Innovation Cafe with Gary Shuster, patent litigator and prolific inventor.
Transcript
Hey there I’m Gary Schuster. Welcome to Innovation Cafe. Today I want to talk about the importance of innovative play as an adult. So I’ll tell a story about something I played with and the invention that it led to. I, for whatever reason, started to become really obsessed with high powered lasers, particularly green lasers, because the human eye sees green much more readily than other colors. I had some high powered lasers, and I lived at the time in a house that had a second story with a balcony that looked out over a school, and there were tons of birds that would every day just go and eat worms and whatever birds do.
But they.re all hanging out on the lawn at the school. And I thought, I wonder what would happen if they saw a dog coming towards them. So I pointed the laser in their direction and they were terrified of it, and they flew away and it just sat in my head. Now think about how I got there. I just thought lasers were cool. I didn’t even know what I was going to try to invent. But if there’s something that catches your attention and you think this is something that I really could do something with,maybe buy some of it.
Now, granted, as a professional inventor, you do get cool calls. Like when my patent lawyer called me up and said, you have to buy an Xbox Kinect for work because you’re going to invent stuff off of it. That was cool. Still didn’t have the guts to deduct it from my taxes, but I should have. The upshot of the invention is what an amazing way to protect crops from predation by birds. You don’t need anything that kills the birds. You just need a moving laser light that has a dot that secures them. Now it turns out I did do some research, and there were similar enough technologies in place that it didn’t seem like it could get a broad enough patent to have value, but it doesn’t mean that the laser wasn’t a good thing to play around with for an invention.
And there are probably a thousand other things they did with laser. That didn’t give me a flash of insight and inspiration and lead to a eureka moment. And that’s okay, because creative play is not always going to lead to an invention. But inventions almost always come out of someone who’s into creative play, whether that’s someone who just loves working in their lab. And for them, working in their lab is play. Whether it’s someone like me who’s like, I’m going to order the strongest possible magnets in the largest possible size because I think something cool might come of them.
Either way, just stick with what is fun for you and you are going to succeed. So that’s the story of my no kill bird laser tool signing off from Innovation Cafe. Till next time.