By ADAM DAVIDSON
The Inventors Association of Manhattan meets on the second Monday of each month in the conference room of a Times Square law firm. I went to their most recent meeting to explore an idea that I’ve been hearing a lot about lately — that we are living in a golden age of the independent inventor. Or as Ron Reardon, a patent agent who was a guest speaker that evening, explained, the odds of making money “aren’t good — 1 in 100, 1 in 1000, I’m not sure — but they are better than the lottery.”
Gathered around the room that evening were 55 people, old and young, in suits and T-shirts, everyone hoping that his or her idea could buck the odds. Chris Landano, a young, wiry firefighter, told me about his TrakPak360, a utility belt — perfect for photographers, carpenters, “anybody who carries tools!” — which is equipped with a plastic track that allows pouches to swing around easily. Lorraine Muriello, a woman from New Jersey, described her borderline-brilliant (but extremely easy to rip off) idea: No Sweat Towels, gym towels with zippered pouches for keys and cellphones. Her friend, Cheryl Manzone, told me she has filed countless patents over the past few decades (shoes with interchangeable heels, a compact diaper travel kit) and is now pitching her latest innovation, Stickpods, which are like straws with legs. They’re for holding lollipops, among other treats. The one invention already on sale came from Gregory Quinn, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union. Quinn, a veteran driver (“Truck, taxi, limo, you name it”) has begun selling his Stimulus Pad, a kind of massaging car-seat cover that offers the equivalent of 15 masseurs’ hands on your back all at once. And this is only a small sample of the ideas I heard about.
America has always been the land of tinkerers, from Benjamin Franklin and Henry Ford to Steve Jobs and the guy who created the Flowbee. But today’s basement inventors have it easy in ways their predecessors couldn’t have imagined. In the past, someone with a new idea would have had to actually build the thing themselves, find a market for it and figure out how to get it mass-produced. Now inexpensive technology means that anybody can quickly transform an idea into a physical product. Google SketchUp makes it easy for even the sloppiest untrained draftsperson to mock up a 3-D digital model. Any inventor can contact a Chinese factory, many of which are so hungry for American business that they will create a prototype for next to nothing. Sites like Etsy.com make it easier to reach a market, and others, like Quirky.com, allow users to simply suggest an idea and share the royalties if it makes it to the market.
This environment approaches the ideal economy that Adam Smith wrote about — one in which size and power don’t always beat good ideas in the market. Comprehensive data are difficult to come by, but the largest inventor’s organization, the United Inventors Association, says their membership has tripled to 12,000 in the last 18 months. This spike is undoubtedly due in part to the economic slowdown and high unemployment, but the new tools seem likely to inspire a permanent increase in amateur inventing when the economy starts growing more aggressively (whenever that is).
This is good news for noninventors too. Many of the things that make life better started off in the brain of some lonely experimenter: the steam engine, airplanes, antibiotics, maybe even self-supporting lollipop holders. But after leaving the meeting, I felt less convinced than ever that we are living in a golden age of invention. Sure, the Internet and other tools have made the inventing process easier; but the entrepreneurial landscape hardly seems dominated by small inventors. Actually, the new-idea supply chain has some considerable rough patches that, in many ways, are harder to overcome than ever. Once invented and prototyped, those new products have to compete for space in a very narrow pipeline. Retail has become so concentrated that three companies (Walmart, Kroger and Target) control about a fifth of all United States in-store sales, and a tiny number of Internet and made-for-TV giants (Amazon, QVC) dominate in-home sales.
Another huge barrier to independent inventors is, paradoxically, the system set up to protect them. “The patent system has become rather costly for a small inventor,” says James Bessen, a lecturer at the Boston University School of Law. “Go back 100 years, and patents were very inexpensive to get. You didn’t have to have a lawyer to get one. The system is working in a very different way than it did years ago, and that favors large corporations.”
These days, the average costs for a patent are about $10,000 — chump change for a corporation, but a considerable amount for many home inventors. And even when they spend that much, they often see their patent applications rejected. Even if an application is approved, larger companies have become adroit at swooping in and copying the product with just enough changes to make it legal. As a result, many give up on the process altogether. Gary Clegg invented the Slanket before Allstar Products Group introduced its near-identical Snuggie. Allstar outmarketed the unpatented Slanket, and the rest is history.
Since he took over the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2009, David Kappos says, he has thought every day about a man he met from northern Vermont (“He was dressed, literally, in overalls with a red-and-white checkered shirt”) who had invented a brilliant, transformative two-cycle engine for a snow blower. “If you don’t protect your invention with intellectual property,” Kappos says, “it will be copied almost immediately if it’s good.” So Kappos has initiated a host of initiatives to help the small inventor with cheaper patent filing fees, pro bono legal help and a more responsive patent office.
It probably won’t matter, though, says Paul Romer, an economist at N.Y.U. and perhaps the leading thinker of our time on economic growth. It costs around $1 million to defend a patent-infringement lawsuit, Romer says. So even if a lone inventor has a legitimate patent claim, a large company can sue and force the person into bankruptcy. Romer says that our patent-law system is one of the key barriers to progress, because wealth typically wins out, which would set Adam Smith spinning in his grave. The problem, Romer says, is not simply that the amateur snowblower tinkerer is cheated out of some profit; it’s that people with real world-improving ideas may ignore them because they think the system is stacked against them. If that’s the case, winning the lottery might be their best hope.
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