Invention Programs

Invention is more than just ideas—it’s about the creation of new sources of value and the processes to support this creation.

You have the people—we have the tools. For years, the Invention Arts team has been working to support grassroots invention efforts, creating both products and patents, in the companies we’ve worked for. Our tools and processes can help your company establish effective grassroots invention programs and systems.

  • Is your "innovation" limited to a string of incremental improvements to existing product lines, when breakthroughs are required?
  • Do you have independent fiefdoms within your company that compete for resources, talent, and knowledge, frequently building similar products with little or no communications amongst them?
  • Could you use a cohesive, enterprise-wide grassroots invention program that leverages the brain trust of your employees?

Invention Arts can help. We provide:

Grassroots Invention Programs

We create and run grassroots invention programs, using processes and tools that can help you discover both talented inventors and innovation within your company:

  • Review your current innovation and invention processes; revise or implement new, proven ones
  • Develop an innovation pipeline, funneling the best ideas to action
  • Implement powerful internal tools to enable open exchange, debate, and refinement of ideas, especially those that cross organizational boundaries
  • Capture these ideas, let the best bubble up to the top through internal crowdsourcing
  • Connect inventors with implementers and keep the process moving forward
  • Reveal the most talented inventors and the big ideas in your company, giving you the opportunity to encourage and reward the best and the brightest
  • Ensure that no good idea is left behind: if you can’t build it now, patent it now

Invention Management Systems

How do you capture and manage invention? Implement tools that work to surface ideas and refine them. We build systems to do just that.

  • Our Inventions platform is a corporate-wide intranet clearinghouse for managing the flow of ideas throughout your company
  • Not only does it reveal great ideas, and let your employee brain trust vote and comment on those ideas, it connects inventors and implementers in order to turn those ideas into reality
  • Ensures that no idea gets lost in the cracks
  • Provides better transparency and a starting place for collaboration on new concepts
  • Gives inventors an internal public platform for their ideas and inventions

Futurist Programs

The problem: to meet marketplace challenges, you need more than incremental improvements to existing product lines.  The solution: engage Invention Arts to run a futurist program at your company.

  • Our futurist programs encourage your employees to look up from their daily deliverables and into the near future, envisioning what the world, your company, and your industry will be like, then imagining the products and services your company should be creating for that future
  • This competition helps to build teams of collaborators, discovers the innovators at your company and is a great employee morale booster—it's also usually a lot of fun
  • It results in both actionable products and patentable inventions for future products

Focused Invention Challenges, Pre-Storms, and Summits

Processes and tools are not always enough.  In many cases, we can employ a higher touch model in order to truly get at the innovation hidden within your company:

  • We hold time-limited, focused Invention Challenges bringing together cross-functional groups in your company with Invention Arts inventors to solve a specific issue or address a predefined goal, e.g., “how can I develop more services I can monetize?”
  • In Invention Pre-Storms, we meet face-to-face with a group of innovators from your company to get them in a highly generative and efficient invention mindset, then let them loose on a set of problems, with your inventors capturing their generated ideas in the IA Inventions Platform
  • With Invention Summits, we help you identify and connect innovators from across your company around common topics to capture the human power of creativity, giving people an opportunity to expand personal and information networks, and allowing disparate groups to share information in a non-threatening way

Invention Councils

In many cases, a high volume of ideas from grassroots efforts needs to be vetted and mined for the most valuable ideas and concepts.

  • We can help you create and run Invention Councils, handpicked groups of inventors and big thinkers from across your company. These cross functional teams meet on a regular basis to review and refine big ideas in the idea pipeline before they are handed off to product or patent groups.