Wade Armstrong

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American Inventor: Episode 9 Recap

Posted Friday April 28, 2006 in Entrepreneurship

I’ll admit, when I saw that Mary Lou Quinlan was going to be our judge this week, I expected an exceptionally teary episode. But, instead, I got what I’d wished for in the last episode a tightly-constructed show that introduced us to the inventors, showed us their challenges and the development process, and then talked about the reasons behind the final decision to advance one contestant. This improvement was matched by an improvement in the inventors’ outcomes: real development and real change took place during those 30 days, and real, usable products came out in the end. This was a good episode.

This week we had three inventors with three products: the double-traction bike, a bike with a seat and pedals in front of the handlebars; the Here Comes Niya Doll, a multicultural line of dolls that sang and spoke English, Spanish, and Kiswahili; and the Easy-X Gym, a modular set of weightlifting and training tools that can be packed and carried around. All three were substantially improved by the inventors’ work with the designers this week, and all three finally appeared to be legitimate products in the market.

In many ways, Here Comes Niya improved the most — not just because of the changes to the doll, but also because of the changes to the inventor. Thirty days sufficed to record a new voice for Niya, to record a theme song that made her unique, and to design and produce a series of dolls that could act as her friends, an end product much more impressive than the initial prototype. Darla, the inventor, had already planned out the line extension, which would seem to be a surprise if you’d heard her earlier, deeply personal pitches for the single Niya doll. Even more, Darla was willing to take input from the design team while still being a forceful leader and imparting her own vision. At the end, she wasn’t a passionate mom telling a story about multiculturalism; she was a decisive entrepreneur following in the footsteps of hits such as the American Girl franchise.

And that was when Mary Lou Quinlan, too, stepped up. In previous episodes she’d been an excessively teary figure who made her decisions based on emotion, not business. Today, she provided this bracket’s contestants with guidance before they embarked on their redesign and asked incisive questions when the inventors showed their final products. One such incisive question was whether Niya was a well-conceived multicultural doll whose time had come and gone. Niya had been in development for 22 years by the time of this show, a very long time; and yet it was only during American Inventor that the Niya doll got tested with target consumers. Quinlan clearly felt that Niya’s time was past. This inventor did not advance.

This 30-day period showed the guts of the Easy-X gym’s inventor, too — or maybe his lack of such. Feedback on the gym went in every direction, with requests for visual redesigns, usability improvements, matching clothing and carrying cases, and even a series of exercise DVDs to use with the gym items. This inventor deferred to experts at every point and, at one juncture, even appeared lost without having his girlfriend to ask for advice. Without a clear vision leading the invention, it was unclear what the end product was: a home exercise video series? A set of weights and rubber band tools for the expert home weightlifter? An entry-level product? The inventor himself, as the star of the videos? To top it all off, one of the components failed during testing, a rubber band propelling a weight back into the tester’s gut and knocking him down. An invention cannot be so unspecific, and failing spectacularly probably didn’t help, so the Easy-X did not advance.

As you can probably guess by process of elimination, it was the double-traction bike that advanced to the next round, and both the product and the inventor, 19-year-old Francisco Patino, really rose to the occasion. He was both open to new ideas and decisive, providing a vision for his product, and even doing research online into customer needs to decide if he’d target his bicycle to teenagers or their parents. Best of all, he was American — an immigrant from Colombia, he clearly was proud of his new country and believed in the American Dream. The double-traction bike itself was developed along two specific, targeted axes: style, to appeal to the target demographic; and safety, so that the person riding above the front wheel would not get dumped off in a turn. The end product was strong, with test customers enjoying the ride, a stylish look that will appeal to the target market, an innovative drive system, and even a front seat that can be removed so that the bike can be ridden by one person without looking silly.

In the end, it was this bike that was clearly the strongest combination of inventor and product, so it was this bike that advanced to the final four. But could either of the other two have done it? Here Comes Niya is a good product, but, looking at the American Girl phenomenon, the trick is as much in the store design, marketing, and companion materials as in the design of the doll herself. American Girl dolls come with complete, historically-accurate stories describing the doll’s history, and are sold in emporia celebrating the entire American Girl experience and offering added features that girls and their parents can enjoy together. Niya could succeed in such an environment, so that should be the inventor’s next step. With her full line of prototype dolls, song, and voices, Darla should approach black history museums and other cultural attractions in urban areas to set up a few flagship experience locations for the Here Comes Niya line. The dolls could be sold at cost to the museum and any proceeds from doll sales could go to the museums themselves; this would match the stated goal of breaking down cultural barriers and giving to the community, while building awareness of, and demand for, the line for a future larger-scale launch. As a first step, a Here Comes Niya playroom could be set up with some of the prototype dolls, with the dolls themselves available by mail order (the trick, of course, being that dolls wouldn’t be produced until sufficient orders were gained).

Both Here Comes Niya and the Easy-X gym were extensively developed before they went on American Inventor, the gym for 13 years and the doll for 22. In that time, it’s unbelievable that neither went through a simple user test. Inventors and other entrepreneurs need to figure out cheap and easy ways to test their product, even at extremely early stages. Feedback on usability is key early on — for instance, some testing probably would have indicated that it’s difficult to safely retain a rubber band with an ad-hoc mounting, so the Easy-X set could have focused on weights rather than resistance equipment. Testing creates buzz, proves demand, and can lead to the early orders that you can use to get the product off the ground.

(Again, Episode 8 appears to have been a clip show.)