News 5 - Economic Development: An Invention Engine for creating jobs

California entrepreneur Larry MacDonald works hard to make the frustrating stuff of life more relevant and rewarding and wants you to join him. MacDonald thinks a new method for developing products that involves thousands of people has the promise to re-ignite the economy and create tens of thousands of jobs.

In association with many teams of people, MacDonald’s company, Edison Innovations Inc., gathers, reviews, and processes your common every-day frustrations into new products.  “The experience and wisdom of retired executives, professionals, and housewives are gold mines,” notes MacDonald, “people are always faced with annoyances or worries and with the collaboration between experienced professionals, our process makes frustrations into in-demand new products. This is the same process that helped America win WWII, but uses the reach of the web.”

Edison is a clearinghouse for needs and frustrations, and Larry’s enthusiasm is contagious.  He notes, “Our business is about relationships between people, those who notice needs, those who create new solutions, and those who connect us to appropriate markets. Our process is based on Thomas Edison’s prolific invention factory, and like Edison, we work only on projects we know have commercial potential using the state-of-the-art best practices.”

MacDonald’s patent-applied-for process uses on-line collaboration on the Internet and face-to-face meetings to solicit lists of problems, select the most promising, and develop and license innovative products.   No frustration is too trivial for consideration, as each leads to opportunities. Indeed, MacDonald’s new venture seems limitless.  With needs streaming in from across all categories of industry, and around the world, he works gathering experienced teams to evaluate each need and select only the most promising, find team members with expertise who have relationships with the manufacturing or marketing groups, and design solutions quickly to facilitate a fast turnover of new products.  And while the yet-to-be-discovered is exciting and unknown, MacDonald points out that by establishing relationships with companies through their previous employees encourages cooperation and collaboration to develop new products.

Companies often rely on their customers to give feedback and provide incremental product improvements but often are not able to make the jump into the next generation new product. 

In his book-lined home office there is a sense of success in the making and it would not be without precedence.  MacDonald sits at his grandfather’s desk which is gouged and scarred from years of use.  “My grandfather invented the rotary printing press which changed the way paper money was made at the time,” notes Larry with subdued pride. His grandfather and uncle were also successful inventors.  Indeed, MacDonald’s office appears like a workshop, with five computer monitors and stacks of books and research papers.  “Larry works tirelessly on this venture, he is so excited about the possibilities for the future.  It is really inspiring,” says Hollie Webster, who has worked with MacDonald on this and other projects.  Or. “ Larry is a creative genius with the potential to fulfill not just his own ambitions, but he has the skills to enable others to fulfill their dreams as well. This is what’s really exciting and I’m thrilled to be involved.”

Bringing new products to the marketplace is a step in the process, with the ultimate goal being to increase society’s capacity for creation, resulting in greater prosperity and a reduction in human suffering. MacDonald finds the process of collecting needs most intriguing and great fun. 

He is building a local team of global collaborators to pioneer the process and would like to involve as many people as possible, especially marketers, engineers, manufacturers, researchers, and those with experience and knowledge of licensing.