Z. An inventor-driven climate research B-corporation

Invention is king. Benjamin Franklin is on the $100 dollar bill because he helped to invent a new form of government. Thomas Edison is legendary. Behind every visionary Steve Jobs is a Steve Wozniak.

Z1. College courses of study specifically for invention

I'm going to describe a key difference between a human chess player and a 1970s or 1980s-vintage chess-playing program. The old fashioned software program checks every legal move. It even checks walking a castled king back and forth behind his row of pawns, because those are legal moves. The program is thorough but then it has a time limitation where it has trouble looking beyond 3 or 4 moves ahead.

The human, on the other hand, looks immediately for a quick profit, say, a potential knight fork or a pin that ultimately nets a bishop, and in the process the human often ignores 90% of the other possible chess moves. Occasionally the human misses a subtle surprise move. Back in the '80s, typically the human would destroy the software program. Chess enthusiasts later realized that the combination of a thorough program and a chess master could often defeat a higher ranked chess master.

Now I can explain the difference between an inventor and a tenure-track faculty member. An inventor has never been beholden to being thorough, only to finding quick profitability and being right 90% of the time. For example, the fame of Nikola Tesla is that he realized the possibility and fundamental superiority (at the time) of longer-distance AC electric transmission versus DC transmission. Edison was, in the end, fundamentally wrong about DC electricity but he and his lab were right about everything from electric current generation with steam-driven dynamos to long-lasting light bulb filaments. The Wright brothers broke aviation down into three critical sub-issues that they identified and then solved: high engine power versus low weight, lift versus low drag, and adequate steering control.

An idealist (or a curmudgeon) is somebody with a specific developed skill set. Like it or not, teams succeed when they collaborate with people who have skill sets that they don't possess. When I as an inventor skim through information, as opposed to reading 100% of the information, I jump to information that may have immediate profitability. I look for order of magnitude engineering blunders that the authors might have made. When I spot big trouble then perhaps I have equally spotted a big opportunity. That's my job as a curmudgeon. That's what works in my own personal field. I understand how the same tactics would fail technologists disastrously in their own careers.

Engineers should strive to become better inventors. It's nice to be a walking encyclopedia but from today forward that's Wikipedia's job..

Too often the path to eventual success has involved dropping out of college. Our heroes, Ben Franklin, Tom Edison and Steve Wozniak, all had their problems with schools. For what it's worth, I had problems with schools.

To my knowledge, no college anywhere teaches invention. I find "Sigma-6" to be pretty weak. U.S. education has never been that good at training people to focus directly on the engineering R&D problems facing us all. "The public wants what the public gets" - The Clash. Translation for people: "No, you can't have what you want because we never want to listen to the likes of you. Here's what you're stuck with." It looks like once again the paying public has no right to expect to apprentice their children to real inventors.

I write from an inventor's viewpoint, and I want to get to the core of our education problem on a climate-exploding planet. I see most of a team as a collection of non-inventors. In time, I want to see each individual for the added value that each one can bring to the table and for the skill sets that each one already has. Most people would probably never cut it as an inventor. It's just as well if hard-driving all-night pluggers aren't contractually some inventor's students, but somewhere out there are a very few students willing to learn the right stuff..

“If your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see all of your problems as nails.” – Mark Twain. I sense that faculty tend to see all of their problems as students, because teaching students is the central skill that faculty have developed. I've seen a few burned out educators in my lifetime. I think that I'll stay as I am, I’m an inventor.

Z2. A hybrid company/foundation for climate embryo projects

Some climate projects have no real hope of making a profit, polar bears aren't going to pay for something that restores the Arctic Ocean's ice pack, but we need to prototype it anyway so that human civilization doesn't suffer unnecessarily. Other embryo projects probably have a payout down the road and a savvy corporation would swoop in, except we want the product to be inexpensively distributed worldwide. Still other embryo projects have a low chance of paying out a profit. How do we develop them all, and on a budget given a skinflint government that would rather see many or most of its own citizens perish than pay an extra nickel for climate R&D.

I recommend a hybrid foundation and company. Individuals can 100% donate to the foundation, or else they can buy shares in a basket of current embryo projects. If one or more of these embryos ever goes public they get real stock shares. With either type of donation the embryo work goes forward.

Z3. Inventors must actually get paid

Modern inventors, especially climate inventors, almost don't exist because most inventors need rent money now, not fifty years from now. Rarely a person such as Fred Rogers is born into reasonable wealth and is motivated to self-invent and set up his career from the get-go. Fred Rogers set out to be a youth minister. He created and starred in "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" for all of his career.

If we want humanity to survive climate change well, then the concept of stealing an inventor's life's work, profiting greatly and leaving the inventor nothing at all must be shunned as an immoral climate act, similar to a medical abomination before God, similar to wantonly spreading a deadly epidemic among one's whole population, as Philistines and other ancient tribes too often did back in the day. I realize that this paragraph could be self-serving but I feel obligated to speak for the support of future inventors after I have died.

A true R&D corporation wants to identify which people have good ideas. Specifically, we must look for the following invention-related skill sets:

- Idealists, people who often as not successfully say, "Why not try this?" I've been a good idealist on this website.

- Curmudgeons, naysayers, people who often as not successfully say, "I'll tell you why you shouldn't try this!" Successful show-stopping arguments are important to the process, and hearing the successful naysayers very early, before spending all that money and not after, is important. Hearing not-so-good naysayers, unfortunately, isn't particularly important, so we definitely need to identify the solid curmudgeons versus the cheap hacks.

- Idea champions, people who instinctively know a good idea when they hear it. These people equally nudge or steer us away from the stupid ideas. Again, some idea champions are right-on and others are slick blowhards who develop bad track records in time. I'll compare them to high-rated stock-pickers versus various no-good stuffed suits.

If we identify somebody strong in one or more of these skill sets, the rule is, make sure to pay them rent money. Stop paying them only when you're sure that they're not currently contributing to the invention process and probably won't ever contribute again.

Give inventors free access to the lab and to a conference room. For extreme embryo projects, have software and technicians for 3-d hardware modeling. Have foam board for building scale models. Have secretaries for taking copious notes, for preserving and cataloguing all sorts of back-of-envelope sketches and for forcing certain communications among all inventors on a team.

Z4. Non-inventors

I specifically separate an inventor's skill set from an entrepreneur's skill set. The entrepreneur should know about A-Round funding and all of that. Technologists, wonks, pencil-pushers, bean counters, people who can tell us why "This doesn't add up" might be good engineers but they just aren't inventors and shouldn't be treated with the same employee rules as inventors.

Z5. Inventors' intake procedures

Inventors are secretive because of zero corporate sharing of money. We can't have that garbage here! If you as an inventor invent something hot, your name gets attached to a share of the estimated profits and you get paid fairly quickly.

We need a thorough intake procedure with an interviewer and a secretary. All of the potential inventor's inventions and thoughts go down on paper. If she/he/they invented something first, then they bring it to the company and by the intake rules they get paid. Sometimes they invented something concurrently and independently.

Z6. Inventor and employee payment procedures

Boardroom integrity wins here. We need a good adjudication committee.

We must partially reward a good idea made on a bad final product. It's often not a particular inventor's fault that a competitor came up with a better idea, or that the government was too dumb or too cozened to invest in a mission-critical climate product.

Payments are made to an inventor for the following reasons:

- Based on her/his/their past body of work, the inventor is known to be a hot commodity, capable of helping the company in the future.

- The inventor just recently suggested something hot, and the company wants to encourage her/him/them and all of the other inventors too.

- The final product was a great success down the road, and the inventor gets a residual share of those profits for her/his/their retirement.

Retirement share payments can be cut off if the inventor has done something that the adjudication committee considers unethical, such as jumping to a competitor without authorization and taking lots of the company's secrets with her/him/them.

Z7. Multiple types of street cred as a new form of non-government currency

Many different varieties of street cred exist. You can have a street cred reputation for being a good arbitrator. You can have a street cred reputation for honestly handling money. You can have a street cred reputation for being a good artist. Or, you might have a negative street cred reputation for getting into too many draining arguments so people will stay away if they can.

Successful idea champions, dreamers, big problem finders, technologists and coordinators should earn some street cred within the company.

Cred delivers retirement funds way down the line. Cred delivers voting power too, voting for projects in small groups, voting for the board of directors. Certain types of cred deliver relatively quick pay, so that good inventors get paid right now.

Voting for someone's cred must be designed to be immune to single blackballing efforts. For this reason, each employee's lifetime voting record is open to the arbitration committees. Extra committee members should be called in whenever an apparent blackballing effort or a wild disagreement in street cred ratings has been flagged.

In an innovative field, turncoats can lose all of their internal cred. People can bear great financial responsibility for major corporate infighting or for the spilling of major competitive secrets, as they can lose their retirement. This is different than people merely moving on to another firm. We must only be harsh on the rare super-sellouts. In this world we have little or no U.S. law to fall back on for such invention sellouts.

Z8. Non-salary company cred compensations

We live in a world of gambling addictions and alcoholism, Wally Bachman-type employees and crushing lifetime student debts. Some people may prefer not to be paid in cash.

Internal payments such as free rent and meals may become void in the outside world if an outside court attaches those benefits for an unpaid debt.

Having a street cred economy promotes an internal company economy, with bulk purchases. In-house employment of partially disabled B-corporation members or of parents on partial maternity leave becomes more possible.

“What do you do for your living? / Are you forgiving, giving shelter? /Follow your heart, love will find you / Truth will unbind you, sing out a song of the soul /” – Chris Williamson

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead

Z9. Business values

Friends prefer forthstraight honesty. The word “enterprise” is a Quaker term, meaning that a Quaker merchant would enter a fixed price at a market and not haggle. Friends could still keep trade secrets.

A company should serve its community of people: the investors, the workers, the contractors, the customers, the town and the planet.

In a community, all sorts of people should have the right to work. We should not want to discriminate against 60-year-old people who are major health insurance risks. Sometimes we should hire people out of discriminated categories, simply because we’re part of the whole greater community and these people need a break. We don’t ask for perfect people. “I may be clueless and I’m clumsy / But I’ve got friends that love me/” – “Who I Am”, by Jessica Andrews.

No burnout jobs. In the long run, burnout isn’t fair to the employees, and so it isn't fair to us as a group either. Also, tolerating gross health and safety violations isn’t a fair deal for the employees.

In this world, a company needs to show a profit or at least needs to not lose much money. Sometimes a company’s non-monetary benefits can outweigh its lack of profitability.

Early Friends such as Rhode Island’s Moses Brown and Samuel Slater started the American industrial revolution because their area/state needed jobs.

Later Friends discovered that money corrupts. Friends drove their workers (and their slaves before slavery was abolished in the Society) as hard as anybody else. When the children of successful Friends inherited money they too often forgot all about their parents' beliefs.

Z10. Embryo finances

Have 5 or 10 foundational “investors”, often the idea champions, in the company. These people determine what each embryo R&D project's stock valuation is at any particular time. Each person is investing the foundation's money in the stock. 0.1% of this money (on a sliding scale for big money) is that person's own money. We want enough money to keep each investor interested in the stock's movement but not enough to really hurt. There's a constant drip of money inputted into the investing system to keep these investors financially interested even when they are forced to look at a string of rather bad projects.

Given some terrible results or terrible internal news (or great news) any investor is allowed to sell out (or buy) shares. However, in order to have a fair market the investor must publish her/his reasons for the sale, say, a personal opinion that the new prototype is clearly going to flop. Everybody else gets up to a week to react to this reason for selling out. In this way, another investor of a different mind can buy low or sell high in response. A very late settlement date gives everybody time to make various offers to buy or to sell.

All embryo projects must list guidance for what their next R&D projects are going to be, for example: Build prototype two, 2 months, $2,000 cash outlay, sweat equity 200 hours (all company employees get a draw for their rent money), estimated odds of success 90%, estimated future company stock value if successful, estimated future company stock value if not successful. These inventor estimates can be challenged by more savvy investors. With real companies, their own company guidance is modified by investment firms to give expected consensus earnings per share. For many brand new embryo projects, the foundation does all of the initial financials and the inventor just knows the stock process and invents. It's an education for the inventor.

If a company's stock value minus current debt is too low, then it simply can't borrow any more money from the “bank”, which is also the company or the foundation. Sorry, either come up with a solution or hope to start a new project. R&D projects can potentially go moribund/bankrupt within a week, which really saves the foundation's early money.

It's good for the foundation to have their investors circulating with inventors perhaps daily, listening to them. Inventors need somebody to bounce ideas off of.

The foundation also manages its investors. New investors don't get that much total money to invest. Poor investors get fired or their employee duties get transferred. As always there's a full circle process of new “investors” coming in, successful investors getting more clout and more earnings, and bad investors getting retired or getting less clout. Wall Street manages money managers all the time.

The foundation needs founders, people who aren't inventors, to take a promising R&D avenue and run with it.

Z11. Organizing this foundation

We face an Arctic meltdown and chronic worldwide agricultural failures for humanity. Zero is getting done and at glacial speed. I'm a normal adult with a working mind, not a little child crying in fear, and so I call for engineers to organize a first planning meeting. What steps, besides letting people starve to death, are we going to take to inhibit the expected meltdown and then the big hunger?

Where's the meeting? When? How many people could you find? Are you going to tell me about it?

I call for the establishment of a practical research and development foundation, for the purposes of developing the solar and climate products that the fossil fuel industry really doesn't want anyone to develop.

The fossil fuel industry has been putting an average of $900 million per year into lobbying money, and some of this has been putting a thumb on every academic institution to not do critical climate R&D. We must get the work done, somewhere, somehow, by some funding mechanism, because we want to inhibit a mass extinction.

King Solomon asked for wisdom. Let us ask for wisdom so that humanity and the planet will survive climate change as best our descendants can. We will want our decisions to have integrity.

Can you do some of the leg work for organizing such a research foundation? Can you fight against humanity’s unfortunate inertia?

Z12. Invention and development criteria

1. Does the project or invention save human lives or species?

We face a human catastrophe. Actions taken soon are going to be more effective than actions taken later.

2. What are the odds for an experimental project's success?

In a marketplace economy, a project with a 20% chance of working is a wild gamble, barely worth chasing. In a world survival situation, five projects with a 20% chance of working will be roughly equivalent to one project with a 100% chance of working. Moreover, if five projects are all competing with each other in one market and all five projects have a chance, perhaps we want to develop and ramp up all five projects until we can see that each particular project has almost zero chance of any success. If you can run five horses in a high-stakes horse race, by all means enter all five and hopefully one of the five will win the prize.

For the time being a vast number of practical climate engineering projects are worthy of assessment, are worthy of sketching out, are worthy of seeking out concstrucive criticism, are worthy of the testing of critical subsystems and critical question mark issues. We don't yet know which ideas are going to fail because humans are so ingenious.

3. Does the project save the diversity of life on our planet?

We can, sometimes, take a Noah's Ark approach and allow one species or one million species to go extinct in the wild as long as we have them in zoos and can bring them back later. However, sometimes in the past we haven't been able to bring a particular species back from captivity. We aren't even aware of many species' existence in remote jungles and in the deep ocean. For these reasons, there's a value in preserving intact ecosystems.

I've heard that other species have an inherent right to exist, and I've also heard a slightly different argument that we owe these species to our future generations. I don't have to choose between these two arguments. We just need to invent.

4. Assuming that the planet's future is kept on a budget, which projects should get the scarce resources?

I make the assumption that, for example, our desperate need to inhibit the Arctic meltdown won't be set up to pay its own freight in a free-market economy. If the world's nations don't want most of their citizens to starve or to suffer homelessness, they may need to redirect some of their war budget to the protection of citizens' lives and property from the climate crisis.

For the most part the critical parts of all of my technology are based on already working technologies. I have added a number of improvements that for the most part look like pretty low-grade engineering problems.

When many separate innovations each improve an invention by 10% or by 20%, one or two of the innovations can be left behind on implementation but the system will still be quite profitable. The concept of a massive wave of innovations, each innovation backstopping the other innovations, insures that investors will make money in the end.

We’re always interested in quickly shutting off the project funding whenever a particular project is moribund. It would help if we had a plan to quickly transfer all personnel over to another project so that the personnel can pay their rents.

For further reading: Unicorns and Platypuses: The Myths and Hidden Lessons Big Tech Holds for Non-Profits. https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/unicorns-platypuses-myths-hidden-lessons-big-tech-holds-non-profits/