Automating Invention

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Are you an individual designer or inventor who wants to earn a living from selling your products but who doesn't have the time, inclination, or money to sell your products yourself, and who wants to be your own boss? No worries. Wired magazine reports that a company named Ponoko will let you upload your designs to them in digital form. They will then market your products for you.

I started programming computers when I was in fifth grade and my school received two brand new Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80s. They were black and white and had a whopping 16K of memory (about 1/100,000th of today’s personal computers). My first lesson was learning how to write a two-line program that would display my name repeatedly on the screen. I was hooked. Now, about a quarter of a century later, I am a full-time patent lawyer and part-time law professor, and I still spend most of my time working with and thinking about computers.

Most relevant to this blog is the example of InnoCentive which, according to its web site, "is an exciting web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies from around the globe. We provide a powerful online forum enabling major companies to reward scientific innovation through financial incentives." In other words, if a company has a technical problem that its own engineers can't crack, the company can post the problem on Innocentive's web site and award a prize to anyone -- from anywhere in the world -- who can solve it.

Another strategy, which can of course be combined with the first two, is to develop the ability to adapt rapidly to changing conditions. It is important to keep in mind, however, that in this context the changing conditions include not only the spread of technological skill to people worldwide, but also the development and spread of technology that itself can perform tasks previously only capable of being performed by humans. If you are a technologist developing a technology that has the potential to displace you, you should at least consider keeping it to yourself.

The ICARO project has been undertaken by the Basque corporation Tecnalia and the Spanish corporation Aernnova to develop Multidisciplinary Optimization (MDO) software to optimize the design of aircraft wings. The goal of the project is to reduce design variables such as manufacturing costs and weight and to develop innovations in aeronautical structures in composites for future aeronautical programs.

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