Obvious

I am an inventor on about 70 patent families. My feeling is that only a very small number of these is truly inventive.

Here is an example.

We were doing R&D on a new electrochemical bio-sensor blood glucose strip. The difference between ours and the ones that already existed was that we used a closed electrochemical cell versus an open cell.

We started off with the idea of using membranes where existing products did not. This serendipitously lead us to the idea of using a closed cell and we were good enough to see the concept hidden within the concept, and we then chucked away the membrane.

This high-level idea gave great new benefits (smaller sample size, less oxygen effect, shorter measurement time, etc.) but we then had to do a lot of R&D to make it work in practice at reasonable cost. Years of development and scale-up, with lots of practical problems to solve along the way.

In this process we came up with a dozen more ‘inventions’ because every time we had to solve a technical problem we patented the solutions. These solutions represented genuine new knowledge.

But I would argue that any good team working on this product would have come up with these ideas and therefore they are obvious. The only real invention was the original one.

Oddly though, the concept of an electrochemical cell with two close and opposing electrodes was certainly not new at all. The application of this type of cell to blood glucose measurement was however inspirational.

No new knowledge was created by the original idea other than the idea itself – it was a new application for an old technology.

The technology went on to become the core of two competing sets of multi-billion dollar products – one company even stole the ideas and was latter sued for patent infringement, And yet another start-up has licensed the technology for new applications and has gone on to a public listing.

The idea was so good that afterwards everyone said it was OBVIOUS.

Oddly this is a sign of true invention. People getting sort of mad at themselves for not having the idea themselves and then they tend to say it is obvious in order to discredit the idea a little, just to make themselves feel better I guess.

The great inventive ideas are always obvious after the fact.

True invention requires a number of things:

1. Serendipity or blinding insight, normally only by the highly trained – the ready mind

2. To others in the field It may be ‘obvious’ but only after the fact

3. One idea amongst an infinite set of possibilities and not one idea amongst a finite set of possibilities – the latter can be arrived at by systematic experimentation

4. And I see no requirement for new knowledge to be created other than the idea itself. When genuine new scientific knowledge is created it is often many years before someone has the inventive insight as to how to put that knowledge to practical use. For example the scientific community first heard about lasers in the late 1950’s but it wasn’t until many years later that industrial R&D types has product insights, followed by hard-earned improvements in performance and reductions in cost required for product release.