Introduction
How things get invented, is often not a straightforward kinda story. Usually, it is an iterative process of steps forwards ... and steps back. Sometimes it is one person imagining tomorrow's world different from today's. More often is it multiple people interacting with each other, that creates new insights that slowly hone a new invention, a new niche, a slightly modified world.
Today I want to share how we invented the iStill Extractor Technology. I won't focus on the benefits. That's for another iStill Blog post. But I do want to focus on the story of how the Extractor came to be. First, before we dive into that story, let's investigate into how things actually are invented!
How inventing works
An invention, any invention basically, has three aspects to it. The first one - the one we all understand intuitively - is the thinking part. One has to imagine something new and that "something new" is supposed to be the invention. It is the part we get intuitively, as we all understand that in order to invent something, we need to imagine that thing. If only inventing was that easy. But there are more steps to it: producing the innovation and then selling it.
There is a second part to inventing and that is successfully selling what one has thought out. The sale - or in fact: multiple sales - establish that what you invented adds value to the world at large. Not just in the sense that you thought it a good idea to invent something, but in the understanding that market acceptance is the true feedback that tells you that how you envisioned that brave new world was actually realistic and better. Valuable, so to say.
For an invention to be successful, it needs to be paid for by customers. That's how value is expressed in our society. That's how we can see if what we invented has any value at all. It is not just the "thought", the "spark", the moment of genius or brilliance ...
Instead, the initial thought is followed by a design process (with may more new thoughts on how that can be done efficiently), the production process (is it feasible, urgent, scalable, affordable ... lots of new "sparks" during that process!), the marketing, and finally the sales.
The statistics on how many of our "thoughts" make it to market introduction? Probably between 10 and 20%. That's on the bigger innovations. Smaller ones, that I like to call improvements, probably have a closer to 40% success rate. If that doesn't tell you that being creative is not a mind game, but a very, very meticulous and hands-on process, that mostly takes place in the real, structural world around us ... what will?
Or do you think this reflects on the iStill Technology Center? That others might be more successful in converting that idea into reality? Well, it doesn't. Overall, in society, inventions that make it from "thought" to "sales" have a 1 to 2% chance of success. So we do it better, way better, than the general rule. Why are we so good at successfully inventing and innovating? Because we have designed our organization to be as innovative as possible. We harbor a culture of learning ourselves, and then teaching others. Mistakes, at iStill, are not considered bad at all ... as long as we learn from them.
The Extractor
The invention of the iStill Extractor Technology is an example of how "mind" and "hands" work together in order to create a potentially industry-changing innovation. Think "open mind" and "fast hands", because one has to see the opportunity in order to act on it. And one needs to act quickly so that testing out the real-life value of that opportunity can be done as quickly as possible. Here it goes:
iStill was already a well-established company, delivering distilleries to craft distillers around the world, but I was still lingering on amateur distilling forums as well, helping out and trying to educate those that wanted to learn more about distillation. One day, I read a post by an amateur distiller that proposed to use glass, laboratory Soxhlets in the distillation process. He got laughed at and he got ridiculed: "How can you even propose something as stupid as that! Glass has no place in a distillery. You cannot use this. Too fragile! Too small" were some or the remarks he got.
I was intrigued by how this little glass Soxhlet worked and invited the amateur distiller