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The Myth of the Lone Inventor
Codex The Sloth writes "Malcolm Gladwell (who amongst other things, wrote "The Tipping Point") has written an article for the New Yorker claiming that the role of the lone inventor is over. The example of Philo T. Fransworth (the "inventor" of Television) who failed because (amongst other reasons) he didn't have the big resources of a company to allow him to focus on his innovations. The thesis is that it is rare to have a single innovation that makes a product workable and that getting all of the inovations together requires a (large) corporation. No doubt others feel different."
We're reaching a point where it's incredibly difficult for a single individual to develop new inventions of any significance because of complexity. There is still a role for innovation by individuals, however.
Even though software programs aren't inventions in the normal sense, I think this is one area where individuals can still have a huge impact, although we're also seeing most large software projects written by teams.
my dad has developed & built a number of successful inventions/innovations that have gone on to spawn businesses & corporations. the lone person model can work quite well.y pes.html
www.karadon.com (an invention/corporation that was built from an idea facet of one of his previous successful inventions)
www.geocities.com/spdrcrn1tr0/protot
not to say i haven't developed a number of items as well. screw the corporations, do it yourself
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
As long as there are tools and imagination, there will be inventors... Anyone remember the guy with the wind-up radio for the third world? A guy called Trevor Bayliss had the idea watching TV about how batteries in Africa cost a month's wages.... So he built a prototype in his garage and was eventually successful. Source here http://www.engineerguy.com/comm/2574.ht m I think lone inventors will always be around, but corporations will determine whether they can make a financial success out of their idea.
Absolute horsefeathers.
Big corporations don't invent anything, and the worst place in the world for an inventive, brilliant, highly intelligent and competent person (like an inventor) is a stultifying, closed-minded, skeptical, gray, dull bureaucracy (like a big corporation). Nothing will take the joy out of invention like having to appease a bunch of self-serving arrogant skeptics.
The days of the lone (or small group of)
inventor(s) is just beginning. What about Linux, for example? Come on. This can't be serious.
The day we hand over the responsibility for progress to middle management is the day we better start preparing for a stagnant society.
Ask the patent office... Things like one-click patent can be accomplished by single individuals easily.
S
The free software movement has proven that in order to invent something these days you absolutely need to stand on the shoulders of giants. But it's also proven that this level of collaboration doesn't need to be driven by a lumbering behemoth or the almighty dollar. Innovation and collaborative invention can also be motivated by sheer passion and sharing. This is the article's only major flaw.
Second you must have the manufacture/ marketing/ sales etc. This is the bailiwick of larger corporations.
This has always been the way. Edison made such an impact because with his first small successes he built a corporation which could produce and market other more marginal products. Tesla, on the other hand, had some (literally) world-shattering ideas, but as he didn't have a large corporation of his own, he had to go cap-in-hand to people like Westinghouse and Morgan to get the funding to develop his ideas. (Yes, Tesla did start several companies to develop specific concepts, but they were all small, specific and all failed for one reason or another. If Tesla had had all the resources of Westinghouse at his command, rather than at petition, who knows what toys we would have now?)
This is not to say that Edison was a better inventor than Tesla (many would argue that Tesla left him in the dust as far as raw imagination and engineering skills went), but Edison had the marketing skills and business sense which enabled him to do more with what he had.
You will, I think, find this pattern in all revolutionary inventions over the last two-hundred years. The inventor was
You will probably find that the discoverer of the Blue Laser Diode was working with a corporation, and could make a deal with that corporation to produce the diodes. He could not have done it on his own. Similarly with the Clockwork Radio, IIRC the inventor used funds from the UN to start a company to produce these radios.
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
Farnsworth is a poor example to use for this subject. He DID invent television mostly by himself without the benefit of a large corporation. What he didn't have as an individual was reasonable protection from RCA, whose goal was to monopolize the airwaves at all costs. When they couldn't buy him out, they harassed him with lawsuits and propaganda campaigns that repeatedly told people that RCA brought them TV. The real problem with lone inventors is that "those who have the gold make the rules". Few people, until recently, ever heard the story of Philo Farnsworth.
Another cool fact about Farnsworth is that he developed a working fusion device, called the Farnsworth fusor. It doesn't even come close to breakeven, but it does produce neutrons consistently.
Lack of a lone inventor is not the problem with the system. There are a lot of people today that can focus on a product and develop it. Having a big staff is not the issue, and sometimes it actually slows development. It's simply that the lone inventor is having trouble getting past the legal flacks of big business who throw down slap suits, suits designed to suck off your cash, suits designed to "discover" all of your company info through the legal process of discovery, suits to hold you in court while they come up with a product, suits to determine where your bank account is so that they could sue you there......
Corp. Flack to boss: "How many thousand lawyers do you want me to drop on company X today boss?"
Boss: "Enough so they never come back!...I want those basterds!...send all we got!"
This method of operation is being used to hunt the "lone inventor," so that disruptive technologies do not emerge to threaten the giants. They have people dedicated to keeping the walls of the empire safe, that's the advantage of being big.
What Mr. Farnswort lacked was the equivelent legal firepower of the MPAA and RIAA.....could you imagine his lawsuits against RCA?...He would have ended up owning the company....but RCA's lawyers combined with the unfortunate timing of the WW2 means that Mr. Farnsworth is simply out of time to collect on his invention. The big guys stole his stuff and stalled out untill the penalties were meaningless.....sound familiar?
Now....flash forward to todays system.....all of the corporate giants not only have lawyers that they could para-drop into any courthouse across America, but they have the DMCA to make that "taking" of private invention all "legal"...think of Sonic Blue's situation....being forced (I know that it was reversed later, but principle) to collect information for the MPAA about their customers.....I know, I can hear the cynics, "It's all legal though, gotta be, it was decided in a court of law, right?"
Until the "lone inventor" can defend himself in court on the merits of the case rather than the cash onhand, he will always be hunted....
Legal reform for this problem made simple: The loosing party pays ALL legal expenses for ALL parties!....just think...no more nuiscense suits, no more extortion by the big guys because I could get the BEST defense on contingency by the BEST professional who would WANT to help me defend my position! He wins, he charges plaintif company X whatever he wants (huge is fine with me!). Contingency has done wonders for the plaintif lawsuit market, perhaps by making legal defense profitable, we can reverse the trend!
These three inventions were all made by Bell Labs. Bell Labs was supported only by the telephone monopoly, aka the biggest corporation in the world. I'd say that that is a far cry from a "lone inventor." What it once took a genius years to do, it eventually takes anyone no time at all. You understand the laws of motion (probably) and gravity, which is more than can be said of anyone living in the 12th Century. You can create new applications of those problems, but that doesn't make you the inventor of them. Even if you recast them and re-write them.
1. DSP research and development. I've worked as the student programmer for a 2 person DSP programming company that was actually successful. The owner, an experienced electrical engineer, was an astounding businessman, programmer, and scientist, who invented and ported sound technology to DSPs, and worked with larger companies on a freelance basis to put those DSP's into larger inventions. All while working at home after years in larger businesses. There's plenty of work out there to make the gadgets of future decades possible - but you have to do a lot of inventing and marketing to make it feasible, and be absolutely sure about each step. If you can't honestly explain exactly what you are doing, in a provable manner, to potential customers, everyone will get very frustrated. Be prepared for lots of legal work too. And be prepared for some insane assembly languages for dozens of different parts - for each new part, the language, compiler, and basic philisophy of the unit seems to change. If anyone can develop consistant tools for many parts between companies, and convince people to start using them, they could make lots of money.
2. Biotech and DNA technology development. Much like #1, but much more massive ammounts of legal work involved. The main thing is that, as much as possible, don't get involved in the touchy intellectual property-oriented areas. Instead, develop the tools which will allow others to study, graph, track, etc, various pieces of Biotech information. The easier and more consistant you can make the process of collecting information and organizing the information for medical researchers, the more they can get done, and hopefully, the more they will use your tools. You'll need to consider the equipment used in various experiments, the nature of the appropriation systems put together for research organizations, and how best to market your product. You can make deals with equipment providers (as long as you're not outright purchased this way), and get job satisfaction out of helping people develop ways to save lives.
Well... those are the two big ones I can think up off the top of my head. Anyone else with some other relatively open branches of computer science or electrical engineering? Any other great unfilled but potentially profitable needs that haven't really been getting companies attention?
:^)
Ryan Fenton
As someone who qualifies as a "lonely inventor" (see my latest invention) I can say with some authority that there are occasionally some definite advantages to working outside the huge corporate structure.
:-)
For a start, many of those working within the corporate machine have obtained their position as a result of a splended array of formal qualifications and their academic background.
Now, while such a background is extremely important, there are occasions when it actually makes the act of "inventing" an awful lot harder.
Some of the most interesting (and practical) inventions are the result of someone who didn't know (because they hadn't been taught) that something was impossible -- so they just went ahead and did it.
An unfortunate effect of gaining a depth of knowledge is that one's field of vision is often reduced as a result. Sometimes an important innovation comes as a result of applying knowledge gained in a totally different field to a problem.
It's been my experience that occasionally the "experts" get so close to the problem that they can't easily see the bigger picture -- a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees so to speak.
Of course the reality is that if "the lone inventor" does have a good idea, they're then left with no choice but to solicit the help of a large corporation and the resources that such an organization can bring to bear. There's usually a huge void between an idea or a working prototype, and a commercially successful product.
The inventor and his invention are just one piece of the puzzle.
Of course (as I well know), the biggest problem faced by many inventors, regardless of the quality or viability of their ideas, is getting the right "big corporation" interested enough to provide those missing pieces.
I shudder to think about just how many great ideas have never seen the light of day -- not because the inventor couldn't invent, but because (s)he simply had no luck in attracting corporate or investment interest.
Of course anyone wanting to invest in my X-Jet engine is welcome to contact me
Your argument is as ridiculous as saying that every single government on Earth is as genocidal as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China or Pol Pot's Cambodia. The head of my CS department was a manager at IBM. He was paid from what I hear about $400,000/year. Based on the kinds of bonuses that he secured for his top subordinates, I would bet good money that he got a lot of innovation and hard work out of them. Bonuses that were frequently in the $17,000 ballpark. He got them bonuses that were higher than what some people make in 1 year in the US. You would have to be pretty foolish to think that people won't bust their asses for cash like that. Good corporations have regulations to make sure that people don't go off in every direction, so that there is a purpose to research. But good corporations will pay whatever they can to ensure that there is financial motivation to bring out the genius in every employee doing the R&D that they can.
So Farnsworth didn't really have a commercializable technology. Worse, he got to the demo level during the Great Depression, a lousy time to get funding for a long-term R&D project.
It took RCA well over a decade to make television work commercially. It was hard to build a good TV camera tube.
If you look at the tube designs, you can see the problem. The image dissector had no light integration; only the light falling on the beam spot at the moment of scan was sensed. In other words, only one pixel time's worth of light contributed to the output signal. Farnsworth put in all the amplification he could, with a photomultiplier-like arrangement within the tube. But it wasn't enough.
Zworklin's Iconoscope integrated light over the whole frame time, but didn't amplify the output within the camera tube. That wasn't enough either.
It was clear that using both ideas together would help the sensitivity problem, but it took over a decade at RCA and elsewhere to make that work. Both approaches came together in the image orthicon, which was big, expensive, complicated, and required lots of support electronics, but delivered a good image. The sort of thing you'd expect from a big industrial research lab.
Quoth the poster:
Legal reform for this problem made simple: The loosing [sic] party pays ALL legal expenses for ALL parties!....just think...no more nuiscense [sic] suits,
While this might sound like a good idea on the surface, it would in fact have a devastating effect on the justice system. Even the most seemingly ironclad lawsuit is a crapshoot when taken before a judge. Law is a game of subtleties and minutiae; further more, it is inherently subjective. The mere fact that claims are contested is evidence of this: a case that seems airtight to a plaintiff is scoffed at by the defendant. The judge listens to the arguments as presented by each side (in effect, making the skill of the argument part of the case, for better or for worse), and renders his decision based on his legal training, precedent, his experiences, his ideology (again, for better or for worse), and a whole host of other factors. These factors introduce an element of chance into the proceedings, an element which one cannot discount.
What does this mean? It means that even the most solid case, argued by the most skilled attorney, can be lost. Now, if you make the loser pay the legal fees for both sides, then you are putting a potential plaintiff in the position of having to pay legal fees on a case that may have been perfectly legitimate, but cursed by bad luck; this problem is compounded by the fact that with the loser paying, both parties would have incentive to hire the best attorney possible: if a better attorney can win the case for you, and you won't have to pay if you win, then it is absolutely to your advantage to hire somebody better. This would inevitably lead to a chilling effect on lawsuits. While that may be viewed as desirable, the chill would extend not just to frivilous suits, but to legitimate suits as well.
Also consider enforcement: if Microsoft were found to be using code from the Linux kernel, and Linus decided to file suit against Microsoft, how would he be held to pay if he should lose? Would he be required to post funds in advance in escrow, in case he loses? How much should he post? Microsoft has quite a legal team. What if MS decided to hire additional lawyers, or specialists? Perhaps expert witnesses? Should Linus pony up every time they add a staffer to the payroll? If you institute a policy like this, quashing a lawsuit would be as easy as hiring everybody you know. The other options would be to make them pay afterward (what if they don't have the money), or require some sort of legal insurance (equally expensive).
Short answer is that, while it may seem attractive, having the loser pay the winner's legal fees, it would have dramatic negative consequences. A better idea, perhaps, would be to have a two-tiered system: bring your case before the court, the judge listens to the synopses. If your case fails a "straight-face" test, he can instruct you to pay the defendant's legal fees. If you pass the "straight-face" test, you move on to the trial court, and follow the current rules. This is, in fact, a derivative of the criminal system: before the trial, the prosecution must get an indictment. The indictment forces the prosecution to show some sufficient cause to believe that you committed a crime, before you go to trial. Incidentally, even now, there are some provisions for making the the loser pay the winner's legal fees; legal fees can be included in a judgement. This is just used semi-sparingly, to prevent the effects mentioned above.
Just for the record, I am not a lawyer, so feel free to correct me anywhere I missed a detail. My dad is, though (Oklahoma, Ohio, and Federal bar (USAF)), and we've discussed this at length. He's disgusted with the legal industry, too. :-)
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
An example is automotive cooling systems. For the majority of the last century to water flowed through in the wrong direction. The cold water came in through where the oil was kept, then the warmed water flowed around the cylinders where everything is hot. Now you want your oil to be nice and warm so that it will flow well and cover everything, and you want the rest of the engine to be kept cool so that pistons don't get stuck and other high temperature nastyness. The reason the water flowed the way it did was simply because that was the way water flowed with gravity feed, but for nearly a century after the water pump was introduced into the system the water flowed the wrong way.
There is always room for innovation. Even very simple systems can sometimes do with a tweak. The role of the lone inventor is not over, as shown by such people as the guy in Thailand that is making spherical fire extinguisers that you operate by rolling them into a fire.
These days Swan is airbrushed out of the story in the States.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
In fact, Issac Newton summed it up somewhat earlier when he said "If I have seen further than others, it is through standing on the shoulders of giants" (precise wording not guaranteed, statutory rights not affected).
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
But then there is another story not many people remember about someone doing work on creating a pump mechanism that you place in a river. Using the kinetic force of the movement of the water to power a pump to take some of the water from the river and push it thorugh a hose up a hill. This was a device that was just submerged in the water without the need to dam the river.
I'm not surprised that not many people remember it. What you have described is a hydralic ram, which was invented by the Montgolfier brothers (of ballon fame) in 1793. See here for the details.
ARM are a smallish bunch of guys based in the UK, they "think" for a living, then sell the ideas to the rest of the industry.
So IP based companies can work, and leave the heavy lifting to others.
In the world of outsourcing this is a common model, and ARM are probably the best examples of how to be an ideas company.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi