Nature-Derived Invention Method

"i) No one ever had an idea staring at a drawing board So do not do this. I always rather liked Francis Bacon's analogy of the Spider and the Bee (I think it was Francis Bacon). A spider, he explained, works entirely upon himself, and from within himself, and produces only poison, whereas a bee works on raw materials, deriving"

"his product from nature at large, and produces honey. (Or something like that. I probably failed whichever subject they told me that in). At any rate, Bacon always got his ideas from walking in the coun- tryside and observing nature, rather than sitting in his study. So get out and look at things, and when an idea comes, grab it, write it down, and play with it until it works. Don't sit and expect ideas to come. (Always bear in mind, though, that Bacon died of pneumonia, trying to invent frozen chicken.) ii) Everyday products sell Although it is harder to improve a mature product, if you succeed there is no need to create a market - something Clive Sinclair's C5, for example, could have done with. As before, thinking in a vacuum (forgive me) is not going to help. Try out current products in your own home, and make a list of things that you don't like about them - I found about twenty things wrong with my Hoover Junior at the first attempt. iii) New technology It may sound obvious, but many of the things that people write to me saying they have 'invented', interesting and useful though they are, are only modifications of existing technology, and can thus be copied by anyone under law. The thing about truly new technology is that it makes your invention patentable. And then no one can copy it."

"This attitude to employment extended to Fry's thinking in every- thing, including engineering. Like Brunei, he did not, when an idea came to him, sit down and process it through pages of calculations; he didn't argue it through with anyone; he just went out and built it. So it was that when I came to him, in the midst of my efforts with the Sea Truck that summer, to say, 'I've had an idea,' he would offer no more advice than to say, 'You know where the workshop is, go and do it.' 'But we'll need to weld this thing,' I would protest. 'Well then, get a welder and weld it.' When I asked if we shouldn't talk to someone about, say, hydrodynamics, he would say, 'The lake is down there, the Land Rover is over there, take a plank of wood down to the lake, tow it behind a boat and look at what happens.'"