It’s a gearhead’s dream, the slot-car track, truck-spring bar stools, engine-block table – all of it. “It’s all auto,”
George Davison says, “because that’s what makes them tick.”
The motor speedway is only one section his
Inventionland, the O’Hara RIDC Park hideaway for budding creatives. Well, why not? According to Davison, it’s the warm childhood memories and fantasies that fuel people’s creativity. And that’s exactly what he’s selling: creativity. By the carload.
Since Davison’s creatives produce some 240 market-ready products every year – one roughly every 10 days -- who’s to say that this kind of environment is not the wave of the future?
The motor speedway, pirate ship, little old lady’s shoe, they’re all part of the 80,000 square feet of Disneyesque streams and waterfalls and tree
houses where the Inventionland elves come up with such new product ideas as the Paintball Goggleflauge to the Perfect Pizza Pan to the Hover Creeper (a compressed air glider for under-automotive work), all ready to be licensed, manufactured, and sold through the Lowe’s, Wal-Marts, and Home Depots of Consumer Nation.
Oakmont native, scion of entrepreneuring families
Davison and McCreery, he took an Allegheny College degree, worked on a product, and failed. Then he realized that inventing isn’t just about inventing; it’s also about enabling. “What do you do to keep people creative?” he asked. “Don’t be afraid to dream.”
Or to make a profit. Davison is quick to say that “the business side is daunting. How do you limit risks? Because it takes a lot of experiments, and failures, to learn what won’t succeed.”
For instance, a can cap to save soda and retain fizz represents three months of beverage blowing all over the lab and a literal bagful of burn-outs. “You have to get up again and again and again,” Davison
says. “Then, if the stars all line up, it works.”
Fine, but what about marketing? With 300 people on the payroll, there are the dreamers, but also accountants and account executives, model makers and shipping clerks, and so on. With each new product costing roughly $10,000, as Davison puts it, “we did not invent product development. We invented the process of making it economical.”
That process includes a painstaking march through product and patent research, manufacturing and market clarity. They brainstorm and draw. Model in 3-D and make prototypes. Parse packaging and create ad campaigns. “Lots of people make pretty drawings of things that can’t or won’t be built, or won’t sell,” Davison says. “We build the sales sample as it will look on the shelf. We close the gap between the idea and the buyer.
“We don’t pitch ideas,” he adds. “We pitch products.”
Regularly selling in North America, Europe, and Australia, Davison has recently opened an office in Shanghai.
Predictably, the hires come from Carnegie Mellon, but also from Disney and Pixar. “We can pretty much hire at will,” Davison says.
“This region is rich with people with wonderful imaginations,” he adds. “If you have that, you can build tomorrow.”
Abby Mendelson’s latest book, Ghost Dancer, a collection of short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.
Captions:
George Davison on site at Inventionland
Pondering
Davison demonstrates the Hover Creeper
All photographs copyright Brian Cohen