AAWSAP DIRD, Maverick Inventor Versus Corporate Inventor: Where Will the Next Major Innovations Arise, March 2010

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Where does the inventor find funding for such a development? The typical inventor
(Reference 13) will canvas a wider network of friends, his church, a local venture
capitalist or private investor who is not very savvy, or a fund specifically established to
invest in exotic energy startups (Reference 14, 15). After convincing them of the
incredible return on their investment in the technology by "demonstrating" it (without
proper protocols, test equipment, and so forth), manpower, space, and new equipment
are purchased. Usually the last thing on the inventor's mind at this stage is wasting
investors' money on an independent laboratory test such as might be found at a local
university's engineering or physics department or certified testing laboratory to
determine whether there is any validity to the technology.
Around this time, the major investors start to sense there might be something amiss in
their original assessment of the validity of the technology. This might arise from any
number of factors, including continual requests for more funding, continual delays in
demonstrating the new high-power unit, more-informed friends asking probing
technical questions, and so forth. Investors start to withdraw, accepting the fact of their
bad investment, and the inventor eventually recedes into oblivion or skips town to start
up again under a different guise somewhere else. This is typical behavior for the con
artist (Reference 16, 17, 18), whose exploits will not be further analyzed herein.
However, some enterprising individuals parlay their experience into related
conventional businesses (Reference 19), and some investors hang on long past the time
a reasonable person would quit (Reference 20).
Patent protection generally is not sought by the Type 1 inventor. And if a patent is
sought, either it is rejected outright by the patent office or a watered-down version is
obtained that is usually worthless from either the physics or technical point of view or
as part of the intellectual property to eventually be sold to an investor interested in
commercializing the device.
What can be learned from the Type 1 inventor? Given their lack of formal education in
the relevant disciplines, there is a negligible chance that Type 1 inventors will
contribute anything of significance to major innovations in the energy and propulsion
areas. Their undisciplined approach, coupled with th,eir lack of funds and interest in
science by media, virtually guarantees failure.
The Type 2 Inventor
The major-and sometimes only-difference between Type 2 and Type 1 inventors is
that Type 2 inventors tend to be even more confident in their inventions because they
have been able to purchase fancy and costly measuring equipment and have high­
quality machining done. However, because of their general lack of education in the
relevant areas of instrumentation, they can misuse the instruments or misinterpret the
resulting data just as badly as Type 1 inventors (Reference 21). However, Type 2
inventors have the advantage of being able to purchase external expertise in these
areas (Reference 22). The degree to which they rely on and believe the external
expertise-for example, a university laboratory-is dependent on several factors, most
notably the personality of the inventor himself. The more self-assured personality relies
less on outside expertise.
Type 2 inventors generally have more to lose in terms of money, as they typically start
out big and want to go bigger faster. They tend to investigate less speculative areas of
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