There is a TV program that is a copy of American Idol based on American inventors. The program has a panel of three judges who evaluate the inventor’s proposals and often prototypes.
For me this program is emotional terror. First, I don’t see most inventions as stupid and worthy of ridicule and humiliation because I respect inventors. Inventors are people with a vision of how the world could be different and better and they are willing to do something about it. Ridiculing them is mean-spirited and vicious.
Second, anyone who thinks they can tell which invention will succeed has had no experience in the business world. I have worked with thousands of businesses and hundreds were based on inventions or modifications of existing businesses. I could never tell what would succeed and what would fail. Virtually nothing did fail, so long as the business person learned from and accommodated the market.
Let me offer some examples of my clients who would have been ridiculed by the TV judges.
Two women opened a store on Union Street in San Francisco in the early 1970s to sell cosmetics that were “more organic” by their definition, meaning more fruit and herbal scents; they used good simple graphics. Minor modification of no consequence? Their store, designs, products and name were bought by an English company that is today’s Body Shop. (A global company.)
There were two surfers who started silk screening t-shirts with complex environmental images for the Sierra Club crowd, as well as political statements. This was in the mid-1970s, at a time when t-shirts only had sports teams and city names on them. I remember thinking to myself, “Will this ever catch on? People only have room in their closets to buy one or two t-shirts.” (Thirty years later the message t-shirt business is still expanding.)
What about the guys, in the late 1970s, who took old bike frames and put fat tires on them? They used the weird bikes to ride on fire trails on Mt. Tamalpais -- an obvious dead-end business. Yet, they changed the entire bicycle industry with their invention: the mountain bike.
I repeat: I have sheer contempt for the TV program about American Inventors. This is Hollywood pursuing its steady output of trite bad taste and infantile perspective on the world.