The Invention Development Process

Your idea could be a service like "fat freeifying" food for food manufacturers, or retrofitting power generators to run at lower pressure, saving money. (Did you know that water boils at room temperature at a low enough pressure?) Your idea could be a product, like a new kind of launch vehicle or something less tangible, like a new kind of loan, or a web site (a web site, imagine that). Metaphysically, I have observed that if one sets a pure and good objective and goes in that direction -- a web site about raising capital for people who may not yet know how, or a guide to non-polluting motor vehicles -- the details, including how to get paid, come later, as an unfoldment.

"Golden rulers" and other motivational experts seem to concur that if I sport an "edge" and/or focus on competing, that that edge isn't going to last for very long. The work has to be the reward, or put another way, the philanthropy. Intention is more important than plan.

"Iwon.com" is the latest example of an idea quickly becoming a $100 million business. The success of this kind of entrepreneurship is as much due to the reliability of programming to achieve certain kinds of objectives as to the ability of investment bankers to fund products. Other advantages of programming are copyright protection -- a 75 year exclusive arrangement that makes patenting look like a conspiracy, and the 50 million plus consumer base, eager to make the most of their investment. If your product is not something which an experienced programmer can "guesstimate" a budget for, take heart.

Design Tips

Product samples can also be created. The majority of these will probably be built from scratch, so it may be worthwhile to take a junior college-equivalent class in working with materials to learn the in's and out's of aluminum, plastics, steel, wood and glass. Much of this information can also be found online. In my experience, I was always trying to adapt toasters to typewriting, so I recommend learning how to work from scratch. The majority of finished products have been optimized for their uses, so a curtain rod is strong enough to hold curtains, not be a tripod leg for a camera.

This is why when one meets other inventors, their project so often is a chunk of aluminum or steel that has been machined and polished and may be a little oily. In a nutshell: metal surplus is plentiful, once steel is "worked" is becomes much harder; aluminum is difficult to weld but good to drill, tap and bolt; plastics tend to "relax" and wood is, in many ways, similar to plastic.

If, on the other hand, you know from the beginning that your product will be "value-added," you will be able to do some fairly accurate planning for it -- bearing in mind that saying about "the stone that the builders rejected." Many manufacturers are more than willing to provide free samples to a prospective buyer with a good plan for their product. This allows for some test versions and samples to mail back to the manufacturer. Make the most of that love, and it will grow. In the event you cannot sell all of the finished products, a cooperative manufacturer may even allow the unsold "value-added" inventory to be returned.

If the product is difficult to prototype, consider working outside of its normal "scale." Just as a ship model can be made out of a few feet of aluminum foil, a microscopic component of a sewing machine can be made two or three feet across, to demonstrate a principle and fine-tune a design. This idea can be carried further: to prove that a CCD camcorder chip can be applied to a given problem, a $100 document scanner chip may be used, which only photographs a single line, to prove that a whole video picture is possible. Or a light meter photo-transistor can be used, for a single pixel. Computer programs are increasingly making these scale-cheating measures unecessary, but it can be comforting to know that a person can make a camera that will eventually be two inches across, four feet across, with a lens made from of a sheet of glass, cut to a double-convex eye shape. (Do you see how it works? The sheet glass will throw an image that will be a slit, but will still contain image information!) I most recently heard of this technique being used for the latest design of radio antennae incorporating focussing lenses. If I understand the principle correctly, the antenna used a "lens" with a certain frequency of radio being transmitted through it, and its shape is similar to an interference grating, very rippled. This design was tested by making the "lens" in only two dimension, a sheet of copper cut to the rippled pattern. The test was successful.

So, you can encourage yourself and possibly streamline a laborious prototyping and promotional effort if you slow down the motion from the speed of sound to the speed of a snail, reduce (or increase?) the number of dimensions, change the scale or otherwise focus on what works-- go for it!

Other suggestions? Definitely use the search engines to confirm the principles involved. You may find a product superior to your planned idea which you could market knowledgeably as an alternatve.