I never realized that 20 years in R&D would take a turn into the school curriculum industry, but that’s one of the great things about inventing. When you invent something, usually there are lots of additional uses that come your way when you’re successful. 

We’ve been hard at work for over a year developing a new curriculum to help high school students understand how things are made in this world. After running it by about 45 teachers, principals and superintendents during an in-service in Inventionland, we know we’re on the right track. The curriculum was well received, and getting their help and input to make additional improvements is invaluable.

It turns out that the process of developing a product is really very similar to developing curriculum. First, you do your pre-development work, identify the needs of the marketplace, brainstorm out a solution, then work through a series of concept models until you eventually get the direction that seems best. Then you put forth a great deal of effort to build the finished product, or curriculum in this case, which then gets reviewed and tested prior to product launch.

In today’s curriculum environment, teachers are finding it more and more difficult to capture the imaginations of young people. Our project-based curriculum will enable students to be actively involved in the process of developing new inventions.

By having students go through the sequence of successful products on store shelves, they can see how the development process works and can get an overall picture in their mind that functions as a “how to” map, which builds a belief system in young people. Once you see how a process can be applied to an idea you see it isn’t magic – it isn’t unorthodox guesswork; it is a process you can apply to any invention to get it developed.
 
Currently we’re working with state and local (and soon, federal) representatives on making sure the next generation grasps one of the most basic roots of our economy for the last 200 years – how inventors build the economic model of the U.S. I hope that we’re able to do our part, so that we can continue to lead the world toward the innovation frontier.