Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World

by Pagan Kennedy Narrated by Lisa Flanagan

Overview

Find out where great ideas come from.

A father cleans up after his toddler and*imagines*a cup that won't spill. An engineer*watches people using walkie-talkies and has an idea.*A doctor figures out how to deliver patients to the operating room before they die.

By studying inventions like these - the sippy cup, the cell phone, and an ingenious hospital bed - we can learn how people imagine their way around "impossible" problems to discover groundbreaking answers. Pagan Kennedy reports on how these enduring methods can be adapted to*the twenty-first century, as millions of us deploy tools like crowdfunding, big data, and 3-D printing to find hidden opportunities. **
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Inventology*uses*the*stories*of inventors and surprising research*to reveal the steps that produce innovation. As Kennedy argues, recent advances in technology and communication have placed us at the cusp of a golden age;*it's now more possible than ever before to transform ideas into actuality.*Inventology is a must-read for*designers,*artists, makers-and anyone else who is curious about creativity. By identifying the steps of the invention process, Kennedy reveals the imaginative tools required to solve our most challenging problems.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Clive Thompson

…elegant prose and excellent reporting…

Publishers Weekly

11/16/2015
Kennedy (Black Livingstone), former innovation columnist for the New York Times Magazine, examines the process of invention, wondering whether there is any formula for success. Kennedy interviews more than 100 inventors in different fields, asking who really does the work of invention, what we can learn from data on successful inventions, and what can be gained from emerging technologies such as 3-D printers. Along the way, she provides fascinating studies of numerous innovations, such as the rolling suitcase and color printing. Kennedy divides the book into five sections, each exploring a different strategy for invention: finding problems, discovery, prophecy, connecting, and empowerment. She also looks at how creative people channel frustration into solutions and explores the role of serendipity. Her interviewees recommend ways to think ahead of the curve and overcome self-doubt. The most absorbing chapter centers on “cross-pollinators”—people who carry ideas from one domain into another, thereby enabling new solutions. This book offers a new perspective into the process of invention that will inform and illuminate. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick Literary. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

"[Inventology] offers a new perspective into the process of invention that will inform and illuminate." —Publishers Weekly "'Inventology'" may be a real science; researchers are beginning to study it, and teachers are teaching it. Some 21st-century creations (crowdfunding, 3D printing) are breaking down barriers (money, time) between new ideas and a useful product, so a golden age of innovation seems in the offing. A delightful account of how inventors do what they do." —Kirkus, Starred —

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"A delightful account of how inventors do what they do." —Kirkus Starred Review

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2015-10-14
A journalist delivers an enthusiastic overview of inventions and the researchers that study them. Kennedy (The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution, 2008, etc.), the former "Innovation" columnist for the New York Times Magazine, emphasizes that some inventions—e.g., the rolling suitcase, sippy cup, computer apps, prosthetics—fulfill a need. Others (Velcro, Teflon, X-rays, the laser) emerge as oddball phenomena with no obvious use at the time of their invention, and years may pass before people discover what they are good for. While Kennedy seems to have a low opinion of the concept of inspiration, she finds that breakthroughs often follow happy accidents. For example, researchers testing a heart medication discovered that subjects were getting erections, so the medication became Viagra. Kennedy pays close attention to science fiction and futurology, perhaps more than results justify. In the 1960s, observers who saw the future of communications, which gave us the personal computer, cellphone, and Internet, hit the jackpot because the development of computer chips was genuinely revolutionary. Improvements in energy technology and medicine have been modest, so futurists who have routinely predicted interplanetary travel and cancer cures have a dismal record. In the concluding chapters, the author explores how inventors think. One scientist told her that "the ‘aha' moment is overrated." Kennedy notes how the "real creativity and insight occur as people struggle with a problem in their minds" and then as they translate that into reality. "Inventology" may be a real science; researchers are beginning to study it, and teachers are teaching it. Some 21st-century creations (crowdfunding, 3D printing) are breaking down barriers (money, time) between new ideas and a useful product, so a golden age of innovation seems in the offing. A delightful account of how inventors do what they do.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160648910
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/07/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

MARTIAN JET LAG

In 1970, Bernard D. Sadow, a vice president at a luggage company, was schlepping two suitcases through an airport when he noticed a workman pushing a machine on a dolly. Inspired, he began to experiment with a rolling suitcase that looked like a large pull toy; eventually he patented a suitcase that sat squarely on rollers, with a flexible strap attached to it. Instead of carrying this suitcase, you pulled it behind you on a "leash." Sadow's idea was revolutionary — here was one of the first suitcases designed for airports.

Though it sold well in the 1970s, his suitcase didn't end up becoming standard equipment for the air traveler. You rarely see pull-toy luggage today. Why not? Sadow's design was only a half solution. When you pulled too hard, the suitcase would crash into your legs. If you yanked it around a corner, it might lose its balance and flop onto its side.

In the 1980s, a pilot named Robert Plath custom-built his own version of the rolling suitcase in his home workshop. His design was a vast improvement over Sadow's. Plath put wheels on one edge of the bag so that it could tip on its corner, and he outfitted it with a rigid handle. You could adjust the length of the handle by sliding it up or down, trombone- style, allowing you to find just the right angle so the bag would follow you obediently, without attacking your ankles. This was a bag that you could comfortably tote over miles of airport linoleum.

So why was a pilot's insight so much more fruitful than the executive's? The answer has something to do with the way the two men experienced the problem. Bernard Sadow, a businessman heading off on vacation, was merely a tourist looking for a better solution. His was a short-term form of necessity. But Plath — who dragged his bags to and fro after every shift, day after day — was motivated to think deeply about the suitcase problem, to tinker in his garage, and to come up with an ingenious design for frequent flyers. By virtue of his job, Plath was already living in the future, when flying would become a commonplace misery.

In the 1990s, the price of airline tickets plummeted. Companies began sending executives across the country, sometimes on three or four flights a week. Planes began to feel like buses — crowded, smelly, and raucous. "Life Sucks and Then You Fly," as one Wired headline put it, in an article that described tech employees suffering in the middle seats during their coast-to-coast commute. By that time, passengers were hunting for anything that would ease the pain of cramped flights — from Xanax to noise-canceling headphones. And that's when the rolling suitcase became essential equipment. Plath's Rollaboard suitcase took off.

Adam Smith, writing in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), observed that there is a special kind of magic in tasks that we repeat over and over again. He described a pin factory where one man straightened the wire, another man cut it, and yet another man sharpened the tip, and so on. In a factory like that, each laborer became an expert in one small task, and his close attention might inspire him to "find out easier and readier methods of performing" his job.

In fact, Smith argued that one of the side benefits of the factory system was the way it turned workmen into inventors. He praised the "pretty machines" that factory laborers devised to ease their drudgery. For instance, he noticed a boy who was supposed to pump a lever in time with a piston. This relentless, grinding task inspired the boy to figure out an ingenious work-around: he tied a string between the lever and a moving part elsewhere on the machine. Now the machine itself pulled the lever for him. After automating his job, the boy skipped off to play with friends.

The economist Eric von Hippel, speaking in 2005, made his own observation about the way repetition can feed the imagination: "I've learned personally that you can get a graduate student to do a lot of things, but you can't get them to do it twenty thousand times in a row, [because] they will start to invent" a way to automate the boring job. There seems to be some kind of threshold — some number of hours — after which frustration produces creative insight.

In the 1970s, von Hippel came up with a name for the people who struggle with problems for which no off-the-shelf solution is available: he dubbed them Lead Users. Their job or hobby exposes them to an unusual kind of repetition, tedium, or danger. When bike hobbyists began to spend hours out in the woods riding over boulders and tree stumps, their tires popped, and that inspired them to build what we now call mountain bikes. Surgeons who pioneered new methods of operating on the heart had to design tools in order to perform these feats. And in 1982, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University recognized a new problem with digital communication — the flame war — so he devised the happy-face symbol, or emoticon, to cool tempers online.

Lead User Theory

Before he joined academia and became a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, von Hippel worked as an engineer at a start-up. And that's how he discovered the existence of Lead Users. In the 1960s, he became one himself.

Back then, von Hippel needed a tiny fan that would allow him to improve the performance of a fax machine, so he contacted an aerodynamics expert at Princeton and together they designed the fan. With his plans in hand, von Hippel struck a deal with a manufacturing company to produce the device.

Soon, von Hippel received a call from someone at the manufacturer: "It turns out a lot of other people want your fan too," the company rep told von Hippel. "Can we ... produce it for them?"

Von Hippel said yes. And then one day he picked up an industry journal and noticed an advertisement for his fan. The company had claimed credit for inventing it. You'd think he might have been angry. But instead, he was fascinated. He had just stumbled across a clue — the first inkling of an insight that would change his life, as well as what we know about technological creativity.

In the 1970s, when he switched careers and became an academic researcher, he dedicated himself to a question: Who really dreams up breakthrough ideas? To find out, he came up with a method that bears a startling resemblance to the way that a detective works a cold-case murder — digging deep into files, interviewing witnesses, and wearing down shoe leather to follow clues. In one of his earliest studies, von Hippel picked more than a hundred lab equipment products and then hired researchers to help him discover the backstory of each of the devices. He learned that about 80 percent of the scientific equipment products had begun with someone who needed the tool. For instance, at a Harvard conference in 1964, a lab worker described a method he'd invented to "bake away" the dirt on a microscope using a piece of gold foil; later that year, a manufacturer transformed this concept into a product. Subsequent studies — by von Hippel and others — have shown that the pattern holds true in many other fields.

A company may have "begged, borrowed, stole[n], or bought [its] idea from a person who never becomes famous," Dr. Nat Sims, the inventor-in-residence at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. Companies then "invest a few hundred million dollars into making [the product] successful and getting over all the hurdles. So it becomes an integral part of their culture — not for any mean or malicious reason — to forget that history" of the product. After a few years pass, no one knows how the product came to be — and the true origin story is very hard to uncover. Eventually, we all believe that the product started with the manufacturer.

Of course, only certain kinds of problems are valuable. Ideally, you would want to suffer from a frustration that is rare now (so that no one else knows about it) but that will one day bother lots of people. "Lead Users are familiar with conditions which lie in the future for most others," von Hippel wrote, and so they "can serve as a need-forecasting laboratory." And some Lead Users experience a problem so futuristic that the rest of us have trouble even imagining it. Take Martian jet lag, a sleep disorder that bedevils the engineers who work with Mars-based equipment.

Because the Martian day is slightly longer than ours, people who control robots on the Red Planet have to continually shift their schedules, eating breakfast at 3:40 a.m., then 4:20 a.m., then 5:00 a.m. "It feels like you are perpetually flying east 40 minutes every day," said one scientist, Deborah Bass. "It starts to take its toll."

To add to the discomfort, each Mars landing mission operates in its own time zone to correspond to the local sunrises and sunsets on the planet. For this reason, Scott Maxwell, an engineer and driver on the Mars Exploration Rover mission, had to consult a spreadsheet and then perform several calculations to figure out when he needed to wake up. In 2012, Maxwell created the MarsClock phone app to help him track the Mars rovers and get to work on time. Writing the app, he told me, "scratched two itches: it gave me a handy Mars-time alarm clock, and it let me share a bit of the fun of the mission with rover fans, something I'm always seeking ways to do." Thousands of fans did download the app — an artifact from the Mars mission that lived on their phones.

Engineers like Maxwell face all kinds of other problems that don't affect anyone else right now — like what to do when dust clogs a machine located on another planet. And many of their inventions are one-off solutions that will never spread widely. But imagine what would happen if a company decided to install a vast robot-run mine on Mars; at that point, thousands of us might be complaining about our damned droid with its burned-out wires. And if that future does come, who will have pioneered the solutions to the problem of interplanetary robot control? Most likely, it will be the scientists who first grappled with the problem. In Part IIIof this book, we will dig deeper into the question of futuristic problems and see why prediction and forecasting are crucial to the inventing process.

But for now, let's return to the subject at hand — problem finding — and recap what we know so far. The most valuable kind of frustration has three components:

1. It plays out over a long period of time, thus inspiring more and better solutions.

2. It reveals a hidden problem that is difficult to detect.

3. It forecasts a problem that will affect thousands or millions of people in the future.

As it happens, all three kinds of frustration came together in Jack Dorsey.

Pre-Tweet

As a kid in the 1980s, Dorsey loved to listen to the chatter on CB radio and police scanners, and he became fascinated with the way that drivers of fire trucks and ambulances had developed their own lingo; the drivers spoke in short coded blasts, telling each other where they were located and what they were doing.

By 2000, Dorsey had found a job as a code jockey, writing dispatch software to help route cars and trucks around city streets. He was still passionate about traffic, so much so that he developed a strange desire. If an ambulance could announce its whereabouts and activities, why couldn't he? Dorsey began to imagine a kind of dispatch software for himself, one that would work something like a police scanner, bleating out his activities as he moved around San Francisco and Oakland.

"I wasn't considering what everyone else wanted. I was considering what I wanted," Dorsey later told a reporter. So he cobbled together some software just to satisfy this private desire. At the time, Dorsey owned the RIM 850, one of the first phones that could display and send e-mail messages, and he devised a method to send out text- based broadcasts.

One day, in Golden Gate Park, he sent out a dispatch intended to alert friends to his location and what he was doing (watching the bison). The message was met with silence. Few of his friends owned the type of phone that would allow them to receive the broadcast Dorsey had sent out. This was his moment of Martian jet lag; he experienced a problem years ahead of everyone else. And yet, Dorsey felt confident that other people would catch up.

Six years later, now at a company called Odeo, Dorsey explained his concept to his coworkers. By then, the world had caught up with Dorsey, and millions of phones were enabled with the Short Message Service (SMS) protocol, which made it easy to send and receive texts.

Dorsey and his collaborators hacked together their social network in two weeks. In the beginning, Twitter was something like Bernard Sadow's suitcase. Sadow had recognized the potential of transforming luggage into a vehicle on wheels, but his execution of the concept had been awkward. Likewise, Dorsey and his collaborators at Twitter had given entirely new capabilities to the cell phone — turning it into a twenty-first-century CB radio on which impromptu communities could spring up to report on unfolding events. And yet, the site was awkward to use in its first incarnation; it crashed frequently, and it lacked many of the features that now make it so addictive.

The Bucket Brigade

Earlier in this chapter, we saw that pain and frustration have a cumulative effect on invention — as Adam Smith noted, when people begin repeating the same operations over and over, they learn an enormous amount about how to remove the drudgery and unpleasantness from machines.

The story of Twitter — and many other social platforms — suggests that the hours of frustration do not have to be experienced by a single person. If thousands of people repeat the same unnecessary keystroke, even if they spend only a few seconds a day doing it, one of those users will notice this nano-frustration and will invent a way around it.

So while Twitter's engineers struggled to put out their fires and keep the site running, a bucket brigade of users were improving the functionality of the site and tailoring it to fit their needs. For instance, in 2006, a user named Robert Andersen added an @ sign to the front of his brother Buzz's name to indicate that he was addressing a remark directly to Buzz. Other users embraced the idea, because it was so useful. "If you look at all the early tweets, there are no conversations until people started using the @ symbol," Dorsey himself acknowledged.

As users spent thousands — then millions — of hours on the site, they accumulated lots of insights about its failings and their own frustrations. Those hours of drudgery or exasperation had enormous value. The Twitter citizens began to experiment with their own lingo and thumb-saving shortcuts — not just the @ sign, but also the hashtag and the retweet. This suggests a fourth principle connected to necessity and invention: if you want to understand a problem, ask a community.

When lots of people experience the same kind of pain or frustration, they generate an enormous amount of information about unsolved problems. But if that knowledge is scattered across thousands of different people's minds, how do we gather it together again?

In the chapters that follow, we will investigate how communities of people come together to articulate their own needs and define problems. We will also look at how inventors can work with those communities to extract the most valuable insights from them.

CHAPTER 2

USER-INVENTORS

In the 1990s, Tim Derk spent a lot of time inside a fur suit and a foam head, prancing around basketball arenas as the Coyote mascot for the San Antonio Spurs. That was back in what might be called the "slingshot era," a time when team mascots used enormous rubber bands to fling souvenirs into the crowd during games. The slingshots had limited range, and Derk was frustrated because he couldn't reach the fans at the top of the arena. So he worked for months to find a better way.

"It weighed ninety pounds, including the tanks," said Derk of the T-shirt cannon he debuted for fans in the 1990s. (Derk is hazy on the exact date.) "It was like carrying a TV set on your back. The gun was probably at least four feet long. It used a cast-iron pipe — the kind that goes into the floor underneath your commode," he told me. Fans adored it, and the T-shirt gun went viral, spreading to arenas around the country.

Derk didn't care whether he received credit for his "invention" — as he saw it, no one in particular owned the idea. "It wasn't that one minute it did not exist, and then it did. It just evolved" out of the mascot community, Derk told me. "The Phoenix Gorilla and I were two of the pioneers," but many of their colleagues also contributed to the stunt. Professional mascots are, as he puts it, a "fur-ternity." Everyone shares gimmicks; they borrow, riff, and vie to come up with the wackiest spin on any particular idea.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Inventology"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Pagan Kennedy.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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