Wade Armstrong

American Inventor: Finale Recap

Posted Saturday May 20, 2006 in Entrepreneurship

I’m glad I referred to the last episode of American Inventor as “the final climactic episode,” because the true season finale was a gigantic let-down, five minutes of television squeezed into a bare hour. We learned who was voted winner; we saw retrospectives on every contestant; there were a few special guests; that was it.

Janusz Liberkowski’s Anecia Survival Capsule won, which was not a tremendous surprise — I’d have been shocked if The Catch or the D-Tract bike won — but, as I’ve said before, I don’t think this invention should advance. It’s not that the Anecia is a bad idea, it’s simply that I haven’t heard any medical doctor state that the capsule is safer than a conventional car seat. Creating a spherical enclosure that can convert forward momentum into angular momentum by rotating a child about the inner surface of that sphere is a very clever idea, but I’m unconvinced that it’s really better for the child. Is being spun like a top ok for a baby’s brain? If the baby has enough momentum to rotate up the side of the capsule, but not go over the top, then physics dictates that the baby will slide down the side of the capsule their seat has climbed, go back up the opposite side of the capsule and slide down again, repeating the process several times until the momentum is dissipated. Will going back and forth be safe? Or will the baby’s brain bounce back and forth off the front and back of his or her head, as the baby goes up and down the sides of the capsule, and then we end up with babies surviving crashes but suffering what is essentially shaken baby syndrome? Of course there’s a big shock in a typical accident, but that’s one application of momentum and then the brain hits the front of the skull and usually bounces off and hits the back — just once. With Anecia, we’re talking about many, smaller impacts. Is that really safe? The only way to know is to ask a doctor, which would be part of any good feasibility analysis. I really hate to see $1 million go to a product that may have no commercial use. On the other hand, the Anecia really needs that $1 million to complete development and, if the idea is sound, the product could change the world.

Most of the other finalists did well. Fourth-place finisher Francisco Patino of the D-Tract got a product development internship with Trek bikes. Second-place finisher Ed Hall of the Word Ace had Hasbro’s VP of R&D come out and say they’d try to get Ed’s game into the market. Somehow, Eric Thompson, with The Catch, only got to meet Jerry Rice, but maybe Jerry will put his name on the product and spend a few hours on Guthy-Renker or film a late-night cable TV ad.

And that’s about it. There were a lot of weak parts of this show, including:

• Hometown cheering sections for each contestant, even though many contestants hadn’t prominently mentioned their hometowns and we hadn’t seen the hometown support before.
• The paring of each contestant with their “mentor,” a judge who had taken special interest in them, even though the show’s failure to illustrate the development process had really deprived us of any chance to see the relationship between contestant and “mentor” or the “mentor’s” contribution to the final product.
• Long, silly, empty pauses between the Matt Gallant’s announcement that it was time to eliminate a contestant and the announcement of which contestant would be eliminated.
• Matt Gallant, in general. Send him back to The Planet’s Funniest Animals; he flubbed his lines and was not a powerful presence on the stage.

In addition, I’m not sure about the sudden introduction of fan voting. I’m for having the general public weigh in on a show like this, but, given that we hadn’t voted earlier, it was a bit out of place. When previous contestants were eliminated, they’d gotten feedback on how they were weak. This episodes, the losers were picked as if by magic. Kind of weird.

So, in the end, what can we make of American Inventor? There were good parts and bad. America really is a country of inventors — who hasn’t had a dozen friends with ideas, crazy or brilliant, for new products — and this show was an ideal chance to teach all of these incipient inventors how to actually make something of their ideas. Said opportunity was not taken; we got a weekly line-up, and we learned a bit about some people, but we never learned how they thought, how they came up with new ideas, or how they fought to get their ideas where they had gotten them in the world. We never saw how the design studios worked to commercialize products or learned how one might find a design studio on one’s own. The only kind of market entry discussed was the ultra-expensive form that involves a 30-second TV ad. Worst of all, with four successful judges, none ever really had the chance to teach us how to do what they do well.

At the same time, the story of any inventor has to be about an individual as well, and we got to know some individuals moderately well here. This episode promised a return next year; hopefully then we can get to know competitors at least as well as we do on The Apprentice and see challenges that are as revealing as we do on The Amazing Race. The end product should give us both a single person about whom we care and some real take-aways about how we can be better inventors ourselves. Until then, I’ll try to fill in with some business analysis myself. See you next season!