Inventors find time in recession to hone ideas

“I worked in corporate America for 11 years, and I wasn't happy,” she said. “So I decided to be a full-time inventor.”

Newark, Calif., soccer mom Rebecca Berrigan invented a product inspired by her own experience in the workplace.

While traveling on business for KB Home, Berrigan slipped in a Las Vegas hotel shower and almost hit her head. She thought then that someone should make a disposable shower mat. After being laid off in mid-2006, she decided to do it herself.

The product, Squishy Toes the Biodegradable Shower Mat, isn't selling as quickly as she had hoped: She says her target market of hotels isn't much in the shopping mood, so she's reformatting the product for use by campers. But she doesn't regret the US$10,000 she spent to create and patent the product.

“It's been hugely rewarding to take something that was a thought and bring it to fruition,” she said.

Because most inventors don't know much about marketing and selling their products, the best way to get inventions into the hands of consumers is to license them to companies with the means to produce, advertise and sell them, said Stephen Key, the co-founder of InventRight, a Web site that educates inventors about how to bring a product to market.

Key said 97 percent of all patents never make more money than the inventor spends on the patent, but that renting out an idea to a company can earn inventors thousands of dollars.

Companies that buy people's inventions and produce them have received more pitches as the economy has deteriorated further.

Household products company Oxo International Ltd. has seen a significant uptick in pitches from inventors hoping to get their products licensed, said Katherine Sall, the legal assistant and office manager who handles the pitches. But the company hasn't found anything appealing among the submissions so far, she said.

“It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Sall said.

Don McCammon can tell you that striking a licensing deal doesn't guarantee success. He was laid off from his job as a mental health counselor in late 2007 and took US$100,000 out of his 401(k) to see whether he could develop any of the inventions that he had been kicking around.

He licensed his LidPunch — a device that breaks the vacuum seal of jars — to Viatek Consumer Products Group Inc., which made an As Seen on TV infomercial for it. He's still trying to license his Fridgerack — a sliding rack with custom containers to put in your refrigerator so you don't lose your leftovers, and his Chef's Knife Rack, a magnetic knife rack made from plastic that attaches to any surface, including tile or metal.

McCammon, 62, still hasn't made any money from his ideas. His wife isn't thrilled that so much of their savings are gone. She isn't yet convinced that McCammon, who likes to quote Thomas Edison, who held 1,039 patents, is the next great American inventor.

“My wife won't let me spend much more on new inventions till I start to make some money from my current ones,” he said.

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