There was a fascinating statistic that I heard about how most all inventions, improvements and new creative products were pretty much done by average people without an ounce of having a profit motive. These are individuals, and there are millions of them, working on solutions to everyday problems on their own or in a group collective with a simple goal of just solving a problem.
This was more than just building a cleaver mousetrap, but when beyond sometimes the most well-funded R&D programs of large corporations. Bio-medical devices, computer programming, process improvements and radical new ideas coming to life.
What usually happens to most of these inventions, is like most startups, they didn’t walk very far into the mainstream, but most of these inventors were ok with it, because it may have served such a small niche market or really just themselves as an individual person.
There are many of them that make it to the mainstream and are licensed, adopted or sold to companies. What companies can do to these inventions that come from shade tree inventors is make the improvements, functionality and scalability possible for wide adoption. The lone tinkerer in the basement working a novel idea cannot be dismissed. The ingenuity of the individual human and even the small niche group collective is a huge idea concept factory that generate the real building blocks of viable products to solve the world’s problems.
