True Innovation

In 1997, while rummaging through a bin of novelty items in a tiny sidewalk shop in San Francisco’s China Town, I stumbled upon an item that sounded too good to be true. It was a shaving razor made of a self sharpening non-metallic material that was supposed to be good for a lifetime! My obvious skepticism aside, I decided to risk the crumpled Abe Lincoln note in my pocket to volunteer my face for an experiment that I was convinced would fail.

For the next six and a half years though, my lifetime razor actually held up its incredible claims until I lost it on a trip to Europe. On my next visit to the Bay Area’s Chinatown, I looked up the tiny shop again in hopes that I might find a replacement. Unfortunately, no one there remembered the product and the shop that sold it had changed owners. I did my own search online, but no account of such a product turned up. Yet, this was not fantasy. I actually owned the razor, and it actually saved the landfills of the 100s of disposable razor blades I would’ve bought if I hadn’t entertained that particular impulse purchase. I wondered how many other such products have been forgotten because they didn’t have a recurring revenue business model, or how many breakthrough ideas to serve the greater good of humanity were overlooked for recurring margins and competitive barriers to entry.

Later, I learned that we had the first electric cars and refrigerators in the 1800s, Tesla’s wireless electricity and renewable energy generation in the 1900s, Royal Rife’s drug free cancer killing electromagnetic devices in the 1930s, NASA’s artificial photosynthesis solutions to make hydrogen fuel cells from sunlight and water in the 1960s and aeroponic soil free indoor food growers using 1/100th of the water in the 1980s, water powered car engines, nanophotonic glass to capture photons from the sun far more efficiently than any solar panel on the market and so much more.

So why aren’t these solutions available to the public?

Why don’t truly remarkable breakthroughs that can potentially solve the escalating problems around food, water and energy for the largest population accounted for in history become available to us? Is it because the idea of profit or margins to get shareholders to speculate on the value of something the only way to motivate economic activity?

In other words, do we innovate to serve the needs of an economic model that we work to serve for those who set the rules, or do we innovate to create an economy that serves humanity? It got me thinking about how we as a society define innovation and why we as a society think that planned obsolescence is a market necessity for creating value.

Most people I talked about this to, looked at me as if I was crazy! Grow up! They said, that’s just the way the market works and that’s the way it will always work. People are lazy, and if you don’t entice them with the lure of profit determined by prices set by demand generated by the perception of scarcity, nothing would get done and we’d all revert back to the stone ages. I heard them out, and even considered their bank balances and pedigrees as proof of their convictions, but somehow it still didn’t make sense to me.

Especially in recent times, I had actually spent years doing research and writing my book about the way we use fossil fuels as our energy and economic baseline. I found that practice in sharp contrast to the actual breakthroughs I’ve either learned about or witnessed first hand in labs and garages across the U.S. and abroad. From energy output amplifiers formerly known as “Zero Point” free energy generators which are now being used to create battery efficiencies for fuel cells, the science and proof of their existence beyond the snake oil parlor tricks was overwhelming.

I saw working models of waste to energy fuel cell systems that use biomass much like the Flux Capacitor from the 80s cult classic Back to the Future. I witnessed tap water turned into usable Hydroxy fuel based electricity to run a car and I saw the pressure from existing plumbing pipes power the pump in a high rise building. That was just the tip of it. These were publicized things from independent university and garage innovators that I could track back from the hype to reality. So what about all the innovations like my lifetime razor that have lost their traces of origin because their value cannot be captured in the current market paradigm of profits and prices?

The larger interconnected economic value questions now being brought up from Internet-based currencies not withstanding, what about just the simple accessibility to these things that can directly help communities control costs and improve the health and well-being of their citizens? Today we have biology inspired atmospheric water capture systems to grow food in the desert, but we still promote big food and GMOs with their systematic devastation of soil beds now barren without the introduction of petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides.

We don’t grow food in the desert; instead, we promote centralized solar farms that waste trillions of gallons of water and create toxic waste from dated battery technologies to greenwash a utility model that has remained relatively unchanged for over 100 years! It’s not because we don’t have the technology. In fact, we have solar LED powered food growers that yield 3-5 times more produce per wattage using 1/100th of the water and often 1/1000th of the space in quasi-legal urban farming operations. Few know of these things and use them to their advantage, like the multi-billion dollar underground cannabis trade, but they are rarely visible to the public.

The counter argument to this, in addition to the denial of the existence of these technologies is that it is simply not feasible for widespread market adoption. Venture capitalists will tell you that these things are niche anomalies even if they admit to their existence, and that they simply cannot foresee an exit plan because their application is so contextual that its not worth the capital risk to make them scale efficiently. Hmm…

What if it didn’t have to be this way?

Innovation motivated by profit, or the sale price of the stock valuation hyped by the market makers for easily duplicable ideas like Groupon may be the IPO darlings of this age, but most of us can see through the fallacy. The idea that capital is a factor of labor and land has two fatal flaws.

The first is the idea of labor tied to capital. We live in a world now where manual labor to actually produce something accounts for less than half of all the jobs worldwide. The manual labor jobs that remain, are mostly there to appease political posturing and maintain the inequities of a stratified class structure left over from the feudalistic era. Most of us do work to make the work we did earlier obsolete!

The second idea that capital is tied to land is somewhat true but misplaced. Yes, we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and our abilty to optimize them determine the value of what we can produce. However, if the primary work we are doing is about optimizing resources so that we can do more with less, or innovation, then the fixed value of land based resources that need to be tied to future debt seems meaningless. In fact, it’s the other way around, the land and its resources become less valuable in the old capital paradigm because we are always optimizing it to do less and less physical work.

This is of course a deeper topic for another time, but it prompts some new questions based on what we are already experiencing in the digitized and rapidly dematerializing economy. Software and knowledge are now freely exchanged at unprecedented rates, and the so-called non-market activities like our time here online makes up a significant portion of our work hours. Some more than others of course, and while we joke about that, it is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. We are definitely heading into an era of more thought and less physical work. What if we could actually leverage that momentum to create more solutions for the real needs of humanity with metrics around true value creation over the metrics like profits and margins?

What if we could actually motivate both expert and citizen innovators to get more from their ideas and abilities than going the traditional venture market route? Instead of creating an enterprise whose primary purpose is to sell its story to the speculators in favor of the global banking elite, they could actually create collaborative entities that served the greater good of humanity? In other words, create the market construct to reward innovators for delivering solutions for the need and not the greed?

Before you dismiss this notion as unrealistic or idealistic, consider the new economic activity that is already underway. Today, we have crowdsourced innovation tools that account for each participants’ direct contribution no matter how small into a royalty payment if their co-created product gains enough traction to go to market. Consider the new value accounting systems now being proposed by Crowdfunding, Time Banks, Complimentary Currency and Micro-Equity and Micro-Credit platforms to seed and grow ideas that could never be realized in the past.

If you had an idea to truly help humanity through an innovative product or service approach, which option would be more attractive to you? One where you compete with thousands of other entrepreneurs to pitch to traditional investors that care little about your solution, or one where even your half-baked idea can merge with another to form a solid community benefit business, that can generate recurring revenues by a clear attribution back to its originators? Isn’t having equity in your creation the ultimate motivator after all?

If you are an investor or sponsor, what would be more attractive to you? A choice between the exponential odds against your bet, in hopes of IPO before the sizzle fades or near real-time due diligence from actual co-creators for guaranteed returns and quicker path to maximum value? While the answer is obvious, the tools aren’t quite there yet, but that too is about to change.

My friends and I are on that path towards creating exactly these kinds of tools towards TRUE INNOVATION. Innovation for the need and not the greed. We are developing tools to help innovators get more for their ideas, makers get more their talents, and funders lower risks and speed up their returns. We are not alone. Groups across the world are waking up to the new possibilities now afforded us through the same tools that were once used to bind us in the perpetual production and consumption rat race. It was inevitable. Playing the game changes the game itself. When you create the conditions to reward people for sharing thoughts so that a few can profit from it, be careful what you ask for.

Just as social networks designed to sell us ads are redefining advertising, or crowdsourcing web services were designed to make institutional research and development cheaper are making proprietary knowledge a thing of the past, so is the forthcoming next wave. The awareness for the need is now apparent. The manifestation of that into a world that works is in progress. What evolves is likely to change everything! We’ve done it before. That’s how we are here now.

The future is going to be played on a different playground. I’ll see you there.

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To learn more about Ray Podder visit
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