The Minnesota Inventors Congress’ Invention Expo just wrapped up its first session in the Minneapolis Convention Center, after nearly 60 years of meeting in the small town of Redwood Falls. On May 2 and 3, hundreds of exhibiting inventors, investors and business leaders crowded into the center’s main hall to peruse the latest ideas and designs from the country’s brightest tinkerers, hardware whizzes and gearheads.
The continent’s “oldest annual invention convention,” according to its website, moved to the Twin Cities to take advantage of the local infrastructure. For Zachary Crockett, co-founder of Minneapolis-based Spark and an Invention Expo keynote speaker, the move was about connecting tech-savvy hardware and software experts, who tend to be younger and urban, with practical-minded tinkerers, engineers and designers who come from a “broader demographic” and often live in rural areas.
The exchanges of ideas, partnerships, and capital that result can be game-changing. Early on, Invention Expo’s participants often focused on clever, useful products that made discrete tasks easier—think late-night infomercials. Today’s attendees leverage cutting-edge technology to create products with far broader applications, from Bondhus Arms’ credit card-sized pistol (perfect for a post-“conceal and carry” world) to the Powerizer toolbox, which features a battery-powered charging station, USB outlet and three adapter connections to help users stay connected outdoors. Crockett’s Spark Core, meanwhile, is a node that connects everyday items and systems to the Internet via WiFi.
“Building hardware used to be hard,” says Crockett, “but the process has been democratized. You don’t need a $1 billion factory to make things anymore.” Open-source software (and, increasingly, hardware), coupled with coworking and other efficiency-enhancing trends, are making it easier for teams of three or four to develop, build, market and profit from innovative products.
Trevor Lambert, a University of St. Thomas grad who founded Lambert & Lambert (an IP and product-licensing firm) and Enhance Product Development (which turns invention ideas into marketable products), sees two value propositions for Innovation Expo participants.
First, the expo’s workshops and presentations educate novice inventors about the various aspects of product licensing and development, from pitch support with the “Pitch the Experts” panel (on which Lambert sat this year) to Crockett’s “Inventing Success” address, which discussed the potentially revolutionary impact of always-online devices.
Invention Expo, and events like it, also provides inventors with access to markets, whether through product-development experts like Lambert or direct contact with potential investors. With so many good ideas floating around, competition requires inventors to network relentlessly—something that many are less than comfortable with.
For Lambert and his team, that creates an opportunity. “We’re paid to know people,” he says.