Inventology

Have you ever looked at a simple object—like a Post-it note, a toothbrush, or a sippy cup—and wondered, why did it take so long for someone to think of that? In Inventology, Pagan Kennedy explores this question and argues that invention isn’t just for elite geniuses locked away in high-tech labs—it’s something all of us can do. She contends that invention follows patterns we can understand, learn, and repeat. More profoundly, she shows that the process of invention—our ability to imagine futures, solve problems, and connect ideas—is more democratic, emotional, and social than most people realize.

Kennedy, the creator of the New York Times “Who Made That?” column, interviewed more than a hundred inventors and combed through research in psychology, economics, engineering, and design. Her exploration boils invention down to five major paths: problem finding, discovery, prophecy, connecting, and empowerment. Each stage reveals not only how things are made but how imagination itself works.

The Democratization of Invention

Throughout the book, Kennedy dismantles the myth of the lone genius to reveal that everyday people—teachers, kids, parents, and patients—often make significant contributions to innovation. She highlights the work of Eric von Hippel at MIT, who coined the term “Lead Users.” These are people who experience problems before the general population does and, through necessity, create their own solutions. A striking example is pilot Robert Plath, who invented the modern rolling suitcase because he was tired of lugging heavy bags through airports. His creation didn’t come from an R&D lab; it came from lived frustration.

Von Hippel’s research shows that 80 percent of scientific equipment originated this way—developed by users, not companies. These insights shift our understanding of innovation: rather than being produced only by corporations, much of it bubbles up from user communities and amateurs tinkering in garages. The sippy cup, the 3D-printed prosthetic hand, and even Twitter’s retweet function all began as grassroots responses to real, lived problems.

From Eureka Moments to Processes

Kennedy challenges the romantic “Aha!” myth of invention. Drawing from historical cases—the myth of August Kekulé’s dream of the benzene ring or Elon Musk’s deliberate visualization process—she argues that true inventors work through cycles of observation, trial, and iteration. Jake Stap’s tennis ball hopper—a wire basket that collects balls without bending—didn’t appear out of nowhere; it emerged through hundreds of small mental experiments Stap played in his imagination while driving. Kennedy shows that creativity isn’t lightning—it’s a muscle trained through play, curiosity, and empathy.

She links this idea to research by psychologists such as Graham Wallas and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, suggesting that creativity depends less on divine inspiration and more on deliberate attention to frustration and failure. This understanding allows readers to see their own setbacks as part of a universal process of creative incubation.

Five Pathways to Creative Breakthrough

Kennedy structures Inventology around five key processes:

• Problem Finding: Discover needs no one has spotted yet—like Amy Smith’s ingenious incubator for rural clinics.
• Discovery: Remain open to serendipity—like the chemist who licked his hand and discovered artificial sweetener.
• Prophecy: Use imagination to pre-experience the future, as Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart did when they envisioned personal computing decades early.
• Connecting: Cross disciplines to combine existing ideas in new ways, as John Harrison did marrying carpentry with navigation.
• Empowerment: Democratize the invention process by training others, from hackerspaces to kids learning to code and 3D print.

Each path is anchored by vivid stories: a carpenter who builds a better hand, a Soviet visionary who invents TRIZ in prison, or a hospital doctor who reimagines catheters after reading an article about “thinking teeth.” Together, they map a universal blueprint for imaginative courage.

The Stakes of Human Creativity

Ultimately, Kennedy argues that invention is a survival instinct, not a luxury. From early humans shaping tools to modern engineers predicting climate-tech solutions, creative thinking determines our collective survival. She shows how decentralizing invention—through crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and data sharing—can transform the world’s biggest challenges in health, energy, and education. Instead of waiting for the next Edison, she invites each of us to become part of a global “invention ecosystem.”

“We are the species that invents,” Kennedy reminds us. “Our imagination is our greatest survival tool.”

This sets the stage for her book’s deeper argument: invention isn’t just what creates gadgets; it is what sustains civilization. Through stories that range from NASA engineers to Soviet prisoners, Inventology celebrates the mind as both the laboratory and the machine of progress.

Kennedy begins her exploration of invention where all creativity starts—not with genius, but with frustration. She calls this stage problem finding, the moment when a person notices what others overlook and decides to fix it. The difference between noticing and ignoring, she explains, is what separates inventors from everyone else.

From Tennis Courts to Airplanes

Take Jake Stap, a tennis coach who invented the “ball hopper.” After years of stooping to pick up tennis balls, Stap realized he could design a wire basket that let balls slip in but not out—solving a problem a century old. His invention’s beauty lies in its simplicity, yet Kennedy stresses that obvious ideas often hide in plain sight until someone has lived the problem deeply enough. (Compare this with Adam Smith’s insight in The Wealth of Nations: repetitive labor breeds micro-innovation.)

The same pattern appeared in Robert Plath’s creation of the rolling suitcase. As a pilot exhausted by lugging heavy luggage, Plath reimagined the suitcase’s orientation and handle so travelers could wheel rather than carry. Contrasting Plath’s practical tinkering with an executive’s failed earlier attempt, Kennedy points out that invention often follows empathy and hands-on familiarity—not abstract brainstorming.

Lead Users and the Power of Repetition

MIT’s Eric von Hippel identifies such people as “Lead Users.” These are individuals whose work or passion forces them to face challenges the general public will face in the future. Dorsey, for example, was obsessed with dispatch systems long before mobile texting existed. His curiosity birthed Twitter after he imagined a way to broadcast his location. Users later refined his idea by inventing hashtags and @ replies—proof that whole communities can co-create innovation through shared problems.

Interpreting Frustration as Data

Problems are everywhere, Kennedy insists; the real challenge is recognizing them as opportunities. Pain, boredom, and inefficiency are the invisible metrics of future breakthroughs. By studying our repetitive annoyances—be it typing errors, medical devices, or heavy bags—you’re essentially forecasting unmet needs. The inventors who channel these micro-frustrations into design thinking expand the world’s toolset one insight at a time.

“The most valuable kind of frustration,” Kennedy writes, “tells us not just what’s broken, but what’s about to matter.”

Problem finding reminds you to look at your daily irritations through a creative lens. Whether it’s designing a better cup or rethinking systems like Twitter, the process starts when you decide not to tolerate the obvious but to reimagine it.

What happens when you stumble into a discovery you weren’t looking for? Kennedy calls this the “super-encounterer” mode of invention—moments where curiosity and luck collide. As history shows, many breakthroughs happen not because someone was searching, but because they were alert when chance presented itself.

The Scientist in the Bathroom

Lonnie Johnson, a NASA engineer, discovered the Super Soaker while testing a heat pump in his bathroom. Water shot out of a nozzle and splattered magnificently—it was fun, startling, and completely unintended. Johnson saw play where others might have seen mess. This ability to pause, observe, and recognize novelty defines the super-encounterer: the person who notices potential in an accident.

When Luck Meets Preparedness

Duane Pearsall’s discovery of the modern smoke detector began with a cigarette. A friend’s smoke triggered his anti-static device, leading him to realize it could detect dangerous air particles. Kennedy connects this to chemists like James Schlatter, who tasted aspartame by accident. These anecdotes challenge the rational model of science: while systematic research matters, many of the century’s biggest leaps—from Teflon to penicillin—required imagination to recognize significance in disorder.

Philosophers like Sunny Auyang and psychologists such as Richard Wiseman (in The Luck Factor) echo Kennedy’s view that luck favors openness. The prepared mind, they argue, perceives opportunities that rigid thinkers miss.

Tinkering as Method

Kennedy celebrates tinkerers from MIT’s Doc Edgerton—pioneer of strobe photography—to modern hackerspaces like Artisan’s Asylum. Tinkering thrives on risk and failure: playing with prototypes, garbage parts, or even microwaving a Sharpie, as inventor Steve Hollinger did. Creativity grows messy roots, she argues, and serendipity rewards those who engage playfully with uncertainty.

Invention, Kennedy observes, “isn’t magic. It’s what happens when curiosity outpaces caution.”

For you, this means cultivating curiosity as a daily reflex. Try, fail, observe, and pay attention to small surprises—they might just lead you to the next Super Soaker or sweetener that changes industries.

Kennedy argues that invention demands not only solving today’s problems but envisioning technologies that the future will demand. This prophetic mindset—the ability to mentally prototype decades ahead—links science fiction writers and engineers more closely than we think.

The Memex to the Mouse

In 1945, MIT’s Vannevar Bush described the Memex: a desk-like computer where users could retrieve, link, and annotate documents with keyboards and levers—decades before the internet existed. His essay inspired Doug Engelbart, who later built one of the first personal computers equipped with a mouse and hypertext system. Engelbart’s famous “Mother of All Demos” in 1968 was a live prophecy come true. Yet, at the time, most people dismissed him as eccentric.

Alan Kay, another visionary at Xerox PARC, learned from Engelbart and coined “The Wayne Gretzky Game”: skate to where the puck is going, not where it is. He and his peers imagined laptop computing long before it was technically feasible, guided by Moore’s Law—the prediction that computing power would double every eighteen months. Such foresight built the foundations for the modern digital world.

Storytelling as Technology

Kennedy connects engineering imagination with fictional world-building. From Star Trek’s tricorder inspiring medical scanners to Jules Verne’s submarines predicting modern exploration, storytelling feeds invention. Soviet inventor Genrich Altshuller formalized this idea in TRIZ, a “theory of inventive problem solving” derived from studying over 40,000 patents. After years in prison camps, he reframed imagination as resistance: creativity as survival.

Minds as R&D Labs

Perhaps the most radical insight comes from Myron Stolaroff, who believed LSD could enhance engineers’ problem-solving abilities—an experiment blending science, psychology, and metaphysics. His “mind lab” movement, though controversial, raised enduring questions: how can we expand mental capacity for visualization? Kennedy links these experiments to modern cognitive science showing that imagination, like any muscle, can be trained through mental simulation, meditation, and storytelling.

“You must learn,” Kennedy writes, “to time-travel in your mind—to live in the futures you want to create.”

Prophecy isn’t about fortune-telling; it’s disciplined empathy with tomorrow. When you visualize how people in the future will live, need, and feel, you begin to design the tools they will require.

In Kennedy’s framework, invention thrives when people connect ideas across disciplines—bridging silos to form creative hybrids. This chapter explores how breakthroughs occur when carpenters meet astronomers, or doctors collaborate with data scientists.

From Clocks to Longitude

John Harrison, an 18th-century clockmaker, solved one of navigation’s greatest mysteries—how to measure longitude—by fusing carpentry precision with astronomical knowledge. His marine chronometer emerged not from expertise in any one field, but from his willingness to move between them. Kennedy calls such innovators Go-Betweens: connectors who translate insights between domains.

The Marketplace of Solvers

Harvard professor Karim Lakhani demonstrated how digital platforms like InnoCentive recreate that phenomenon on a global scale. Challenges posted online—ranging from protein modeling to cookie recipes—are often solved by outsiders. The “marginal” participants, Lakhani found, outperform insiders 23% of the time. A marine biologist solved a food-coloring problem; a woman chemist from India invented a diabetic cookie. Outsiders see possibilities insiders overlook because they carry fewer cognitive biases.

This data echoes Pixar’s “braintrust” practice and Nobel laureate François Jacob’s idea that evolution itself is a tinkerer—it recombines old parts for new functions.

Blending Perspectives, Not Professions

Kennedy reminds you that innovation isn’t about abandoning your expertise but reframing it through foreign eyes. Oceanographer Adam Rivers solved a beverage company’s product flaw by recalling how iron oxidizes in seawater; Tom Laughlin, a former engineer, built a spray-tan booth modeled after auto-paint sprayers. Creativity, Kennedy notes, “lives in the bridges, not the islands.”

To innovate, you must be bilingual—fluent in more than one world of ideas.

If you cross-pollinate like a Go-Between, you can borrow wisdom from one field to transform another. In an interconnected world, that willingness to collaborate across boundaries may be invention’s most powerful catalyst.

Kennedy’s final section is both inspiring and political: true inventology, she insists, means empowering everyone—not just corporations or elites—to participate in shaping the world. Innovation succeeds when barriers to creation, education, and expression fall away.

Zones of Permission

From Edison’s Menlo Park to Bell Labs’ glass fortress in New Jersey, history’s great inventions often came from physical spaces designed for experimentation. Today’s hackerspaces and open labs are their successors—but without the walls. Kennedy traces how closed systems like AT&T’s labs bred both brilliance and blindness; they made transistors while suppressing technologies that might undercut profits. Modern “zones of permission,” such as open-source communities and crowdfunding platforms, decentralize that power, letting anyone test new ideas.

Inventors as Activists

For Kennedy, invention itself is civic engagement. Physician-innovators like Dr. Yogen Saunthararajah designed smart biosensors to prevent deadly hospital infections after observing unnecessary patient deaths firsthand. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed similarly reframed auto design as a moral responsibility, proving invention can challenge injustice as much as market failure.

Education and the Next Wave

She concludes with the educational revolution fueled by makers like Neil Gershenfeld and Saul Griffith at MIT. Their Fab Labs and Howtoons comics empower children to tinker, build, and imagine without permission. Teaching creativity, Kennedy argues, isn’t about philosophy—it’s about giving kids access to equipment, mentors, and courage to fail. When five thousand schools teach 3D printing and coding, we move from consuming tools to crafting them.

“If we can shrink factories to fit classrooms,” Kennedy writes, “we can turn the world into one vast R&D lab.”

For you, this idea calls for participation. Whether by contributing to open-source projects, supporting makerspaces, or simply teaching the next generation to question how things work, every act of creative empowerment pushes civilization forward.