Do you have what it takes to be a top inventor?

Who really invents? What are people actually doing in their minds and with their hands when they invent things? Is there a formula for invention? To answer these questions, we need a new field of study called “inventology,” according to author Pagan Kennedy.
In 2012, Kennedy was named design columnist for the New York Times Magazine. Her column “Who Made That?” detailed the origins of everything from the cubicle to the home pregnancy test. Drawing on new research, “Inventology” is a book which sheds light on the creative process and helps us understand the inventive mind at a moment in history when barriers to invention are disappearing as never before.
Ideas are no longer up in the air; rather they are whizzing through fiber optic cables. The Internet “is like a vast R&D lab where we all share our own experiments and benefit from the work of others,” writes Kennedy.
A 2013 Time magazine survey of thousands of adults in 17 countries found that one-third of respondents considered themselves inventors. But if some people tinker just for the sake of tinkering, many others do so because they have not been able to find a product which satisfies their needs.
This is especially true for people who are in need of prosthetics. Jon Schull, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, after attending a conference where engineering students were explaining how they had designed and built a custom prosthetic, wondered how one might help all the people around the world in need of such a device. After watching a YouTube video featuring a South African carpenter who could not afford to buy prosthetic fingers and hands, Schull contacted Ivan Owen, a puppeteer and gadget maker. They both created the Robohand, a mechanical hand which could be assembled from parts manufactured on a 3-D printer. They also made digital plans for the Robohand free to all so that anyone in the world who has access to a 3-D printer can manufacture it for less than $30. And this is how the e-NABLE community, with the help of 32 volunteers, gave away more than 700 prosthetic devices to children who could not afford to pay the $40,000 market price for the needed prosthetics.
According to Schull, the tools of production are now in the hands of the masses. After the industrial revolution and the information revolution, there is a possibility that the world is gearing up for an “alternative economy revolution.”
Low-cost, high-impact inventions
Nowadays, people from all walks of life — including engineers, social workers, academics, doctors and students — are willing to invent products that can make life in a third world country easier and even change its economy.
Amy Smith, a nonconformist Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) instructor, is spearheading this new trend. Aware that engineers and designers are disconnected from the conditions that would allow them to be aware of people’s problems, she took her entire class to Haiti. MIT students, with the help of local farmers, then learned about traditional agriculture. Smith aims to teach her students how to create solutions that cost very little and benefit hundreds of millions of people. In other words, she is training them to brainstorm and invent a successful technology which can be applied to social problems and affect the economy of an entire village.
Shawn Frayne, one of Smith’s students, produced a piece of charcoal made out of the inedible parts of the sugar cane plant. This encouraged Haitians to produce their own charcoal and save money. A year later, Frayne returned to Haiti to a village with no electricity where he was a volunteer in the charcoal project. Seeing how local people were struggling to pay for kerosene, Frayne wondered how he could create a power grid. One day, he saw a flag flapping in the wind. This gave him the idea to build a “windbelt” generator. The pocket-sized device, produced for less than $50, can power LED lights and radios.
Frayne went on to win a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award in 2007 and twelve months later, Discover magazine named him one of the “Best Brains Under 40.”
“After spending time in an off-the-grid village, Frayne has approached the energy problem from a new angle, one that he probably never would have grasped in the comfort of a first-world lab with plentiful electricity,” writes Kennedy.
Shawn Frayne is now a freelance inventor with a design shop in Hong Kong. He studies the needs and desires of his target audience through crowdfunding, which is an amazing way to get feedback from potential customers. Frayne told Kennedy that crowdfunding was not just a mechanism for raising money but was even more valuable as a tool for reading the unexpressed desires of an audience.
“It has always been insanely difficult to get immediate market feedback. But now you can get feedback as fast as you can create the prototype. In a way Kickstarter is like rapid prototyping for market demand. You can throw it out to the crowd and immediately get an answer,” Frayne reportedly said.
Accidental inventions
If many inventions nowadays emerge from new needs, some inventions still happen by chance. In 1965, this was the case with a lab worker, James Schlatter. While he was heating aspartame in a flask, he spilled some of the liquid on his hand. Inadvertently, he licked his finger and was surprised to find that it tasted sweet since it was made from sour and bitter chemical compounds.
In a 2005 European study of thousands of inventors, about half of them reported that their discoveries happened by accident or unexpectedly. This is the case with Duane Pearsall who was working on a system he called “static neutralizer.” The idea was to decrease the presence of potentially dangerous static electricity in factories and photography labs.
One day someone lit a cigarette in his workroom and Pearsall realized that the device was reacting to the particles released by the burning cigarette. Soon after, he met a friend who advised him strongly to forget about static electricity and focus on a smoke detector. At that time many engineers were trying to invent a fire alarm but they were on the wrong track. They believed the best way to detect fire was to sense heat. In 1968, however, Pearsall released his smoke detector onto the market.
Traits of young inventors
There is not an age limit to inventing and for Saul Griffith, an MIT grad student, it is important to change our educational systems so that children can become technological explorers. He told Pagan Kennedy: “The first generation of kids who grew up with computers, Bill Gates for one, learned how to be software wizards and hackers. They understood the potential of digital code as their elders never could.”
Many inventors admit that school did not nurture their interest in invention but that it even prevented them from spending time on their hands-on projects. They also acknowledge that they developed their most useful skills in a home workshop.
“Compelling new research confirms… that children who can visualize and manipulate objects in the mind’s eye tend to become top achievers in midlife,” writes Kennedy.
Nowadays, most educators are advocating hands-on projects and school R&D labs to encourage children of different age groups to engineer and invent. Jack Andraka was thirteen when his mentor died from pancreatic cancer; he made up his mind to find an early-detection test for the disease. He worked a lot on the Internet; he learned how to understand cancer-biology papers and eventually found a promising protein. He contacted some two hundred scientists to ask for lab space where he could run trials to test his ideas. He was given a place in a lab at John Hopkins. Two years later, at the age of fifteen, he found a low-cost method to detect a certain protein in the blood. As a result Andraka won an Intel ISEF Gordon E. Moore Award. Although his device has yet to be tested, his story is a shining example of just how far a teenager can go when the entry point is a laptop.
“Inventology” ends with a reminder that every one of us has the capacity to invent. “So if we can harness the enormous diversity of 7 billion minds, we stand a far greater chance of discovering the elegant solutions that lie somewhere out in the unknown,” Kennedy concludes.
This book scrutinizes the new digital tools which enable people of all ages and from all walks of life to tackle seemingly impossible problems and discover groundbreaking answers. In the 21st Century, inventing is no longer reserved for an elite; any individual can have an idea, create a vision and take it to the market.

Source:Arab News