Kimberly Burton-Weisman

Compositor: SPi Global

Indexer: SPi Global

Cover Designer: Anna Ishchenko

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Mom, thanks for getting me all those LEGOS to play with and not making me clean up my room.

I was busy inventing.

Contents

About the Author

Brett Stern is an industrial designer and inventor living in Portland, Oregon. He holds eight utility patents covering surgical instruments, medical implants, and robotic garmentmanufacturing systems. He holds trademarks in 34 countries on a line of snack foods that he created. He has worked as an industrial design consultant for such clients as Pfizer, Revlon, and Saatchi & Saatchi, and as a costume materials technologist for Warner Bros.

Stern has been an instructor in industrial and product design at the Art Institute of Portland and Parsons School of Design. He has lectured on innovation and biomedical technology at Columbia University and Stanford University. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in industrial design. Sterns work may be viewed at www.brettstern.com . Visit this books website, www.inventorsatwork.com , and contact the author by email at invent@inventorsatwork.com.

Acknowledgments

Seemed like everyone in Portland, Oregon, was writing a book except me. One day I got a call from Matt Wagner of the Fresh Books literary agency, asking me if I wanted to write this book. I got off my bike, put down my beer, and surrendered to the muse. Though I do know how to invent stuff, but really dont understand where all the commas are supposed to go, the publisher, Apress, teamed me up with several people who really obsess over proper punctuation and grammar to move this project forward:

Jeff Olson, Acquisitions Editor

Robert Hutchinson, Development Editor

Rita Fernando, Coordinating Editor

Kimberly Burton, Copy Editor

I greatly appreciate all of their efforts. They made it fun, and isnt that the whole point?,!,?,!,?

As Ive asked my interview subjects about the benefits of having mentors in their lives, I would like to thank the mentors in my life: Michael Cousins, Richard Thompson, and Matthew Lesko.

And, finally, to all the people who said no to my crazy ideas. Thank you for the motivation to keep moving forward.

Introduction

Inventions in steam engines, cotton mills, and iron works converged in the eighteenth century to propel the First Industrial Revolution. Inventions in internal combustion engines, electrification, and steelmaking in the nineteenth century ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Today, twentieth-century inventions in digital technology are being conjoined with twenty-first-century innovations in software, materials and advanced manufacturing processes, robotics, and web-based services to inaugurate the Third Industrial Revolution.

Today, at the dawn of the nexus of the future, ideas for inventions stand only a small chance of being realized and competing in the marketplace unless theyre generated or picked up by corporations that can marshal teams of scientists and lawyers underwritten by enterprise-scale capital and infrastructure. Nonetheless, millions of individuals still cherish the dream of inventing and building a better mousetrap, bringing it to market, and being richly rewarded for those efforts. Americans love their pantheon of garage inventors. Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, and Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs are held up as culture heroes, celebrated for their entrepreneurial spirit no less than their inventive genius.

This book is a collection of interviews conducted with individuals who have distinguished themselves in the invention space. Some of the inventors interviewed here have their Aha! moments in government, institutional, or industrial labs; develop their inventions with multidisciplinary teams of experts; and leave the marketing of their inventions to other specialists in the organization. Other inventors in this book develop their inventions with small teams in academic labs and try to translate their research into product via licenses or start-up companies. Still other inventors carry on the classic lone-inventor-in-his-garage tradition and take on the task of bringing their products to market themselves. And a few mix and match their strategies, bringing skills honed in big labs home to their garages and licensing their personal inventions to big corporations.

This is not a recipe book. It doesnt aim to reduce invention to a foolproof sequence of steps: take an idea, go through the R&D process, develop prototypes, create intellectual property, build a brand, raise capital, and get product on store shelves. Rather, this book invites readers to touch their own creative impulses to the fires of real inventors speaking candidly about what possesses them every day of their lives: the passion to question the status quo and invent the future.