The Total Inventor's Manual

Transform Your Idea into a Top-Selling Product

Sean Michael Ragan

• Publisher: Weldon Owen
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781681883069
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Civil Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This comprehensive guide from the editors of Popular Science covers everything a new inventor needs to know from starting out to running a start-up. Contrary to popular opinion, you don't have to be an ace electrician or a coding prodigy to develop your own game-changing invention. All you need is curiosity, a desire to fix a common problem, and the determination to see your ideas become reality. And it won't hurt to have this book handy—a volume full of vital tips, skills, and strategies that will take you from zero to inventor. Everyone knows about Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but in The Total Inventor's Manual, you'll also learn from the examples of those intrepid inventors who gave us the first home pregnancy test, the Super Soaker, the Roomba, the digital camera, and many other products that have changed the world. Here you will learn to turn your vision into a reality with a crash course in ideation, prototyping, and testing—including lessons in 3D-printing, coding, robotics, and more. You'll discover funding strategies that range from running a Kickstarter campaign to making a venture capital pitch, plus tips on manufacturing, supply chains, marketing, and running—or selling—your new company!

ON THE CARE AND FEEDING OF IDEAS

Like drawing, doing algebra, or speaking a second language, having original ideas is a mental skill that can be developed and, with practice, become second nature. Whether you dream of creating the next big thing in the tech space, need a concept for a pressing assignment, or are just looking to transform your mind into a fertile breeding ground for good ideas, try a few of these practical tips to shake up your sluggish muse.

001 GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION

Society doesn’t always encourage us to be creative. At a very young age, we start learning what’s expected to fit in, and our own original ideas start to seem less important. So we get out of the habit of having them. And when, as adults, we’re called on to produce creative work, we may be plagued by insecurity or negative self-talk: I’m not an ideas person. I suppose I might try such-and-so, but that’s stupid and would never work.

First, don’t think that way if you can help it. Second, even if you can’t silence your inner critic, remember that first ideas are often stupid and almost never work. A genius isn’t so much someone who has better ideas than everybody else as someone who just has more of them—and is unafraid to dig through dozens of bad ones to find a diamond in the rough. Anyone can do this, and the more you work at it, the easier it gets.

002 CLEAR SPACE IN YOUR HEAD

In 1991, a bright, young artist named Tom Friedman had his first solo exhibition in New York. A conceptual sculptor, Friedman’s works often consist of everyday objects like pencils, soap, and aluminum pie pans arranged in striking ways. He’s created explosions out of toothpicks, cadavers out of paper, and giant spheres out of chewed gum. He made one of his early works by mounting a spinning canvas to a wall and signing his name on it over and over as it turned, spiraling toward the center as his pen gradually ran out of ink.

Today an original Friedman easily fetches US$150,000. But before his glory days, he was a grad student at the University of Chicago, where his journey to find the creative potential in everyday things started by closing himself in an empty, all-white room: “Every day I would bring an object from my apartment and place it somewhere in the space. The first day I placed a metronome on the floor, and it just clicked back and forth. Or I would sit the whole day, on the floor, looking at it and thinking about it, and asking questions about my experience of it . . . For me, this was more like a mental space that had been cleared away.”

Your own empty room is likely to be metaphorical—maybe it’s meditation, exercise, hot baths, or whatever else works—but the point is the same: Eliminate the distractions of your daily life and listen to what bubbles up in the silence. The longer you listen, the more interesting the things you will hear.

003 WRITE IT DOWN RIGHT AWAY

Ideas are guests in your brain. Be sure to treat them with hospitality. Moreover, they’re fickle guests who come from a mysterious place, drop in unannounced, and may not be inclined to stay that long. Who knows how many good ones have been lost over the eons because they chose to call on someone distracted by hunting, eating, sleeping, socializing, or some other more practical obligation?

Don’t be that person. When an idea shows up and makes you go “Aha!”, stop what you’re doing (safety permitting) and immediately make some kind of record. Get it on paper, into a computer, or somewhere on your phone within a few seconds. Snapping a quick picture of whatever triggered your brainstorm is better than nothing, but be sure your process includes filing all these seeds away in a single, easy-to-search location, so you’ll know how to find them later. I like to keep a plain text idea file on my computer desktop, and I pay a remote backup service a small annual fee to automatically upload the file to a data vault whenever I add something.

TOOL TIME

004 PROTECT YOUR IDEAS WITH A NOTEBOOK

For decades under U.S. patent law, the inventor’s notebook was not just an eccentric prop to go alongside the bubbling chemicals, lab coat, and propeller beanie —it was an important legal document. When a dispute arose about the awarding of a patent, the courts would investigate to determine who had been first to invent the idea, and a properly maintained research notebook was the most important piece of evidence. So the patent rights—and the potentially lucrative legal monopoly that goes along with them—would generally go to the inventor who kept better notes along the way.

In 2013, federal law was changed to award priority to the first inventor to file a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which brought its processes more in line with those long practiced in most of the world. That change has pros and cons, but one upshot is that the importance of the notebook as a legal document has been somewhat diminished.

Regardless of the patent laws in your area, there are still lots of good reasons why you should have a proper notebook (see #015) and be disciplined about keeping it up-to -date. First and foremost, it’s a critical aid to fallible human memory. Inventing something worthwhile is a long, laborious process, and the time and energy you invest in figuring stuff out is wasted if you can’t later recall what you did and how you did it.

005 PERUSE THE PATENTS

Philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s oft quoted in the context of history, but it’s just as true with inventing. To bring your work to market, you need to know what’s come before.

Start by doing an extra-thorough online search. Think about the many ways someone might describe your idea, and try those searches too. Scientists joke that “a year in the lab will save you a day in the library.” Believe it: If you’ve got a killer idea, you may be disappointed to learn that somebody else has already been there, done that, and sold a million T-shirts. So it’s better to learn now than it is to waste time on a dead end.

Next, search the patent files for prior art: published patents and applications that may describe a similar idea (see #106). All the world’s major patent databases are freely searchable online, so dive in.

006 HONOR MOTHER NECESSITY

Everybody knows the old saw about necessity being the mother of invention. At the risk of bad taste, there’s been a lot of speculation about who donated the Y chromosome. Galileo once wrote that “Doubt is the father of invention,” and other thinkers have pointed the finger at a whole cast of downright mythological characters, including opportunity, scarcity, curiosity, laziness, and ingenuity. All we really know about Papa is that he’s shiftier and harder to pin down—a bit of a rolling stone.

But if your goal is to invent something profitable, it’s usually best to take the conventional route and start by looking for problems wanting solutions. Train yourself to think past the status quo and imagine how the world could be better. Just because we’ve all been doing the same thing—and in the same way—for as long as anyone can remember doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done using a better method.

And if you’re ambitious, consider Problems Writ Large—be they problems of the economy, the environment, medicine, or the human condition itself. Here you can take your pick of history-making examples: the printing press, the...