My Three Steps Guide For Inventors

Step 1 – Analyze the problem.

The old adage – necessity is the mother of invention is absolutely true. Every invention is aimed at tackling a problem that you observe in your daily life or at your work. Now, it does not necessarily have to be an earth-shattering type of invention – in fact, most of them are not. The earth-shattering ones are very rare – Light bulb by Thomas Edison, Airplanes by the Wright brothers and more recently Personal Computers by Steve Jobs and the Disk Operating System that enabled these computers to become a useful tool by Bill Gates are some of those inventions that fall in the category of earth-shattering inventions.

Most inventions including many of my more than 30 patented inventions are what I would call incremental inventions. For most of my working life, I worked in aero-engine companies where we had to continuously find ways to improve the capabilities of these engines – cut down on the fuel burnt, reduce the size and weight, increase the service life, reduce operating costs and many other metrics to ensure our engines were best in the class and could stand out in the very competitive marketplace. So, as one of the thousands of engineers our job was to look for problems and limitations which prevented us from pushing these very high-tech machines further and come up with imaginative ideas that would help resolve those problems. Of course, not every idea was workable – in fact very few were, but some did bear fruits and turned into patented inventions that nudged the state of the art just a little. You add all those nudges – kind of singles and maybe an occasional double, and you had a winning run total.

So, go ahead and look around for problems – big or small, and get your brain fired up to thoroughly analyze the problem and begin formulating solutions that you and your cohorts could start working on.

 Step 2 – Start sketching your ideas.

Step 1 should have given you some ideas that you could now begin to sketch out on a piece of paper or on your computer if that is your preferred medium. For me it is always pencil and paper. The sketches – if it is a physical object or information flow diagrams if the problem you are trying to solve requires new software instead of hardware, do not have to be overly detailed at this stage. All you are trying to do is to get your idea(s), hopefully you have more than one, down on that piece of paper or computer screen that you can now stare at and get your neurons and synapses fired up to help you put some flesh on the bones. This is also the stage where, if appropriate, you solicit inputs and feedback from others on your team – recognizing most inventions today are collaborative rather than individualistic efforts. 

And this is also the step where you start thinking about filing a patent, if you believe your invention is worth patenting and the associated costs and efforts that are required to do so. As a reminder, the US Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) issues patents not just for hardware inventions but also for software which has new and inventive computer programs.

Step 3 – Actualization and Testing

You have now successfully reached the third and final step in getting your invention off the ground. You are now ready to actualize and test to see if your idea actually works and does what it is supposed to do – which is solve the problem that got you started in the first place. This is the step where the proverbial rubber meets the road and in some ways is the most arduous and challenging step. The Wright brothers spend years and years at Kitty Hawk – with many failures and setbacks in their quest to make their machine fly. Their success was incremental with their airplane just about to fly but not really flying. Each failure taught them something new – and that is the key. In the business of inventions, failures are as important as successes so long as you learnt from them as to what worked and what did not and accounted for those lessons learnt in your next iteration.

So, go ahead and invent away remembering that firstly you must believe in yourself and your idea but most importantly if you want to see your idea translate into reality – you must persevere and persevere and persevere some more. That is what the great inventors of our times have done and that is what you need to do to help doing things better – whatever those things happen to be!