Great Ideas Gone Unrewarded?

Have you ever had — or known somebody who had — some kind of brilliant idea for an invention that seemed almost certain to change the world?

You might not have thought of it in terms of getting rich off your invention, but likely you thought of it as being able to make a change and having a positive impact that could make life better for people.

But what happened next? Did you actually develop the idea and bring it to the world, or even try to develop the idea to bring it to the world?

It is surprising how many amazing ideas never actually make it beyond the ”thought” stage. As an interesting aside, we sometimes have seemingly great ideas, do nothing with them, and then discover maybe 5 or 10 years later that somebody else had the same idea and actually did something with it. At that point, all we can do is feel sorry for ourselves and think ”I wish I could get royalties!”

However, this is the truth of many great ideas. For every 20 great inventions that are dreamed up, there might be only one that ends up being brought to market.

Being an ”ideas person” is not an easy life!

What's more, even if you do have some brilliant idea it is usually met with skepticism and resistance while it is new. As a species, we human beings tend to be very resistant to change, largely because it often involves testing out something new to us and unknown.

We look at something and consider the fact that we may already have a solution that is working for us — even if it is far from perfect — and don't see the sense in trying something untested.

As such, many great ideas don't actually get very far because the person with the original idea runs into all this resistance... and while they thought what they had in mind would be awesome, instead they're surrounded by people who say either ”I don't think that's gonna work” or outright say ”I think that's stupid, nobody will ever buy that!”

So they end up just giving up.

Sadly, many great original ideas end up not being credited to their original inventor, but to the person who came along perhaps years or even decades after the fact, was told about the idea and then executed it and ran with the concept.

Besides, most brilliant thinkers are not all that great at understanding such relatively mundane concepts as production and mass marketing. And that's one of the primary reasons why a lot of great ideas never get beyond a few sketches on a napkin somewhere.

My own father was a but of a "crazy inventor," but none of his ideas ever made it beyond just his own immediate personal needs, and the needs of his business. For example, he invented a device that could accurately count 10,000 bottle caps per minute — which he needed for a production line in the factory.

No such thing existed previously (around 1970) so he had to create it.

That same technology now sits inside (for example) high speed coin counters at commercial banks. Not that he would really have cared... but they started showing up about 15 years after he first figured it out.

Just to show, great ideas often go unrewarded...

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!

How about you? Have you ever had some idea you thought might help the world? Did you do anything with it? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2025.01.17 00:30 PST
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