Inventions on Demand
By Katharine Dunn

A tip about inventing: It's easy.

Here's another one: don't bother waiting for that eureka moment; let someone else come up with the idea (subscribe to the "if they come, you will build it" philosophy of inventing). And this dilly: the government will fast-track patent applications for people over 65, "under the supposition that you're going to live less long," says George Freedman '43.

Freedman and his associate Sol Aisenberg, PhD '57, impart these and other bits of inventing advice with a nonchalance inconsistent with the stereotype of the mistrustful, obsessive inventor. Perhaps that's because they're so confident. "We have strong egos," says Aisenberg, as he adjusts four pens and a highlighter tucked in his shirt pocket. "We're not threatened [by other inventors]." Or perhaps it's because of their experience: Freedman, who turned 80 in December, helped start a program in solid-state physics at Boston University in the 1950s. He's considered a semiconductor pioneer. Aisenberg, a physicist in his mid-60s, did his first patent search almost half a century ago, after he and his father invented a way for cigarettes to extinguish themselves.

Together, they're two-fifths of a group of creative scientists who call themselves Invent Resources, and who banded together in the early 1990s. Along with Richard Pavelle, who has worked in MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, physicist Ze'ev Hed and physician Joseph Friedberg, they "invent on demand." Clients, often large companies, come to their Woburn, MA, office with problems and ask for novel solutions. Invent Resources attracts some clients through advertising and others because of the members' track records. Among the five of them, they hold more than 100 patents on such things as a credit-card-thin calculator, a tornado detector and an assortment of nifty microwave appliances. As a company, they hold five patents, with seven more pending. "Our specialty is our generality," says Pavelle, president of Invent Resources.

Earlier this year, Invent Resources' first product (developed by the corporation), the XLerator, went on the market. It's a hand dryer of the restaurant, school and gas station variety, and Freedman and Aisenberg designed it. The XLerator promises to dry your hands three times faster than any of its competitors.

Inventing is a numbers game: inventions, patents, value of ideas, royalties Freedman and Aisenberg quantify everything. When they say they feel sorry for solo inventors, it's because they've calculated how much better off they are as a team. "When you have four minds working on a problem, it's as though you have 20," says Freedman. "We feel like there's a factor of five more. When I ask Aisenberg if he goes online to do research, he folds his hands and says, without hesitating, "The Internet has increased my effectiveness by a factor of five."

As soon as Aisenberg and Freedman devised a faster hand dryer on paper, they started measuring. "What was the definition of a dry hand? We had to quantify that," says Aisenberg. (A dry hand, it turns out, has less than two tenths of a gram of water on it.) It took a couple of years for the hand dryer, produced by Excel Dryer of East Longmeadow, MA, to get from brainstorm to bathroom wall. But Freedman and Aisenberg say conceiving of it, which took about a week, was easy.

"We probably couldn't do that if it's a Nobel Prize-level thing," says Freedman. "But this is a simple device. And it uses elementary physics like we learned as freshmen and sophomores at MIT. Sometimes we have to go to real graduate-level knowledge. But we're experienced enough to know that when we devise something on paper, it'll work!"

Their most important calculation may be to estimate how much money an invention will yield. This can be dicey, especially because Invent Resources doesn't charge a fee when the members take on a project. Instead, like those personal-injury lawyers who advertise on TV, they only make money if you make money. (The inventors do offer their services as consultants once an invention is finished, for about $1,500 a day.) They invent for free but keep the patent rights to their work: that way, one of their inventions can generate revenue for 20 years-the life of a patent.

Freedman and Aisenberg say they're open minded, and that they don't arbitrarily reject ideas. But there are exceptions. "We won't touch perpetual motion," says Aisenberg. "If we violate laws of physics, we get a little nervous." Jokes aside, the company doesn't bother inventing products that will require approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (too much time), nor will it work on software (too many other people in the field). That's fine with Freedman. I hate the damn computer," he says. "When I went to school, there was no software. Everything was hard. That is, you could hold it in your hand. That's being neglected these days. That hand dryer's an example. Some fancy scientist wouldn't deign to look at it."

The inventors took on the project because they believed it would sell. But how can they be sure? Before accepting a new commission, Invent Resources researches the pertinent industry to determine whether there is a market for the product. Then the group takes a chance. The hand dryer was a good choice, they think. Invent Resources licensed it for the standard five percent royalty fee. It expects to make between $100,000 and $200,000 in royalties in 2002, and about 10 to 15 percent more a year until its patent expires.

But the group doesn't always get that far. The biggest pitfall for the independent inventor, say Freedman and Aisenberg, is the "not invented here" syndrome. That's when companies feel threatened by outside ideas, even when they solicited those ideas in the first place. So far, Invent Resources has seen its inventions shelved for this reason about half a dozen times. "In a company with 30 VPs, one might like something new. This is the guy who very often is our client, and he champions [the idea]," says Freedman. "He's the first one to get fired if they have a budget cut."

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

January/February 2002