There are many benefits and a few disadvantages to inventing as part of your job. Your prestige goes both up and down, depending on the attitude of each individual to inventors and inventions.
In an organization which is progressive, beyond lip service to "innovation, motherhood, and the flag," your prestige goes up with management and with the other inventors of the organization, and you can compensate-or ignore-your loss of prestige with those others who think of inventors as nuisances and nuts.
In an organization with an anti-progressive bias (regardless of its propaganda) you must balance your unfortunate predilection against your reluctance to change jobs. In such a place you quickly learn to understand the "curse of innovation" and to understand that the way to tell the pioneers from the Indians is that the pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their backs.
Within a single company it is common for different groups to be progressive and anti-progressive. You may be able to transfer within the company without the extreme step of finding another job.
The benefits to inventing on your job can include the following:
- Raises and promotions
- Prestige
- Interesting assignments (e.g., proposal writing)
- Presentation of technical papers (including company-paid travel and meeting other people), publication of articles, and publicity from company PR
- Patents paid for by the company
- Awards (sometimes including real money)
- Job offers by other companies based on the above publicity
- Self-satisfaction (the ego reward described above)
- Job security because of your value
However, as the delightfully elegant expression goes, "You'll never get rich as a working stiff." Many of you are driven to make a lot of money and your strength is in inventing and engineering, what else can you do?
Selling Your Inventions
Your first option is to keep your job, invent in noncompetitive fields, and sell your inventions to other manufacturers for the well-known $1 million each.
Forget It
Companies rarely buy inventions which are not fully developed, in production, and successfully being sold. Why?
- Most companies have an inventory of undeveloped products which were "invented here" but which have been stalled by lack of capital and personnel to get them all the way to market. "Why should we pay you for yours when we already have our own?"
- Fear of legal entanglements, particularly with amateur inventors who may be paranoid and greedy and are presumed to be ignorant of the realities of business costs and risks.
There is a path to selling inventions which has a better chance than most. If you invent a product on your job in a field in which you are expert but which does not compete with your employers' products, and if your employers do not choose to exploit it, and if you ask their permission, they may give you the rights to the invention, either free or on a shared-royalty basis. Your invention may be salable because your professional expertise makes it state-of-the-art.
Obstacles and Aids to Innovation
If you are a chronic innovator, you will encounter both obstacles and aids to your work from people around you. Unless you are very lucky, you will encounter far more obstacles than aids, and there will be times when you will think of the phrase "the curse of innovation." Here is an outline of what you may encounter.
Most people are hostile to new ideas. Their reasons may include jealousy, recognition of a political threat, emotional conservatism (which is a fancy way of saying that they just feel hostile to new ideas), and the fear of unexpected consequences, which is legitimate conservatism. They will show their hostility in a variety of responses such as angry denunciation, faint praise, active resistance, blank silence, and, in the case of assistants, a will to fail appearing as subtle sabotage.
Your manager, if hostile to innovation, will refrain from praise and rewards for successful innovation, will neglect or reject proposals, and will punish you for errors. (There is no more successful management technique than prevention of error by punishment. Of course, the punishee will thenceforth avoid punishment by not doing anything with any element of risk and by doing as little of anything as possible, but he or she won't make any more errors.)
Many have found that manufacturing engineering managers are far worse in this respect than product development and R&D managers. They assign to manufacturing engineers maintenance tasks and technical clerical tasks which should be handled by technicians, not graduate engineers. They punish errors, discourage innovation, and provide the worst of the available office facilities. As a result, manufacturing engineering has low prestige, is avoided by those who can get better jobs, and is even neglected in engineering schools. All this, in spite of the fact, that manufacturing technology is as fascinating as any other branch of engineering and offers as much opportunity for innovation as most other branches. This situation bears a major part of the responsibility for United States manufacturing's becoming so noncompetitive with foreign manufacturing that a national disgrace is becoming a national disaster.
