The 8-track tape player won’t make a comeback, but many old technologies offer opportunities for peripheral inventions.
Look at lighting.
Curled, low-power fluorescents are replacing incandescent bulbs. LEDs, a solid-state technology, also are moving in. Arrays of LEDs, which don’t “burn out” like incandescent lights, make up most of our traffic lights today. The savings in maintenance and electricity is enormous.
Smaller arrays of LEDs are replacing incandescent lamps in vehicle tail lights.
Lighting is a major technology and the innovative opportunities are mainly exploited by large corporations. But what’s important is the principle, not the product. Independent inventors can find opportunities to build upon old technologies, especially those that are low-tech. And these fields are much less crowded.
Consider the large metal canned goods sold at wholesale food and general merchandise sellers such as Costco and Sam’s Club. These institutional-sized cans are made of steel that is 40 percent thicker than the consumer-size soup can.
That sounds innocent enough. But the shear strength of metal increases by the cube of its thickness. This means old manual can openers require almost three times the effort to cut through the lid of these larger cans.
Imagine a person without much wrist strength or with arthritis trying to open such a can. Furthermore, taller cans don’t fit typical electric can openers, which most likely wouldn’t have enough power anyway.
So we see an opportunity for a manual can opener with an extended, angled crank handle that provides increased leverage and has a more comfortable grip.
I’ve made a couple of these for elderly women who couldn’t open the larger cans without help. They rave about my can opener. They even use them on their Campbell’s tomato soup cans.
This invention likely won’t make me wealthy.
Compared with the standard Ekco manual can opener, my extended crank model is a niche item. It probably wouldn’t command a sales volume that would attract a large manufacturer, or even a small second-source competitor. Still, it’s an item that could produce a nice sideline income for several years. And it wouldn’t cost a fortune to tool up.
Is it patentable? Possibly. Am I going to patent it? No.
Why would I spend $5,000 or more to patent an item that I claim won’t have any competition? Exclusivity, after all, is the object of a patent, right?
It would be wiser to invest the money in tooling and other startup costs, being first on the market, and more important, getting the can opener into the good catalogs, thereby substantially locking out potential competitors.
I could have greater success going this route than by patenting.
Unless a competitor comes up with a much better idea that will attract the catalogers, I’d have the market for this niche item to myself – the very same advantage I would want from a patent. And if a competitor came up with a much better idea, my patent probably wouldn’t cover it anyway.
Old technologies can be mined for their tailings. But like old mines that have seen their bonanza days and run out, the pickings will be relatively rare and lean. That said, old technologies that change – often in subtle ways – may reveal a vein that’s rich in innovative opportunities.
