“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” These words have long been attributed to the Nineteenth Century American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet that didn’t sound like his usual eloquent self.
It turns out that his actual words were different: “If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”
But the simplified version has become a popular metaphor about innovation -- and many have taken it quite literally! The mousetrap is the most frequently invented device in American history: the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted over 4,400 patents for new designs of mousetraps; it has rejected thousands more.
What if all that creative energy could be directed at solving some other everyday problems? There is no shortage of challenges. Ironically in our age of technology, hundreds of millions of people -- most of them poor, and a majority of women -- are still toiling away in tasks where simple machines or devices could reduce their daily drudgery.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Wanted: More ‘Idiots’ to tackle grassroots innovation challenges
