Video Transcript

Auto-generated transcript. Timestamps are approximate.

Welcome to Innovation Cafe. I’m your friendly neighborhood inventor, Gary Schuster, and today we’re going to have a brief talk about a patent that never issued for me. I couldn’t get it issued — and that’s okay.

So what happened: I was at a formal event with my then three-and-a-half, four-year-old daughter, and she would love to take off running. If I turned my head for a second, she would run — and she ran into a parking lot. I quickly chased her down, but it got me thinking: that could have been really bad. A lot of parents have this problem.

So I thought, what would be a good thing to do for a toddler? You want to disrupt their running. If something weird happens, they’re going to stop — that’s how toddlers are. They’re naturally curious, and they’re naturally going to stop when something interesting is going on.

So I came up with a proximity detection system where the parent has a transmitter and the shoes each have a receiver. When the signal gets beyond a certain level of weakness, it means the kid is too far apart — probably taking off — and it’ll cause the shoes to vibrate. That should be enough to stop a kid.

Now, why didn’t I get a patent on it? Pretty simple. They had already done that to catch prisoners who were running away, and there was already some patented technology for that. There was just too much prior art. There were some things that would distinguish my invention, but ultimately I wouldn’t be able to get broad enough claims issued to make it worth it. So I walked away.

That’s a huge trick for inventors — it’s a skill, and it’s almost impossible. Inventors tend to fall in love with their inventions, and I loved this one. I thought we could really keep some kids safe, maybe even save some lives. But I also had to be realistic. If I couldn’t get a patent on it, I couldn’t get a patent on it. It’s that simple.

Why throw money at the patent office and at lawyers if you’re not going to get some kind of payoff? Here the cost-benefit was really high costs, almost zero benefit.

The best thing you can do is take the win — someone else thought it was valuable, someone else patented it, someone else was using it, and then you came up with it independently. That means you came up with a really good idea. Pat yourself on the back, say “I did it well that time, maybe next time I’ll come up with something that hasn’t already been invented,” and move on. Don’t waste money or time on something that has already been patented that you can’t monetize. That said, if you think it’s a good thing for humanity, you could go and publish it and promote it.

So that’s my “didn’t get patented” way to stop toddlers from running away story.