According to recent research, the left sides of faces are more emotionally expressive (and therefore, it seems, more attractive).

This suggests today’s invention -a software tool which automatically creates an online avatar image by joining the reflected left half of one’s photo to the original left half.

Given that the most beautiful people tend to be the most symmetrical, in theory, two left cheeks should be more attractive than the usual pair -but I’m not really convinced by the neanderthal experiment indicated on the left

Today’s invention is a fork which attaches to standard, squeezable tubes of sauce.

This allows sauce to be pumped down the inside of each tyne and thus applied carefully to a mouthful of food, rather than dolloped everywhere on one’s plate.

It’s common to find that one’s DVD has a commentary on the film made by the cast, Director etc.

Today’s invention is an upgrade of that process for complex movies and on behalf of those of us who sometimes struggle to understand nuances in the plot.

The movie would be shown on a touchscreen, so that a viewer could click on a particular character and have a thought bubble appear.

This would state, without plot spoilers, who the person was, what they were currently doing and why.

This would also allow the Directors of films to indulge in very complex storytelling, without having to dumb-down their vision because they suspected that it would be just too hard to follow.

Today’s invention is inspired by a question in New Scientist (you will probably need a subscription to read this).

It seems that reams of paper don’t burn primarily because the paper is treated with “rutile titanium dioxide, one of the most fire-resistant substances known”.

So imagine fire doors which are made hollow, but with postal slots in their surfaces. This would allow spare paper to be stored, as blocks, conveniently until needed.

It would also allow paper waiting to be shredded to be kept in a secure place, inside firedoors, whilst actually doing something useful.

Today’s invention is a crumb tray for laptops (shown in blue).

All the crud which normally accumulates on such machines (especially the one I use when eating lunch) can fall between the keys.

This allows a tray to catch all this stuff -then to be slid out sideways and emptied, just as in a toaster.

Today’s invention is based on the idea that there is a difference between the accelerative and constant velocity regimes of vehicle movement.

We tend to rely on tyred wheels for both -which entails a compromise between maximising drive and minimising rolling resistance.

Instead, imagine a vehicle with a fat, high-grip drive band (yellow) to be used only during acceleration or deceleration, together with very thin-tyred, slim wheels (blue) to be used only when the vehicle is moving along at top speed on a smooth surface.

These two elements would be swapped in or out depending on the position of the accelerator pedal.

According to my back-of-the-envelope calculation, the flow velocity within an exhaust pipe of a standard sized car is a small fraction of the speed of sound in carbon dioxide.

This allows me to treat the exhaust pipe, for acoustic purposes, as if it were filled with static fluid.

Today’s invention is therefore a suppressor for combustion engine exhaust noise.

Each pulsewave emitted by the opening or closing of the exhaust valve is allowed to pass into the clockwise arm of the looped pipe at 1 o’clock * (using a valve linked to the exhaust valve itself -not shown).

Once the pulse travels around the loop, it is allowed to leave using another linked valve at the 11 o’clock position.

By tuning the length of the loop to be (n+ 1/2)*the exhaust note wavelength, destructive interference can occur between the exhaust and loop waves, greatly reducing the engine noise emitted.

*I had to rethink this whole thing to avoid using the valves and fixed-length loop (thanks Andy, see below). Instead, a toroidal loop would be inserted in the exhaust as shown. A port would allow waves to enter and propagate around the loop. The loop itself would be spun, much faster than the wave speed, so as to position its port against the exhaust pipe. It would do this in such a way that if a compression were moving down the exhaust, the loop would inject a rarifaction and vice versa. In this way, pressure fluctuations could be eliminated within the exhaust, without introducing extra ones by the operation of conventional valves.

Furniture legs tend to dig into floor coverings and create craters.

Today’s invention is a coffee table which helps to avoid damaging the rug or carpet upon which it is placed (and without relying on big ugly discs under the legs of the furniture).

The table would would be constructed in a light wood and have perhaps four thin metal coasters set into the top surface.

When hot cups were placed on these (without saucers) each coaster would act as the hot reservoir of a small Stirling engine, built into the underside of the table.

The engines would drive casters so that the table would reposition itself a little, each time it was used, and thus save the floor covering (albeit at the expense of slighlty cooler tea).

Non-professional drivers frequently motor along with their hand resting on the gear lever.

This is considered poor practice, since in an emergency situation, both hands should really be on the wheel.

Today’s invention is therefore a gear lever knob which senses the presence of a hand on it and if it has rested there for more than a second or two (especially without changing gear) it will buzz and/or emit a beeping tone.

What’s so open about Open Innovation? Big companies realised some time ago that maintaining a sizeable internal ‘Arrandee’ department was painfully expensive and usually not very productive when up against commercial deadlines.

Often, that issue was representative of a failure to understand that R and D are fundamentally different activities (Research is stumbling across new knowledge by repeatedly testing your ideas about how the world works -by watching how the world works. Development is making new products to a defined specification and within a fixed budget and timescale). Get this wrong and all your resources get expended on smart people playing limitless mind games. Even large corporations find it too costly to maintain patent portfolios arising from ideas which might become products ‘one day’.

Instead, they spotted that many of their best new product ideas were being suggested by outsiders, off the payroll. Acme Ltd’s usual policy is to say “send us nothing because we don’t want to be accused later, by some lone inventor, of having copied his idea…ie pretty much the same one we may have already been working on in-house”.

Avid customers however are persistent and, in the case of eg Lego’s robotics kits, they were actually improving the system by hacking its operating system. After 18 months or so of prosecuting their best customers for their temerity, the company realised that those people were a source of expertise and sheer creativity that you usually can’t get by waving a paycheck around.

Listening to customer ideas is the foundation of Open Innovation. Sounds a bit like Open Source, but it’s vastly different. It turns out of course that some companies are more open than others. Many choose to use online aggregators, such as Innocentive.com, to publicise problems they’d like to see dealt with. There aren’t that many people capable of suggesting new sulphurisation reactions for polycyclic aromatic morpho-heterachromes, or whatever…offering prizes online is a way to attract them.

Here’s the deal. You have to sign up to multiple pages of legal bumf before even getting access to the guts of the problem. It’s almost always a very narrowly defined one which is limited by the imagination of an already embarrassed head of Arrandee (see above). Then, you get a chance to write some detailed solution and send it to them. If they choose it as a winner you might get $20k. If they don’t, then you have shared your idea with some folk who have decided not to pay for the privilege. This may well hamper any of your subsequent attempts to obtain legal ‘protection’ for your solution.

P&G have managed to reduce their new product failures from 80% to 50% by this kind of process, so it clearly works -for them. As for the external Inventors, they may get some satisfaction and even recognition but it’s mostly free consulting in return for a small lottery ticket.

If you have a really good cure for a significant commercial headache, why not try talking direct to potential corporate licensees? (after having decided whether to invest in your own patent application). Contact me for some guidance about how to make this kind of approach. pra@break-step.com