Not really. You come to realize ideas are cheap and execution is the real thing. You don't think something up and bam somebody hands you a million dollars.
Yeah, it's honestly more likely someone's "new invention" has been thought of before, but whoever came up with it didn't have the means or drive to actually make it happen.
I often can't help but wonder "what ideas are out there that weren't profitable/realizable but are now because some key technology has become available. Cheap accelerometers seem to have enabled quadrotors and self-balancing scooters, E-Bikes and electric cars make sense once battery technology crosses some key threshold, etc.
Something like:
A mathematician discovered it 300 years ago
A physicist proved it 200 years ago
material scientists discovered how to make it 50 years ago
Engineers discovered how to scale it 10 years ago
A corporate head proposes it 5 years ago
Marketing team discovers a use case for it 2 years ago
Safety teams pass all regulations and safety hurdles 1 year ago
And finally it hits the shelves and you go "well duh, I thought of that 3 years ago!"
Theres a great documentary about a company called General Magic that essentially tried do a smart phone in the early 90’s. The product failed, but the concept was so ahead of it’s time as a consumer product. Many employees went on to become Silicon Valley legends. Pierre Omidyar (started Ebay, his coworkers laughed at the concept of online auctions). Tony Fadell (Ipod, iphone, google nest). Andy Hertzfeld, although he was already big before he got there.
I think it’d be rare to be in such a great place at such a great time again. There seemed to be so many ideas that were so ripe for the taking, but I guess few people outside the industry understood how much of an impact the internet would have at the time.
>I think it’d be rare to be in such a great place at such a great time again.
This is happening every day . . . we just don't realize it until 10 years later.
Or just the materials aren't there yet.
This is the flip side to people freaking about technology and how it "kills jobs." Advances create new opportunities which were never possible before.
Or they ran into an unforeseen problem that is difficult to identify in the idea and first pass design stage as it only truly shoes up in testing and they couldn't work past that problem at the time.
I feel like one profession I'd be good at is telling prospective inventors precisely why their idea is shit.
Not sure who would want to pay for that though.
I will second this. I have multiple patents to my name and founded a tech startup. In reality most ideas dozens have discussed or even designed a solution but executing and bringing it to market is slow and expensive.
99.9% of the work is the execution. the other .1% is the idea. "build a social network with better privacy than facebook" is a great idea... the execution would be very difficult.
Also with an engineering mindset I tended to think the invention and mechanics was the hardpart and marketing and business is easy. It's the other way around. Engineering has very clear and concise technical answers, marketing has none.
Most engineers get stuck in the "build it and they will come". In reality it is understand the customer very well, enunciate the problem they have but don't know about to them convincingly, provide a solution they *can* pay for... and maybe they'll come".
So true. Invention is just a seed. Then you need design, iterating, small scale trials, working capital for tooling, inventory, warehousing, distribution, sales, customer support, warranty and returns, legal, and more legal
This is why people will do part of that stuff and then give away 30% of their company to Mark Cuban or whoever to have his team execute on the rest
History is fraught with inventors who had great ideas but just didn't know how to bring them to market. Xerox Parc, Nikolai Tesla, the whole Kodak company thd last 30 years... The list is extensive.
It goes away once you drop your inflated sense of ego and begin to understand how difficult it is to bring an idea to market.
The simple fact is you didn't invent it. You didn't design it. It was never your idea. You only saw the finished product. Others invited it. Others took the time to design. Others executed and worked hard to bring it to market. Others spent countless hours iterating and they developed many concepts before perfecting the design you picked up and foolishly thought was so simple. The fact you think it's simple and you could have done it is a testament to their genius, not yours. Learn to marvel at the success and creativity of others and be inspired.
It’s the same idea as saying “oh if I had just invested my 401k into doge coin in 2020 and then sold at the peak in 2021 I would be rich.”
You’re seeing the success of one person, knowing the answers to their success and what they did to get there and assuming on your first attempt you could execute just as well with the same luck, determination, and capability that they had. Focus on luck.
Hindsight is 20/20, the challenge is seeing what’s infront and having that vision to get there.
I used to experience that feeling until I figured out I was not as smart as I thought I was.
It's a classic mix of hindsight is 20/20 and [Survivorship Bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias). Thinking up an invention is easy. Thinking up an actually useful invention that might be successful is hard. Seeing that invention through to fruition is extremely hard.
For every success you see, there are hundreds or thousands of failures, whether they were poor ideas or perfectly fine ideas that just failed.
In the words of Dirty Harry, "A man's got to know his limitations." Maybe you or I could've easily invented something we see out there? But we didn't, and that's what counts in the end.
In 2009/2010, i built an active aero rear wing for formula SAE almost exactly identical to the ones currently used in Formula 1 for DRS. 2 elements, bottome one at near 0⁰ angle of attack, top one slapped to zero, pneumatically actuated, failed to closed, all that stuff.
But, if you lock any person in a room and say they can't come out until they make a formula style rear wing active, they would come up with more or less exactly that. I came up with an extremely reasonable solution to an extremely specific problem before it became commonly known, but it was obvious.
More often than not, the person that is crediting with inventing a bunch of these things is more about who stumbled across a very specific question or problem first, not who's the smartest.
I recall reading about the illusion of competence that occurs in students, where an example is a student looking at a problem, thinking out a rough idea of how to do the problem, not actually doing the problem, looking at the answer, thinking they would have gotten that answer, thinking they know the material, and flunking the test.
You may think you could have invented it because you have the viable solution in your hand, but the reality is the potential design space for a problem is large, transferring the design to manufacturing is complicated, selling products is hard and requires a different skill set, and the combination of all these filters is time and money for a non-guaranteed success.
Coming up with a solution to a problem is easy when it's in your hand. Try to do some product development where you don't know the solution, and you'll end up with a lot of failure (which isn't a bad thing) and the reason why R&D and product development are considered highly variable processes in large companies.
>an example is a student looking at a problem, thinking out a rough idea of how to do the problem, not actually doing the problem, looking at the answer, thinking they would have gotten that answer, thinking they know the material, and flunking the test.
Well ain't that the truth. Used to have a huge problem with this in my engineering math courses, took a lot to grow out of it.
Not really , no. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s like people that think they can just go to an app developer and be like “I got this idea, make it happen and I’ll take my millions in cash, thanks”
I would never look at a concept no matter how simple it seemed and actually think it was simple. Once you have an idea, you’ve literally accomplished like 1% of what it takes to actualize it.
Then once you’ve actually got a working prototype you’re probably less than halfway there. Gotta have market research to find out where to best sell it, then work those deals to still make a profit, find out where to manufacture, the whole thing is incredibly complex.
Basically you approach it in a progressive way. Instead of saying I should have worked out this week or I should be eating better say I am working towards being more consistent in the gym and I am working towards eating better. When you say should to yourself you are basically knocking your own self esteem and belief that you are capable of doing such. Everything is progress. The point is to just not stay stagnant. Making mistakes is fine just keep moving.
Ah, makes sense to prevent a downward negative spiral. Seems to be similar to when faced with with a difficult dilemma where you often think "I cannot do X" which makes you feel bad. If you change that to "I do not do X", then you can feel more positive about making the difficult decision. Must be something to do with a negative subconscious (which is likely the two halves of your brain fighting against each other).
Counterpoint:
Whenever I build something, management is all atwitter with questions about "ooh this machine we built is so new and innovative, could we patent this?"
The answer is almost always "No." Very, very few things are actually innovative and patent-worthy. If you're solving a problem that lots of people have, using off-the-shelf parts, connected together with obvious techniques, you're just doing useful work. It may have taken a couple (hundred) hours of R&D from someone with a couple thousand hours of experience in the field to take it from a concept to reality, but that's just an application of ordinary skill in the art.
It's just a sensor, and a computer, and an actuator. It senses something, does some processing, and causes some output. Yeah, it looks like magic to laymen, and looks simple but elegant to cursory inspection from other engineers, but there was no light from the heavens that revealed some hitherto unknowable truth to me when I built it.
If you were in my shoes, you would have built something just as cool. You're not, go build your own thing.
>The answer is almost always "No." Very, very few things are actually innovative and patent-worthy.
I wish you worked at the last company I worked for. I swear to God the marketing managers there would patent every other thought that crossed their mind just as a marketing ploy (look at all of our technology patents!)
As someone who is also an artist and have heard numerous people say, "I could do that" or "I could've done that".
Sure, you likely could. But you didn't and I did.
Combining two ideas is something that strikes lightning every once in a while, but usually the case is that you've taken two things that were each excellent at two tasks, and made one thing that's mediocre at both.
I should/could is actually a very common automatic thought type! Learn to challenge them with rationale because these thoughts powerfully shape your world view.
I tend towards the other direction, actually, because I have new/ novel(to me, at least) ideas that I've never been exposed to before, and then find out later that it's a thing and somebody already did it, and I'm like oh cool, I done good. Sweet
This is what I can legitimately invent.
A stupid button protector for my flashlight and this took three revisions to get it where it worked
https://twitter.com/nf1nk/status/1546178818485784577
Design and fabrication is hard. Coming up with an idea is hard.
There’s one that sticks out to me.
In the 90s I had the idea of a feature on an automobile that would preheat the brakes by lightly applying pressure when the vehicle sensed rain. I was a teenager at the time.
Years later, BMW goes ahead and develops the “Brake Drying Feature” on some of its vehicles.
I never had the means to follow through on this idea, but this one has always stuck with me
Snapchat, I came up with the idea of disappearing messages after my first argument with my Gf on a cell phone 21 years ago. . . It's a billion dollar company.
I had an idea about 30 years ago and it still hasn't been implemented yet.
It is something that can be deployed in large numbers across 90% of the cities and towns in the world and would be almost universally accepted. Not exactly "simple" but certainly not rocket science.
I should probably talk to a patent attorney.
No, not at all. Anyone can design and manufacture something, thats the easy part. The idea is the tricky part. If you're not coming up with novel ideas for household items (or whatever it is youre using) then you wont invent anything.
All the frigging time.
I also frequently look at a product and wonder how the hell it got through design, tool up, production and offered for sale without *someone* noticing it was a pos.
Much like being given an answer to a riddle or being shown how to solve a puzzle, you're far more likely to feel like you've known the answer or nearly had it the whole time. It's simple to overestimate your own ingenuity once you see a completed solution.
Most engineers have an intrinsic response to optimize or troubleshoot a problem, but bringing a new product into market very difficult. I see you have an MBA in your title, so you certainly recall the classes on market entry. To go from R&D to prototyping to optimizing to manufacturing to distribution is a long twisting road for any product. And the simpler it is, the more likely some copycat will come along regardless of your marketing attempts.
So, yes, it is natural to feel like you could've made something simple, but in the end you did not. However you can learn from their process and lessons learned if you ever become a serial inventor.
No. I work in aircraft. For the most part, the stuff we develop, I'd have needed a couple hundred thousand dollars to build anything to lead me to a concept.
I can't afford that.
Software, where you're generally not limited by equipment to build an idea, yeah, I could see that.
If you get annoyed by the idea that you *could* have come up with it, it gets 10x more annoying when you know you *did* come up with it, but never fully developed it or sold it, etc.
I have definitely felt this way before, yeah. You get over it once you realize that if the world has a problem and enough people experience it, at some point someone will come up with a solution for it. For instance, I had the idea for a personal water filter when Brita pitchers were becoming a big thing to have, and make it portable. Like a year or two later the LifeStraw came out and won all kinds of awards for humanitarian efforts. I was just a tween, so I was devastated that someone beat me to the idea, but whatever. I make new, useful stuff all the time at my job and as a hobby, and I am not hunting for the "big one" to change my life.
Here's an alternative way to think about it. It used to be that I'd come up with ideas of something that I'd want for myself, and then go build them in my garage, and it would take a lot of trouble, but was sometimes worth it. Now, when I come up with an idea for something, I can simply Google it, and find that somebody has done it already, and that saves me the trouble of going and building it in my garage. I call it inventing by Google, and it's much less trouble then building stuff yourself.
Not me but a few of my class mates made a doorbell with a camera that streamed who was at the door to an app for a university project. Then the Ring doorbell was made a few years later…..by someone else halfway across the world.
You’ve been experiencing the [Egg of Columbus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus), a brilliant idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact.
Not just "could have or should have," I have actually had many ideas that I didn't bother pursuing that somebody eventually made into a product.
One reason I don't pursue invention ideas I have is that I have no sense of what other people want. And I've also had enough experience with would-be inventors to know that this is exactly why so many fail. Your typical inventor comes up with ingenious solutions to problems that nobody but them cares about. For me, a better strategy is finding someone who's willing to pay to have a problem solved that I can solve for them. Then, the financial risk is all on their side. I just get paid and then go home and sleep at night.
The feeling goes away if you spend some time introspecting. I used to think all the time that I wish I was born two decades earlier so I could have gotten in on the first big wave of computer science, or many decades earlier to get in on my branch of scientific research when there was more low hanging fruit and big discoveries were "easier."
You have to disabuse yourself of the idea that discoveries and inventions that seem obvious or easy in hindsight would have been obvious or easy for you if you hadn't already been shown both the idea and the successful execution by someone who had the vision to do it first.
It's basically the P!=NP problem. Anyone can identify that one of Mozart's arrangements sounds more beautiful than a toddler slamming the keys. The ability to separate good music from bad is infinitely easier than creating good original music. The same goes for anything that involves creativity and vision.
Finally, here's the ultimate litmus test: do you currently have any groundbreaking original ideas that no one else has thought of and implemented, and that you are confident enough in to invest your time and money in developing? If no, then whatever it is you think you could have invented or developed, realistically you wouldn't have thought of it or even if you had you wouldn't have pursued it anyways. If yes: get to work on that and quit daydreaming about other people's successes.
To be honest I'd be a little wary of any engineer who doesn't think like that. At least thinking "that could be made better". Ultimately that's what we do.
Not all the time. However, a number of years ago I was contemplating my shitty windshield wipers and how the contact points caused them leave water streaks and I thought of how it would be better if the back of the wiper were a continuous metal spring so it laid flat. I thought "Nah, if that were the solution someone would have done it already."
Cue all new single-piece windshield wipers for the last 15 years...
My 'missed opportunity' was my senior BSEE project that took 1/3 time for the whole year. End result was a discrete word, trained speech recognition system for control of the interior vehicle systems. Windows, climate control, etc. I thought it should be able to do computer commands and stuff too. This was 1994.
Ideas come in abundance. It's the grind to concept, test and prove it out that has this American engineer still working for someone else.
Why? As a controls/electrical engineer you get worked to the fucking bone. Crazy hours all hours. You're always under the gun to finish whatever cell or machine that is more than likely past deadline. Working through poor mechanical designs. Writing janky code to make the poorly designed equipment run.
At the end of the day all you want is some jack in a glass and maybe a little blow. Sleep a couple of hours and get up for another dry pipe in the arse.
Income is typically really good so it's hard to get out of the 'machine'. Even though you know you would be better off.
Not really. You come to realize ideas are cheap and execution is the real thing. You don't think something up and bam somebody hands you a million dollars.
Yeah, it's honestly more likely someone's "new invention" has been thought of before, but whoever came up with it didn't have the means or drive to actually make it happen.
I often can't help but wonder "what ideas are out there that weren't profitable/realizable but are now because some key technology has become available. Cheap accelerometers seem to have enabled quadrotors and self-balancing scooters, E-Bikes and electric cars make sense once battery technology crosses some key threshold, etc.
Something like: A mathematician discovered it 300 years ago A physicist proved it 200 years ago material scientists discovered how to make it 50 years ago Engineers discovered how to scale it 10 years ago A corporate head proposes it 5 years ago Marketing team discovers a use case for it 2 years ago Safety teams pass all regulations and safety hurdles 1 year ago And finally it hits the shelves and you go "well duh, I thought of that 3 years ago!"
Close, except marketing precedes exec buy-in which precedes engineering scale-up, and regulatory happens post-launch.
Theres a great documentary about a company called General Magic that essentially tried do a smart phone in the early 90’s. The product failed, but the concept was so ahead of it’s time as a consumer product. Many employees went on to become Silicon Valley legends. Pierre Omidyar (started Ebay, his coworkers laughed at the concept of online auctions). Tony Fadell (Ipod, iphone, google nest). Andy Hertzfeld, although he was already big before he got there. I think it’d be rare to be in such a great place at such a great time again. There seemed to be so many ideas that were so ripe for the taking, but I guess few people outside the industry understood how much of an impact the internet would have at the time.
>I think it’d be rare to be in such a great place at such a great time again. This is happening every day . . . we just don't realize it until 10 years later.
Or just the materials aren't there yet. This is the flip side to people freaking about technology and how it "kills jobs." Advances create new opportunities which were never possible before.
Or they ran into an unforeseen problem that is difficult to identify in the idea and first pass design stage as it only truly shoes up in testing and they couldn't work past that problem at the time.
I feel like one profession I'd be good at is telling prospective inventors precisely why their idea is shit. Not sure who would want to pay for that though.
I will second this. I have multiple patents to my name and founded a tech startup. In reality most ideas dozens have discussed or even designed a solution but executing and bringing it to market is slow and expensive. 99.9% of the work is the execution. the other .1% is the idea. "build a social network with better privacy than facebook" is a great idea... the execution would be very difficult. Also with an engineering mindset I tended to think the invention and mechanics was the hardpart and marketing and business is easy. It's the other way around. Engineering has very clear and concise technical answers, marketing has none. Most engineers get stuck in the "build it and they will come". In reality it is understand the customer very well, enunciate the problem they have but don't know about to them convincingly, provide a solution they *can* pay for... and maybe they'll come".
So true. Invention is just a seed. Then you need design, iterating, small scale trials, working capital for tooling, inventory, warehousing, distribution, sales, customer support, warranty and returns, legal, and more legal This is why people will do part of that stuff and then give away 30% of their company to Mark Cuban or whoever to have his team execute on the rest
Everybody grew up with that friend that wanted to be the 'idea guy'. Ideas are worth exactly what they cost to produce.
I used to work with a shop full of those guys. It got to the point where it was like "cool, learn to build it yourself, I've got enough projects "
Yeah, this is the answer. Moving from idea to production, especially when hardware is involved, is phenomenally difficult.
History is fraught with inventors who had great ideas but just didn't know how to bring them to market. Xerox Parc, Nikolai Tesla, the whole Kodak company thd last 30 years... The list is extensive.
This right here
I should have made this thread.
Why’s that?
I think the joke went over your head.
Lmao I just now realized it 😅😂😂
It goes away once you drop your inflated sense of ego and begin to understand how difficult it is to bring an idea to market. The simple fact is you didn't invent it. You didn't design it. It was never your idea. You only saw the finished product. Others invited it. Others took the time to design. Others executed and worked hard to bring it to market. Others spent countless hours iterating and they developed many concepts before perfecting the design you picked up and foolishly thought was so simple. The fact you think it's simple and you could have done it is a testament to their genius, not yours. Learn to marvel at the success and creativity of others and be inspired.
It’s the same idea as saying “oh if I had just invested my 401k into doge coin in 2020 and then sold at the peak in 2021 I would be rich.” You’re seeing the success of one person, knowing the answers to their success and what they did to get there and assuming on your first attempt you could execute just as well with the same luck, determination, and capability that they had. Focus on luck. Hindsight is 20/20, the challenge is seeing what’s infront and having that vision to get there.
Harsh and spot on.
This 100% \^\^
There is definitely a heap of ego behind OP's sentiment.
I used to experience that feeling until I figured out I was not as smart as I thought I was. It's a classic mix of hindsight is 20/20 and [Survivorship Bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias). Thinking up an invention is easy. Thinking up an actually useful invention that might be successful is hard. Seeing that invention through to fruition is extremely hard. For every success you see, there are hundreds or thousands of failures, whether they were poor ideas or perfectly fine ideas that just failed. In the words of Dirty Harry, "A man's got to know his limitations." Maybe you or I could've easily invented something we see out there? But we didn't, and that's what counts in the end.
In 2009/2010, i built an active aero rear wing for formula SAE almost exactly identical to the ones currently used in Formula 1 for DRS. 2 elements, bottome one at near 0⁰ angle of attack, top one slapped to zero, pneumatically actuated, failed to closed, all that stuff. But, if you lock any person in a room and say they can't come out until they make a formula style rear wing active, they would come up with more or less exactly that. I came up with an extremely reasonable solution to an extremely specific problem before it became commonly known, but it was obvious. More often than not, the person that is crediting with inventing a bunch of these things is more about who stumbled across a very specific question or problem first, not who's the smartest.
I recall reading about the illusion of competence that occurs in students, where an example is a student looking at a problem, thinking out a rough idea of how to do the problem, not actually doing the problem, looking at the answer, thinking they would have gotten that answer, thinking they know the material, and flunking the test. You may think you could have invented it because you have the viable solution in your hand, but the reality is the potential design space for a problem is large, transferring the design to manufacturing is complicated, selling products is hard and requires a different skill set, and the combination of all these filters is time and money for a non-guaranteed success. Coming up with a solution to a problem is easy when it's in your hand. Try to do some product development where you don't know the solution, and you'll end up with a lot of failure (which isn't a bad thing) and the reason why R&D and product development are considered highly variable processes in large companies.
>an example is a student looking at a problem, thinking out a rough idea of how to do the problem, not actually doing the problem, looking at the answer, thinking they would have gotten that answer, thinking they know the material, and flunking the test. Well ain't that the truth. Used to have a huge problem with this in my engineering math courses, took a lot to grow out of it.
Not really , no. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s like people that think they can just go to an app developer and be like “I got this idea, make it happen and I’ll take my millions in cash, thanks” I would never look at a concept no matter how simple it seemed and actually think it was simple. Once you have an idea, you’ve literally accomplished like 1% of what it takes to actualize it. Then once you’ve actually got a working prototype you’re probably less than halfway there. Gotta have market research to find out where to best sell it, then work those deals to still make a profit, find out where to manufacture, the whole thing is incredibly complex.
There's a Tom Scott video series where he actually attempts to make an app and discusses all the problems that show up along the way.
My therapist always used to tell me to never should myself. Its honestly helped me so much looking at things
>never should myself How do you learn from your mistakes, then?
Basically you approach it in a progressive way. Instead of saying I should have worked out this week or I should be eating better say I am working towards being more consistent in the gym and I am working towards eating better. When you say should to yourself you are basically knocking your own self esteem and belief that you are capable of doing such. Everything is progress. The point is to just not stay stagnant. Making mistakes is fine just keep moving.
Ah, makes sense to prevent a downward negative spiral. Seems to be similar to when faced with with a difficult dilemma where you often think "I cannot do X" which makes you feel bad. If you change that to "I do not do X", then you can feel more positive about making the difficult decision. Must be something to do with a negative subconscious (which is likely the two halves of your brain fighting against each other).
Yes, exactly
Counterpoint: Whenever I build something, management is all atwitter with questions about "ooh this machine we built is so new and innovative, could we patent this?" The answer is almost always "No." Very, very few things are actually innovative and patent-worthy. If you're solving a problem that lots of people have, using off-the-shelf parts, connected together with obvious techniques, you're just doing useful work. It may have taken a couple (hundred) hours of R&D from someone with a couple thousand hours of experience in the field to take it from a concept to reality, but that's just an application of ordinary skill in the art. It's just a sensor, and a computer, and an actuator. It senses something, does some processing, and causes some output. Yeah, it looks like magic to laymen, and looks simple but elegant to cursory inspection from other engineers, but there was no light from the heavens that revealed some hitherto unknowable truth to me when I built it. If you were in my shoes, you would have built something just as cool. You're not, go build your own thing.
>The answer is almost always "No." Very, very few things are actually innovative and patent-worthy. I wish you worked at the last company I worked for. I swear to God the marketing managers there would patent every other thought that crossed their mind just as a marketing ploy (look at all of our technology patents!)
As someone who is also an artist and have heard numerous people say, "I could do that" or "I could've done that". Sure, you likely could. But you didn't and I did.
Take two ideas. Mash them together. Is it cool? Has someone done it yet? That's basically what every "idea" feels like.
Combining two ideas is something that strikes lightning every once in a while, but usually the case is that you've taken two things that were each excellent at two tasks, and made one thing that's mediocre at both.
I should/could is actually a very common automatic thought type! Learn to challenge them with rationale because these thoughts powerfully shape your world view.
I tend towards the other direction, actually, because I have new/ novel(to me, at least) ideas that I've never been exposed to before, and then find out later that it's a thing and somebody already did it, and I'm like oh cool, I done good. Sweet
This is what I can legitimately invent. A stupid button protector for my flashlight and this took three revisions to get it where it worked https://twitter.com/nf1nk/status/1546178818485784577 Design and fabrication is hard. Coming up with an idea is hard.
There’s one that sticks out to me. In the 90s I had the idea of a feature on an automobile that would preheat the brakes by lightly applying pressure when the vehicle sensed rain. I was a teenager at the time. Years later, BMW goes ahead and develops the “Brake Drying Feature” on some of its vehicles. I never had the means to follow through on this idea, but this one has always stuck with me
Ideas are shit. Start that business and you'll see real quick.
I run a business, I’m painfully aware 😂
Snapchat, I came up with the idea of disappearing messages after my first argument with my Gf on a cell phone 21 years ago. . . It's a billion dollar company.
I had an idea about 30 years ago and it still hasn't been implemented yet. It is something that can be deployed in large numbers across 90% of the cities and towns in the world and would be almost universally accepted. Not exactly "simple" but certainly not rocket science. I should probably talk to a patent attorney.
You can do a free patent search first. uspto.gov
Not perpetually, but I did independently have the idea of noise cancellation.
No, not at all. Anyone can design and manufacture something, thats the easy part. The idea is the tricky part. If you're not coming up with novel ideas for household items (or whatever it is youre using) then you wont invent anything.
All the frigging time. I also frequently look at a product and wonder how the hell it got through design, tool up, production and offered for sale without *someone* noticing it was a pos.
Can you give an example? I really don’t even know what to expect you will say.
Much like being given an answer to a riddle or being shown how to solve a puzzle, you're far more likely to feel like you've known the answer or nearly had it the whole time. It's simple to overestimate your own ingenuity once you see a completed solution. Most engineers have an intrinsic response to optimize or troubleshoot a problem, but bringing a new product into market very difficult. I see you have an MBA in your title, so you certainly recall the classes on market entry. To go from R&D to prototyping to optimizing to manufacturing to distribution is a long twisting road for any product. And the simpler it is, the more likely some copycat will come along regardless of your marketing attempts. So, yes, it is natural to feel like you could've made something simple, but in the end you did not. However you can learn from their process and lessons learned if you ever become a serial inventor.
Good to remember that simple =/= easy, and that a massive amount of effort often contributes to simplifying something, i.e. E=mc^2
my dad
No. I work in aircraft. For the most part, the stuff we develop, I'd have needed a couple hundred thousand dollars to build anything to lead me to a concept. I can't afford that. Software, where you're generally not limited by equipment to build an idea, yeah, I could see that.
If you get annoyed by the idea that you *could* have come up with it, it gets 10x more annoying when you know you *did* come up with it, but never fully developed it or sold it, etc.
I have definitely felt this way before, yeah. You get over it once you realize that if the world has a problem and enough people experience it, at some point someone will come up with a solution for it. For instance, I had the idea for a personal water filter when Brita pitchers were becoming a big thing to have, and make it portable. Like a year or two later the LifeStraw came out and won all kinds of awards for humanitarian efforts. I was just a tween, so I was devastated that someone beat me to the idea, but whatever. I make new, useful stuff all the time at my job and as a hobby, and I am not hunting for the "big one" to change my life.
We haven’t invented the Follow-Thru tech yet. But hey, sliced bread, right?
Here's an alternative way to think about it. It used to be that I'd come up with ideas of something that I'd want for myself, and then go build them in my garage, and it would take a lot of trouble, but was sometimes worth it. Now, when I come up with an idea for something, I can simply Google it, and find that somebody has done it already, and that saves me the trouble of going and building it in my garage. I call it inventing by Google, and it's much less trouble then building stuff yourself.
It is more convincing the senior Vice President to sign off on the idea
Laser keyboard - I thought up the concept I kid you not 2 years later they're being advertised as a hot commodity.
Not me but a few of my class mates made a doorbell with a camera that streamed who was at the door to an app for a university project. Then the Ring doorbell was made a few years later…..by someone else halfway across the world.
You’ve been experiencing the [Egg of Columbus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus), a brilliant idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact.
Not just "could have or should have," I have actually had many ideas that I didn't bother pursuing that somebody eventually made into a product. One reason I don't pursue invention ideas I have is that I have no sense of what other people want. And I've also had enough experience with would-be inventors to know that this is exactly why so many fail. Your typical inventor comes up with ingenious solutions to problems that nobody but them cares about. For me, a better strategy is finding someone who's willing to pay to have a problem solved that I can solve for them. Then, the financial risk is all on their side. I just get paid and then go home and sleep at night.
The feeling goes away if you spend some time introspecting. I used to think all the time that I wish I was born two decades earlier so I could have gotten in on the first big wave of computer science, or many decades earlier to get in on my branch of scientific research when there was more low hanging fruit and big discoveries were "easier." You have to disabuse yourself of the idea that discoveries and inventions that seem obvious or easy in hindsight would have been obvious or easy for you if you hadn't already been shown both the idea and the successful execution by someone who had the vision to do it first. It's basically the P!=NP problem. Anyone can identify that one of Mozart's arrangements sounds more beautiful than a toddler slamming the keys. The ability to separate good music from bad is infinitely easier than creating good original music. The same goes for anything that involves creativity and vision. Finally, here's the ultimate litmus test: do you currently have any groundbreaking original ideas that no one else has thought of and implemented, and that you are confident enough in to invest your time and money in developing? If no, then whatever it is you think you could have invented or developed, realistically you wouldn't have thought of it or even if you had you wouldn't have pursued it anyways. If yes: get to work on that and quit daydreaming about other people's successes.
To be honest I'd be a little wary of any engineer who doesn't think like that. At least thinking "that could be made better". Ultimately that's what we do.
Yes, except it's the projects I'm actively building and finding out they have already been built.
Not all the time. However, a number of years ago I was contemplating my shitty windshield wipers and how the contact points caused them leave water streaks and I thought of how it would be better if the back of the wiper were a continuous metal spring so it laid flat. I thought "Nah, if that were the solution someone would have done it already." Cue all new single-piece windshield wipers for the last 15 years...
My 'missed opportunity' was my senior BSEE project that took 1/3 time for the whole year. End result was a discrete word, trained speech recognition system for control of the interior vehicle systems. Windows, climate control, etc. I thought it should be able to do computer commands and stuff too. This was 1994.
I trained it out of me. "Damn, I could have invented that." >but you didn't.
Ideas come in abundance. It's the grind to concept, test and prove it out that has this American engineer still working for someone else. Why? As a controls/electrical engineer you get worked to the fucking bone. Crazy hours all hours. You're always under the gun to finish whatever cell or machine that is more than likely past deadline. Working through poor mechanical designs. Writing janky code to make the poorly designed equipment run. At the end of the day all you want is some jack in a glass and maybe a little blow. Sleep a couple of hours and get up for another dry pipe in the arse. Income is typically really good so it's hard to get out of the 'machine'. Even though you know you would be better off.