July 2023
Beginner
168 pages
4h 21m
English
Content preview from What Every Engineer Should Know about Inventing
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14 Refuting the NIH Theory
Selling ideas for product improvement or patents is difficult. A popular way to explain failure in these endeavors is to allude to the not-invented-here (NIH) theory. As usually explained this theory holds that engineers and company executives while seeming to welcome independent inventors do everything they can to thwart the use of inventions made by anyone other than the company’s engineers. An article in Spectrum (47) gave evidence of how firmly this theory is established. The first part of that article states [47, p. 44]:
Once the main source of new U.S. patents, the independent inventor’s output has been dropping. There is some concern that if he is not actually an endangered species, he is an increasingly discouraged ...
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