Empowering Idea People: A new paradigm for promoting innovation in America

March 05, 2010

"The next 20 years has to be the most inventive 20 years of our history." -- Arun Majumdar, head of ARPA-E, a new green innovation agency at the Department of Energy (from an interview on Clean Skies Sunday) I joined Edison Nation about a year ago and I have to admit, I was initially disappointed because my first idea did not survive the vetting process. Of course, I can understand why it did not survive in retrospect, because I now see that my idea (a plan for recycling plastic grocery bags) was low on specifics and would have required a change in behavior on the part of retailers and manufacturers. Moreover, my idea required the manufacture of a kind of "bag melting machine" that I had no idea whatsoever how to produce. The more I thought about that attempt of mine, the more I realized that, in a sense, I am not really an Everyday Edison after all, since, although I love coming up with ideas, I don't personally have the time (or even the desire, really) to devote my life to the achievement of just one specific brainstorm of mine. Having said that, however, I still believe that there is a potentially valuable role for people like myself in the Everyday Edison family (or at very least in the community of inventors at large), and I would like to use the remainder of this post to explain what that role could be. I think the usefulness of the role in question has been largely overlooked in the past and that the inventor community could get a timely "shot in the arm" by recognizing its existence and then encouraging and fostering the input and guidance of the people who choose to work in this newly recognized capacity. In short, I want to recommend myself (and others like me) to the inventor community as "idea people" working under a kind of "copyright commons" paradigm. You see, in the past few centuries, the activity of inventing has been a somewhat solitary and secretive pursuit in the West, for the simple reason that a breakthrough idea is only financially valuable to the extent that one owns the rights to it, and hence secrecy and inventing have gone hand in hand in capitalist society. Although this is a good system as far as it goes (because it provides financial incentives to individual inventors to quietly put their noses to the grindstone), it has the down side of killing potentially productive collaboration between different inventors (or even different potential inventors) since the parties almost always feel an unspoken concern that something they say or write in the course of this collaboration could result in them losing the legal right to profit appropriately from the ultimate success of their own ideas. A wall of legal concerns is thus erected between different potential inventors, especially those interested in producing the same general type of product or service. I myself saw this wall in action as a child when I mailed in an unsolicited game idea to Parker Bros. The company quickly returned my letter unopened, informing me that they could not even read game ideas from customers for legal reasons. They were apparently afraid (quite rightly, of course) that if the proposed game (or, indeed, any game like it) was ever actually developed by Parker Bros., the letter writer could eventually get wind of the fact and demand royalty payments under the assumption that the company made the invention based on his or her original input. To solve this problem (i.e., to allow inventors to actually listen to and potentially profit from the input of "idea people" such as myself) I propose that Edison Nation -- and, indeed, society at large -- explicitly recognize the existence of these two different sorts of contributors when it comes to pushing innovation: namely, inventors and "idea people" -- and then to provide these newly recognized "idea people" with not only a forum in which to contribute their "big ideas" to inventors (such as this Web site, for instance), but a legal environment in which they can do so without those ideas being summarily ignored by inventors due to legal concerns. In other words, I think there needs to be a new un-copyright law (based on the un-copyright laws already enumerated in the Wiki world of the "copyright commons") under which individuals like myself can publish their non-detailed "big ideas" with the legal understanding that any inventor is free to implement the suggestions to the best of his or her ability. After all, that's the role that folks like myself want to play: We realize, as I said above, that we're not willing (and/or able) to put our lives on hold to develop any particular idea ourselves, but we nonetheless have big ideas that we'd love to see implemented, and there ought to be a way for us to encourage others to pursue them without our being self-silenced or our voices drowned out thanks to legal concerns. Of course, "idea people" like myself can simply spell out our altruistic position in writing by simply prefacing all of our published ideas for inventors with the statement that "we don't expect compensation for any product that may eventually result from the following general proposal" -- but we can't expect inventors to take us at our word without our first having a legal basis for making that claim. Otherwise, it's still legally possible, however unlikely or legally problematic, that the "idea people" in question could come back at some future point and demand royalties from inventions that they claim in retrospect to have inspired. (Indeed, if I myself contributed an idea on this legally unsupported altruistic basis and found it someday to have inspired a billion-dollar product on sale at Walmart, I would no doubt be the first one to point out that I myself had no legal standing when I made my original concession on the subject of compensation!) I hope I have made this concept clear, because I believe that the communication and collaboration that's required to make Arun Majumdar's vision a reality (to make the next 20 years the most inventive 20 years of American history) requires nothing less than a new paradigm for innovation, one that not only explicitly recognizes the valuable contributions of would-be "idea people" such as myself but that provides them with a legal basis under which to effectively contribute their ideas, thereby allowing them to become cheerleaders for change at a time when innovation is so desperately needed. Brian Quass Alexandria, Virginia, USA
Click here to see a few of the author's 'Big Ideas'