Helping Inventors Get “Unstuck”
How Investing in Early-Stage Inventors and Innovators Can Solve Our Twenty-First Century Challenges
By Rob Schneider, Executive Director, The Lemelson Foundation
At The Lemelson Foundation, we believe that inventors and inventions are critical to making the world a better place. Our grantees and partners are supporting the creation of innovative products that address some of our most challenging problems — from health care to agriculture to clean energy and climate change. The novel solutions and successes I see in our grantmaking work are what make me optimistic about our future.
But here’s something every one of those inventors and entrepreneurs will tell you: They don’t always succeed, and that’s okay. They see failure as an important part of invention. Getting stuck helps us see things in a different light, and try a different — maybe more unorthodox — approach.
In other words, failure is only failure if you don’t learn from it.
Take, for example, Sorin Grama. An engineer, entrepreneur, and MIT instructor, Grama is the founder of two companies — Promethean Power and Transaera — that are focused on developing sustainable cooling solutions for low- and middle- income countries.
Incredibly impactful in the hottest corners of the globe, Grama’s inventions are critical in an ever-warming climate. In 2021, Transaera’s novel, moisture-absorbing technology for air conditioning earned the company a spot among the finalists in the prestigious Global Cooling Prize.
But before his success, Grama had experienced failure and found himself feeling stuck. It was the day he first delivered a prototype for a solar-powered milk chiller that small dairy producers in India could use to prevent spoilage caused by power outages in rural areas. “That failed spectacularly in front of our customer who was waiting for this design,” he says. “The day after we installed it, [the customer] looked at it and said, “This won’t work. It’s too big. It’s too expensive.”
Grama and his team went back to the proverbial drawing board, reevaluating and rethinking the design. Instead of relying on their initial idea of solar power, they realized that the real innovation had been the thermal battery part of the product that could store energy for when the electrical grid went down and keep the chillers operating. Ultimately, they created a product that was smaller, more efficient, and less expensive, and found an enthusiastic customer base.
“I think all invention is about exploring the unexplored path,” Grama says. “You’re going into the unknown and there will be dead-ends. Trying and not succeeding, and then trying again is part of the discovery and innovation process. When we hit a wall with something, I know we’ve gone off the beaten path, and we’re now into the creative, exploration phase of something that could be revolutionary.”
What I love about Grama’s outlook is that it epitomizes the inventive spirit. Inventors often get stuck, but the best ones use that “stuckness” as fuel to find another way. As Grama puts it: “Creative fire comes out of failure. And that’s what sparks the innovation in the end.”
Sometimes, however, it’s not the idea that’s the problem. Getting stuck, in many cases, can just as much be about a lack of resources or equipment to build a new prototype, or a lack of mentorship to help with engineering or business challenges, or a lack of the right kind of funding at the right time.
Grama was able to take his idea through various obstacles along the way because of support provided by some of our longtime partners — MIT and VentureWell in the U.S. and Villgro in India. MIT and VentureWell provided early mentorship and coaching to take his concept from idea to first prototype, and Villgro provided in-country experience and expertise to adapt that prototype to the local context and his customers’ needs. It’s this kind of invention ecosystem that is necessary to ensure that ingenuity actually makes it to the marketplace to improve lives.
I have no doubt that at this very moment, some of the most innovative yet undeveloped ideas are in that “stuck” phase, without the finances or a supportive ecosystem to help propel them forward. I also have no doubt that some of these hold the key to solving our biggest problems, like climate change — and there’s too much at stake for us to let these potential breakthrough inventions remain stuck.
Over nearly 30 years of grantmaking, The Lemelson Foundation has championed early-stage innovators and inventors whose ideas are still too risky for downstream funders and investors. For a foundation of our size, we maximize our nimbleness and flexibility in grantmaking to take chances, mobilize support for inventors with innovative and achievable hardware-based projects who are stuck, and marshall an ecosystem to help “unstick” them — everything from physical space and equipment to technical and business advice to the right kinds of funding.
Climate change is one of those areas that demands risk-taking. It’s a twenty-first century moonshot moment where we need to think big — but it’s also crucial to think small and local, to counter the myriad effects experienced by frontline communities across the globe who often bear the brunt of environmental change.
It’s a global challenge that will require solutions across the world, tailored to those individual countries and communities. And invention will be a critical tool.
Next month, we commemorate our Founder’s 100th birthday. Jerome “Jerry” Lemelson saw the great promise that invention had in the twentieth century to improve lives, and he championed the individual inventors who fueled the visions for tomorrow. And it is in this spirit that the foundation continues to take risks to fuel the inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs who question the status quo and seek to transform our world by taking on critical social and environmental challenges.
Through our grantmaking and collaboration with partners, we hope to unearth those innovators and inventors wherever they are, and unleash that power to ensure a healthy and more livable environment, for many generations to come.
Rob Schneider is the Executive Director of The Lemelson Foundation, the world’s leading philanthropic organization with a mission to improve lives through invention.
