Living off making New Inventions?

[AlexanderHowl]

Jeff Bezos is not an inventor, he is just a businessman and investor who got lucky by because he created an online bookstore before anyone else. I doubt that he is personally responsible for anything that could be protected by a patent. He did nothing that any of the other ten million bozos with a MBA in the USA could not do, he just happened to hit the jackpot and knew enough about business and finance to hire smart people to continue to make him money.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Jeff Bezos is not an inventor, he is just a businessman and investor who got lucky by because he created an online bookstore before anyone else. I doubt that he is personally responsible for anything that could be protected by a patent.

He's listed as the inventor on 83 patents though.
https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Jeffrey+P.+Bezos

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Jeff Bezos is not an inventor, he is just a businessman and investor who got lucky by because he created an online bookstore before anyone else. I doubt that he is personally responsible for anything that could be protected by a patent. He did nothing that any of the other ten million bozos with a MBA in the USA could not do, he just happened to hit the jackpot and knew enough about business and finance to hire smart people to continue to make him money.

He owns dozens of patents, but thanks for misinforming with so much confidence in what you say, I almost believe it XD.

And we were not even assessing who is or not an inventor, but potential business/enterprise/innovation values.

[vicky_molokh]

For the record, I think it's best to start with the simple things and an 'average' kind of writer/composer/etc. Getting an excuse to buy moar Wealth/Independent Income isn't quite what I'm aiming at. And while I do have an idea of a gameable way of handling such delayed-gratification work as a craft of sorts, I'm stumped about reconciling it with inventions.

[ericthered]

Amazon is more of a business than a set of software, but that doesn't mean that its not an invention. Starting up a business feels very much like the situation we are describing: you only spend time and money for the first while, and then you find out if the business succeeded or not. So I'd extend our category to new businesses as well as writers, programmers, artists, and tinkerers.



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I would not describe Bezos as "any of 10 million MBAs" He's a Princeton graduate, which implies at the very least exceptional connections. He's got engineering degrees, which is nice in a businessman. His parents who could lend him 300k when starting up a business he was open about "Having a 70% chance of failure". He is primarily a businessman, but if you look at what made amazon successful, its not computer programming, but business practices. If you look at his patents, they're mostly about business practice and workflows. He's also lucky, (see the 70% quote) but he was already an exceptional individual before amazon.



Now, I've worked at an "Idea Shop" before and that's made me suspicious of the names on patents. There are solid legal reasons you want a company bigwig as a primary patent holder. But Amazon isn't a successful computer program, its a successful business working on a recent sales model.

[AlexanderHowl]

Having your name on a patent does not mean that you actually created anything, it just is a legal fiction that owners of business use to make sure that they maintain personal control over the products or processes created by people that they hired. If I steal the design of a product from you and patent it before you, I am the owner of that idea, not you (unless you have proof that I had a legal contract with you that gave you the right to that design). I imagine that Jeff Bezos just slapped his name on products or processes created by people under contract to him.

For example, most employee contracts with IT companies nowadays state that the IT company owns any software produced by the employee, regardless of whether it was produced on company time or employee time. And IT companies are not actually that bad. I once worked for an electronics company whose employee contract claimed any product made by a former employee up to 3 years after they left the company. It is the legal processes by which the rich get richer by exploiting the power of their money over the rest of us.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Jeff Bezos is not an inventor, he is just a businessman and investor who got lucky by because he created an online bookstore before anyone else.

This fits in with research which shows that, once you have achieved a minimum level of skill in a particular field (e.g., stock trading) financial success is as much a matter of luck as anything else. For example, there were plenty of social media platforms on the web before Facebook cornered the market.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by ericthered

From a GM perspective, the hardest part is how much the finished intellectual product is worth: how many people want it, how much are they willing to pay for it, and how long will they buy it for?

For the character, that means rolls vs. Market Analysis (Is there a market for this product? If there is, what's the best way to maximize our profits?) and Merchant (What's the best way to buy materials, manage inventory & employees, and sell the finished product?)

Beyond that, it all depends on the campaign. If the campaign requires characters to make a pile of money or create a successful business in order to advance the plot and/or keep the players happy, then the GM should allow any reasonably good idea, competently brought to market, to become the hottest thing since the antibiotics or the telephone.

If the character concept requires them to be a "successful inventor," the GM should hand-wave everything based on campaign style and character points available in Independent Income, increased Wealth, and Reputation.

Note that "successful inventors" don't necessarily have to be hard-core gadgeteers (although they tend to be). They can be an ordinary person who had one bright flash of innovation and invented some simple, but incredibly handy device (e.g., the paperclip, the rubber band, the adjustable wrench).

They could be someone who bought (or stole) patents from someone else, or refined someone else's idea, and then successfully marketed a product (e.g., lots of Thomas Edison's "inventions").

Finally, realistically, there are very few truly novel inventions. Most inventors are people who tweak an existing technology to make it cheaper to make, more reliable, or easier to use.

For example, photography had been around for ~50 years as a specialist and rich man's hobby, but George Eastman brought photography to the masses by creating photosensitive celluloid film and establishing the commercial photo-developing industry. Celluloid film was cheap and easy to use, and commercial darkroom and film development facilities eliminated the need for ordinary people to mess with expensive equipment and potentially dangerous chemicals.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Beyond that, it all depends on the campaign. If the campaign requires characters to make a pile of money or create a successful business in order to advance the plot and/or keep the players happy, then the GM should allow any reasonably good idea, competently brought to market, to become the hottest thing since the antibiotics or the telephone.

If the character concept requires them to be a "successful inventor," the GM should hand-wave everything based on campaign style and character points available in Independent Income, increased Wealth, and Reputation.

That sounds like an approach that is directly opposite to how GURPS normally works. One does not ask whether the campaign requires the PC to deal massive damage during this swing of the sword; one rolls the damage based on parameters such as sword quality and PC's ST, compares it to the DR of the armour (that depends on the target's TL and resources) etc.

(Also, I'm trying to start small and try to see how smaller inventions than penicillin or the wheel 'work' for indie developers. Stuff like making a modest but quite useful apps for Android, or writing mystery books and publishing them independently.)

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

That sounds like an approach that is directly opposite to how GURPS normally works. One does not ask whether the campaign requires the PC to deal massive damage during this swing of the sword; one rolls the damage based on parameters such as sword quality and PC's ST, compares it to the DR of the armour (that depends on the target's TL and resources) etc.

(Also, I'm trying to start small and try to see how smaller inventions than penicillin or the wheel 'work' for indie developers. Stuff like making a modest but quite useful apps for Android, or writing mystery books and publishing them independently.)

Average Base Value, RS5 Turnover:

10.000 x 100 = $1.000.000.

Just as an example.

Now an approximation to J.K. Rowling.

Complex Base Value, RS8 Turnover:

1.000.000 x 300 = $300.000.000

Or increase it to RS9 or RS10 for $500.000.000 and $700.000.000 respectively.

Now an approximation to the average appstore developer:

Simple Base Value, RS2 Turnover:

100 x 30 = $3.000

Oh, but maybe even if it was such a simple piece of software it went relatively viral and became a sales success. Then increase it to RS7+1 for $30.000, or even RS10+2 for $150.000