Boston Magazine, December 2001
by David J. Wallace

If you're concerned about how your retirement funds are faring, consider the four gray-haired men seated around a Woburn conference table. A Hollywood director might pitch it as The Sunshine Boys meet Good Will Hunting--friends trading ideas and shtick. But, while their cohorts are reclining in their Barcaloungers, these retirees have gone back to the drawing board, developing products such as silent pencil sharpeners and 30-second toasters.

This is the weekly meeting of Invent Resources (www.weinvent.com), a group of inventors who have spent nearly five years not only building better mousetraps, but improving the mice while they're at it. Between them, they have more than 100 patents and some 200 products. And companies ranging from Rubbermaid to General Electric line up at their door in search of troubleshooting innovations.

That's the whole approach here--solving problems. "Most inventors create solutions, then look for problems," says one member of the group, Sol Aisenberg, formerly an MIT staff member, Harvard Medical School lecturer, and Boston University visiting research professor. "We prefer to do things the other way around."

Another member, product development guru George Freedman, knows all about finding breakthroughs. He worked for 40 years at Raytheon and created its New Products Center.

"There's hardly any problem that can't be solved with basic physics," Freedman says. Eight out of 10 MIT professors he studied with, he says, became millionaires by working with companies or marketing their own innovations.

After all, doing is better than teaching, says A. Ze'ev Hed, another member of the group and a specialist in material technology, physics, and instrumentation.

These scientific superheroes have one limitation: They don't do drugs-though they have collaborated on drug delivery systems for cancer treatments.

After a one-time licensing fee, they also opt for long-term royalties on their inventions--gutsy, considering that some are in their seventies. Life's too short, the agree so they take the broader view that market conditions change and may unexpectedly open doors for their creations.

"We often develop systems and then wait while the company puts the item into production," says Richard Pavelle, Invent Resources' president and the inventor of a credit card-sized calculator in 1978 that was licensed to Casio, Sharp, and Canon.

"If they don't," he says, "we own it--and can look for another sponsor."