Category: Creativity

I often get asked “What should I invent”, by budding inventors or those who feel the need to invent something, but are not sure exactly what. And that’s a really good place to start. Inventing is not always about waking up in the middle of the night (or not being able to fall asleep) with a “Eureka” moment. Sometimes it takes a bit more of a methodical approach.

Here’s a few tips on discovering what you should invent.

1. What Do I Know A Lot About?

This is a good place to start. Ask yourself this question. And I promise you, you know a lot about something that most people don’t. Often, the best ideas and inventions come from those with “insider information”. Your in-depth knowledge about a specific topic or industry gives you a wealth of information that other people lack.

Exercise 1

Get a pen, or open up Evernote, and write down areas that you have some knowledge about. I suggest you do it right now to keep the momentum going. Choose about 3 subjects that you know a lot about and write them as headings.

2. What Can Be Improved?

Did you know that most inventions are improvements upon previous inventions? Very few inventions are radically new, they are often minor (or major) improvements in what’s come before. We’re going to continue the exercise above with a way to improve upon what already exists.

Say you know a lot about sports. This means you probably know a lot about what sports equipment works, what doesn’t, what training techniques or props are useful, and what could really be a good invention in this field. You’ll know what tweaks or modifications are needed to existing products that could make them work that much better.

Exercise 2

So under the headings you created in the step above, write down 5 things that need fixing in the area. Just write whatever comes to mind, even if it seems ridiculous when you’re thinking about it. If you have more than 5, keep going. There’s absolutely no limit.

You may even start to see some kind of pattern or connection in the items you are writing about. They could all be leading to something that makes a task more efficient, or saves money, or makes it easier or quicker to do something. This means you are on the right track.

3. Keep Writing

So the exercise that we did above was a way to get the juices flowing. However, to keep the juices flowing, without you even being aware of it, I would strongly suggest keeping a journal. Get yourself a small journal, one that you could carry around with you, or use the notepad on your mobile phone. Write down whatever ideas come to mind wherever you are. If you are the supermarket and think about a new food combination, write it down. If you are watching your kid’s baseball game and think about a new kind of training product, write it down.

The more you write, the more ideas of what to invent will flow.

Exercise 3

This exercise gets you to start thinking visually. Select a few items you wrote in exercise 2 and try and sketch them. You don’t need to be a good drawer, you just need to start thinking about them in a visual way. I’m sure you were thinking of them in your mind’s eye while writing them. As you draw, you’ll notice that new improvements or ideas start flowing. It’s really powerful.

4. Keep Your Eyes Open

Ok, so if you’ve done some of the exercises above, and continue keeping a journal in order to write and draw your inspirations and ideas, you’ll notice that ideas of what you should invent should start flowing.

Exercise 4

This one is just about keeping your eyes open. When you’re taking a walk, observe how people go about their day. At the office, see what tasks cause the biggest headaches or get the most complaints. Read the newspaper and see what the current trends or issues are.

I hope that the exercises and processes I’ve spoken about above gives you some starting points on answering that most important question, “What should I invent”!

 

The Basic First Step after the Great Idea

You have the great idea. It may not change the entire world (although it might) but it will definitely change your world by bringing something into the world that wasn’t there before, or that truly is the better mousetrap.

Either way there is something that has to happen immediately after the great idea for most of us to do anything with it.

How To Make An Invention, otherwise known as prototyping, is about getting the idea out of your head onto a sketchbook and physical object.

How To Make An Invention Prototype

Once an individual comes up with the great idea, the next step is to make a working prototype. Often people have great ideas that might work or would sort of work but they do not turn them into anything concrete to make sure they do work. After you get something that works, then you can figure out if it is worth using. You can figure out the costs, the benefits, what types of materials could make it stronger, better, and more effective. You can streamline and improve upon something that works. Until you have something that works you cannot work with it.

Why do you have to have a prototype again?

The prototype is the first stage of invention design. In summary:

1. To show that your great idea works
2. To have something to protect, whether it is a design or a completely new invention
3. To have something to market and sell.

How To Get To A Prototype?

Once you have the great idea there are a lot of different ways to get the first run prototype.

Make An Invention Yourself

You can learn how to make an invention yourself both physically or digitally.

Build It Physically

A lot of people, including many who are not mechanically inclined, find a way to make their own prototype in their garage with some simple or not so simple tools. This is usually a more economical way to go about the invention design process.

Build It Digitally

Did you know that there is a lot of excellent inventor software available that allows you to digitally build and construct your prototype.

Leverage the Community

Local schools and businesses can be great sources for resources, information and skills that can enable you to build your invention design prototype, and some of these people the local community college may have some students looking to build something as a school project, or the local college with an advanced engineering program or art program may have some students too. For the computer savvy there are 3-D printing options that you can work with to develop highly precise parts. There are businesses that may let you leverage some of their staff like auto shops. Confidentiality agreements should be part of the process to protect your idea. This can also be very economical because you can leverage the experience of people who have knowledge you do not without paying them a lot.

Hire Professional Prototype Builders

This can be a lot more expensive than other routes. On the other hand if the idea is fully formed there can be benefits as well. Often these businesses have marketing and other types of business ties to plug into that you may not have yourself. And they may know more about getting a prototype made than you do. Just keep an eye on the costs.

Ultimately there are a variety of ways to get your invention design made. Just get it made so you can get onto the great part, which is selling your new invention.

It’s not a cliche, nor is it some kind of marketing gambit, to say that anyone can be an inventor. Learning how to be an inventor is a process just like learning how to ride a bicycle or learning how to draw. Some people say that you need some special kind of ‘talent’ to draw, that it is innate and that you can’t ‘learn’ it. Yet many books, courses and educators have proven that anyone can draw.

The exact same logic applies to inventing and the invention process. You can learn how to be an inventor using a combination of techniques, practice and persistance.  But firstly you need to know what an inventor actually is.

What Is An Inventor?

An inventor is someone who improves upon the order of things. He or she helps people achieve their goals in a better, more efficient way. Sometimes he or she improves people’s lives by an order of magnitude.

Here is the mindset that an inventor (i.e. you) should have:

1. Something exists, or people do something in a particular way;
2. I can improve upon this thing or the way that people achieve a certain goal.

That’s it. That’s the essence of becoming an inventor. But to actually innovate requires a certain mindset, namely one of creativity and imagination.

Cultivate a Creativity Mindset

Our brains are incredibly complex and enormously powerful, and can be honed to become adept at virtually anything. Becoming an inventor requires what one might call having a creative mindset. It is about switching on creativity like you would switch on a tap. I’ll go through a few simple ways to do this below. These can all be used together, or used individually.

How to be an inventor with effective creativity techniques

The 24-hour Notepad

Creative people are constantly scribbling or doodling away on a notepad (or even on their phones or iPads). Sometimes it’s the scribbling that leads them to be creative, and not necessarily that being creative that causes them to scribble. Compulsive scribbling should become a habit of yours if you want to learn how to be an inventor.

Get a notepad that is small enough for you to carry it around with you day and night (keep it next to your bed if you wake up in the night with an invention idea), and write down ideas or thoughts as they come to you. If you wait and think you’ll write it down later, chances are you’ll forget (just like having a dream). Jotting down thoughts and ideas reinforces the neural networks in your brain responsible for innovation and originality.  So the more you write, the more creative you can become.

Bear in mind that you must refrain (as much as you can) from censoring anything that pops into your head. Censoring is like a killer to ideas. If you stroll past a washing line and suddenly have a brainspark for an automated line that covers itself when it rains, don’t think ‘Oh that’s a dumb idea, no-one will ever go for it’. Just write it down, and in doing so send a message to your brain that it has the right to be inventive and must continue being so.

Think Visually By Doodling

This leads on from the notepad. It is important for you to doodle in learning how to be an inventor. Doodling does incredible things for the imagination. I’m not talking about becoming the next Rembrandt, I’m just saying you should cultivate a habit of thinking visually and thereby developing your imagination. So doodle, sketch, copy out the neighbor’s lemon-tree, and develop a visual understanding of the world.  A secret in the art of how to be an inventor is that inventors keep their eyes wide open (in their mind’s eye and through their real eyes). They look at the world, they see how things can be improved, and they draw a heck of a lot. Often the difference between an old and a new invention is a very minor improvement or difference between two things, and that difference sometimes comes about by sketching the first invention (say a pen) and then adding something extra to it (say an eraser on the pen or a way to clip the pen onto a sleeve). Doodling is a simple but effective trick in discovering how to be an inventor.

 Do Puzzles

Puzzles you say? Puzzles help you to stop thinking in words (you can’t talk your way through a puzzle can you?) and to think in terms of abstractions. What’s one of the best ways to fall asleep at night if you have thoughts racing through your head? That’s right, a puzzle. It immediately causes you to switch off the words and switch on the imagination. How to be an inventor is a bit like solving a puzzle isn’t it? The puzzle of how to do something better or in an original manner.

Improve Upon the Order of Things

Now that you can start becoming more creative, it’s time to also apply some logical process to the inventing process. And that is thinking deeply about how things can be improved upon.

Read up and study existing patents

There’s a whole section on this site dedicated to patents and patenting. And why am I daft in suggesting that patents will teach you how to be an inventor (aren’t patents boring legal documents and not creative exciting processes of imagination?). Well the simple answer is that you learn a lot from experts. And inventors who have patented inventions (often tens or hundreds of times), are experts. See how they make a case for the uniqueness of their inventions, see how they explain how things are currently done and how their invention has improved upon the order of things. Once you read a lot of patent documents, you begin to see how inventors’ minds work (see the definition above to see how it links to this mindset).

Pick something, and see how it can be improved

Anything can be improved. Learning how to be an inventor requires the ability to see something, identify problems with it, and think of ways to improve upon it.