Forget About the Mythical Lone Inventor in the Garage

Good piece, with major implications for public policy. Encouraging more people to go into startups is great, but funding more R&D (especially in energy) is crucial as well. Also, Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From makes this case very well at book length.

While I do agree with a lot of the points here, I wonder if perhaps recent advances in technology (particularly those that might be considered platforms for future innovations) are making the idealistic "Garage Inventor" more and more realistic. It probably still requires a big lab to create new technologies or new branches of science, but nowadays anyone with a laptop and some money for web hosting can create something that reaches millions of people. Although that's entirely different from what Edison, Hewlett, and Packard were doing, I'd argue that it's still within the realm of "innovation". (not to say that every website is particularly innovative, just that the possibility is there.)

Well, like so many other things, it's field-dependent. :-)

If you're working in software, you don't even need a garage: a dorm room or studio apartment, a laptop, and a few thousand dollars to pay for web hosting, will fill your need for physical equipment. I think that one of the great achievements of the past few decades has been the invention of an entire field of technical endeavor in which the base costs are so low.

But not all innovation is in software, and it's good to get a reminder that most fields have substantial equipment materials and equipment costs. A lab doing electronics, biotechnology, energy research, and many other totally necessary things has much higher requirements.

When I was doing microfluidics work in grad school, I was doing some of the cheapest microfabrication research out there. All I needed was a continuous supply of photoresist ($800/L), some decent-quality silicon wafers ($200/pk of 20), access to a high-resolution transparency printer for masks ($150/print), silicone plastic for making devices ($50/lb), and a good fluorescence microscope ($50,000 or so). Oh, and access to a clean room with about $1,000,000 worth of equipment, but that was shared and I don't know what our "rent" for access was...

Edit: costs estimated from the Internet and 2yr-old memories, but I think they're pretty close.

The author can't be too happy with the picture of Albert Einstein at the top... For those that don't remember this Albert guy made one of the most important discoveries of all time; working in solitude, in the Swiss patent office, in-between reviewing patent applications. :)

I can't wait until some of the programmable-matter type approaches really take off. The closest we have is 3d printing.

What I am hoping to become popular and inexpensive something like 3d printing but with the ability to either assembly parts into machines automatically or the ability to print functional machines all in one go.

When you have inexpensive machines that can do that type of thing, then you really will be able to program reality in your garage, and print out fully assembled machines from open source components you downloaded from the internet.

On a slightly different topic, I was thinking, in response to this article, in a way, no one who is trying to innovate in technology (especially things like software) is really working alone. Instead we are building off of existing platforms and modules that others have created. For example, I am probably one of the most introverted programmers around, but the platform that I am building, ostensibly working on it completely alone, integrates many, many different pieces of open (and closed) source software/APIs, created relatively recently by hundreds or thousands of different people.

I'm working on a product based on jQuery, jQuery UI, WebKit (V8), CodeMirror, NodeJS, jQuery context menu, noty, NowJS (socket.io), CoffeeScript, FckEditor, jQuery editable, jquery ipweditor, Google Web Fonts (more than a dozen contributed fonts by many different authors), Google API hosting, AjaxUpload, NodeJs (NPM, shellJS, formidable, rimraf, async, request, cssmin, vows, zlib, mongolian, etc.) Rackspace API, PayPal/Stripe API, Ubuntu (Debian), Xen. Just look at the huge number of people that have contributed to Debian/Ubuntu, V8 or WebKit or Node.js recently or the rest of it over the years -- there is no way I could even consider doing this project without that stuff. So in a way everyone is in the lab already which is open source/APIs/github or whatever.