Great minds - inventors

Entrepreneur, Jan, 1996 by Janean Chun

Funny how drastic changes often sprout from a single thought. For Anthony Korba, the distance between his past and his future equaled the distance from Orange County, California, up the coast to San Jose. One day in 1991, Korba was flying his small plane to visit his son in college. By the time he landed, he had an idea that would consume the next four years of his life.

"I put the plane on autopilot and just sat back and watched the [navigational] stations come up every 30 or 40 miles," says Korba. "After the third or fourth one, I, having a love of golf, started thinking, this could be the third hole, the fourth hole, the fifth hole. And I wondered, if you could measure the distance [between navigational aids] from an airplane, why couldn't you measure the distance on a golf course?"

While most people ponder such ideas for just a moment before discarding them, as soon as he landed Korba grabbed a napkin and scribbled design plans for his hand-held electronic distance- measuring device for golfers.

The mind of an inventor ticks slightly differently from that of your typical human being. While most people go through life barely aware of the events whirling around them, inventors note the potential in every situation. Inventors don't look at the way things are; rather, they ponder the way things should be. Practicing what is arguably the purest form of entrepreneurship, they are a breed unto themselves.

So what separates the Bill Gateses from the Joe Schmoes? Obviously, being a successful innovator as opposed to an eternal dreamer takes more than just an excellent idea. "A lot of people have good ideas and may even get a patent, but that won't get them to the profit level," says Barry Rein, a partner at Pennie & Edmonds, an intellectual property law firm in New York City. "Inventors have to be willing to go down the difficult and rocky road to the marketplace."

"A lot of inventors sit on ideas for years, only to discover that someone else brought them to the market first," says Laura Flax, an inventor and invention consultant in Canoga Park, California. "These people think 'I could have been rich,' but that's not true."

Flax believes the downfall of some inventors is their "arrogance about their first invention. They think their idea is good enough in itself and that if they make a working prototype, they've done most of the work. But that's actually 10 to 20 percent of the work. I might come up with 100 ideas, flesh out 10, get one to the prototype stage, and then try to get it to market. And it's getting to market that's really the hard part."

Try, Try Again

The reality of life as an inventor has less to do with the light bulb flicking on than with plain old perseverance. According to Korba, instant success is rare. "I have enough of an entrepreneurial background to know if an idea is good or bad," he says. "But you still have to go through all the stages: research and development, marketing, production, sales. It requires a lot of 15- to 20-hour workdays. You can fail at any one of those steps and take yourself out of the marketplace."

Larry Hayslett and Ed Hirzel are fully aware of the specter of failure-an awareness top inventors use to propel rather than paralyze them. Sometimes that fear of failure is so strong, inventors can't shake it until they see their products on the shelves.

After investing several years and more than half a million dollars in Priority Start, a device that protects car batteries from dying, that day of relief isn't quite here for Hayslett and Hirzel's Granada Hills, California-based company, Baton Labs Inc. "We have families, children, house payments, car payments," says Hayslett. "We've got emotional and physical stress. All we have [to go on] is faith in the product."

Financing has been the major obstacle. "It's difficult for any start-up company to find investors," Hayslett says. "You can't depend on other people and large companies. We've learned to do things ourselves."

Yet the partners haven't given up their quest for an investor and are willing to forfeit some control if that's what it takes. "We're trying to persevere and to not be too possessive," Hayslett says. "We don't want to have a death grip-we're too close to having a successful product."

Likewise, even though Korba made all the right moves-taking on three partners; starting DME/Golf Inc. in Costa Mesa, California; and collaborating with top research companies and NASA-he kept hitting that proverbial brick wall. "These were all capable, sophisticated companies with 90 to 95 percent project success rates," says Korba. "But we were trying to miniaturize an aviation tool that was the size of three or four garages. The technology barriers were immense. We spent a tremendous amount of time and a ridiculous amount of money and came up completely dry." By the end of 1992, Korba says, "we were ready to give up."

For the first time facing the prospect that their product might be dead in the water, the partners decided to take a breather for 30 days. Still, Korba remained committed to the idea, and, finally, his big break came. "By chance, a friend who knew of my project informed me of an inventor whose work in this area was being declassified [by the government]," Korba says.