Nokia is now crowdsourcing creativity. "Invent With Nokia" is a new program wherein anyone can submit an idea, and if it results in a patented Nokia invention, you get a cut. Trust them.
Do you have a brilliant idea that could change the way we communicate? Are you too overwhelmed to apply for a patent yourself? Do you trust people you have never met, at a gigantic corporation? If so, then Nokia's new program, "Invent With Nokia," could be just the thing for you.
Nokia wants your ideas. There are a lot of brains outside of Nokia coming up with ideas all the time, and why shouldn't Nokia get a piece of that action? Diverting flows of these random inventions on the Internet is an idea that's creeping into more and more R&D departments--from education materials publishers like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to Intel and its science fair. Nokia's version is this: You submit an idea to Nokia, and agree not to mention it to anybody else for a period of four months, while Nokia reviews it. If Nokia passes, the idea and all rights revert back to you. But if Nokia is interested--and here's the carrot--Nokia can apply for a patent based on your invention, and "in return, you will be eligible for a financial reward."
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Let's dispatch with the one obvious reason why this program might be a good idea for the lone inventor. Patents can be expensive to acquire and maintain, particularly in multiple markets. It can easily cost over a thousand bucks a year to protect a patent. And the U.S. patent office in particular moves extremely slowly, though it's working on fast-tracking some patents. There is a kind of comfort in feeding your idea into the brain of a big organization like Nokia, which can use its brawn to navigate the tricky waters of protecting and implementing your idea.
But despite this obvious potential perk, there seem to be more reasons to be skeptical than enthusiastic here. The opportunities for a lone inventor to get taken advantage of seem too great. Even parts of Nokia's pitch smack vaguely of an ambulance chasing lawyer telling you there's nothing to worry about as you sign on the dotted line. On its "How to submit" page, it urges you to register, a step whose purpose is just "to complete some simple legal formalities." Nokia then goes on to explain that sometimes you might submit an idea that, well, is just like an idea Nokia already had. "[W]e may already be aware of solutions that deliver the same benefit, either inside or outside Nokia. These alternative solutions may be superior in some way to your invention, so we're sure you'll understand if we don't wish to proceed further if that's the case." There's no reason to necessarily suspect Nokia would ever engage in anything underhanded here. But its language--to judge just from this web page, at least--seems to grant it extraordinary freedom to take ideas, look at them, find them interesting but ultimately "too similar" to something they're already working on, and reject your idea while potentially having benefited from it.
Finally, the move smacks of a vote of no-confidence by Nokia in itself. Of course, two brains are better than one, and 6 billion are better than two. But in a year where every financial headline about Nokia brings bad news, the crowdsourcing gesture smacks more of desperation than innovation.
Nokia had not answered a request for comment by post time--we'll update this story if they do.
[Image: Flickr user freakapotimus]
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