Extreme Innovation
Posted on
Oct 5, 2005 |
By ERIN WIGGINS Colorado Daily Features Editor
Saturday, September 17, 2005 6:42 PM MDT
It started from a prototype he built entirely out of materials from McGuckins. It's morphed into a small enterprise that has garnered attention from The L.A. Times, Newsweek and outdoors giant R.E.I.
It's called an Inka Pen, and it is the brainchild of Boulder engineer-entrepreneur Greg Adelman. The pens are dubbed as compact, precision-crafted all-weather devices that can write at any angle, temperature, altitude and even underwater.
"Ideally, it's a pen you could have for most of your needs and could get rid of a lot of disposable pens," explains Adelman, who before being an innovator spent 13 years as an engineer. "Almost two years ago, I got the idea to stop and focus on developing the pen. I didn't really have an idea for a design then; I just wanted to make a pen that could really go anywhere."
From an environmental perspective, it saves waste. Adelman noted that 1.6 billion pens are thrown away in the U.S. every year. From a convenience perspective, it eliminates problems such as not being able to write lying down, or having your pen explode all over your luggage after a flight across the country. The pen, stainless steel and attachable to a key chain, even can be used as a PDA stylus.
In a nutshell, it's for everyone.
"In a marketing sense, one thing that has been fascinating about it is people of all walks of life think the pen was designed for them," says Adelman. "Whether it's outdoors people, or golfers, or even nurses or salespeople, just everyone thinks, 'oh this great.'"
The product was unveiled officially in January at the Salt Lake City Outdoor Retailer expo, and The L.A. Times identified Inka as one of the top four products there. Plane and Pilot Magazine also listed it as number three in the "top 10 gadgets to have in the cockpit." Other magazines such as Backpacking Light, Boating Magazine and Competitor Magazine have done features and Adelman says even Newsweek is in the process of rating the pens for an upcoming issue.
But how did it all begin?
Adelman, who is originally from Connecticut, moved to Boulder in 1998 after a transfer from Scripps Institution of Oceanography to Nonlinear Systems, a local optical engineer company.
However, what really sent him to a place of innovative genius was not his job itself - but rather a common problem. He kept losing pens.
"It's funny because the idea for the pen kind of germinated when I was at Scripps and we were right around getting ready for a cruise - when you go out to sea and test their instrumentation," he says. "That's how I got the idea; I was running around and never had a pen with me."
Having an idea, however, isn't making millions. First he had to figure out if it had already been done.
"I went to the U.S. patent office - you can do searches online - and I started there, and then I had some professional searches done though attorneys," he says. "There was some stuff that had some similarities, but I went though that with the attorneys and the opinion I got was that it had a really high likelihood of patent-ability."
But it still wasn't easy after that. Adelman says he tried to do as much as he could on his own - designing the prototype from parts he found mostly at Boulder's McGuckin Hardware Store - but it was a challenge.
"There are all sorts of technical problems in getting the pen to do what it does and do it well," he says. "I joke about it - it really fought; it didn't want to be a pen."
After that, there were the hurdles of shifting into mass production and starting a business. Inka Corp was spawned in the summer of 2004.
"There's so much expense in starting a business and particularly developing a product," he says. "It took a year to go from a prototype pen to production parts."
This summer, the pens were released to the market, being picked up by the CU Bookstore, The Boulder Army Store and possibly even R.E.I. in the future.
Craig Cameron, a buyer for the CU Bookstore, says he decided to pick up the pens with researching students and faculty in mind, who often have to write in the rain with pens that "just don't cut it." He says the store has already sold more than a dozen to backpacking and snowboarding types, but added that as the back-to-school rush morphs into the holiday season, he expects to sell many more.
"As buyers we get to feature certain products that fit into unique niches," Cameron says. "This is a very unique item with incredible utility that should be around for a long time."
But the current pen isn't just what Adelman plans to create. He already has a titanium version ("it's kind of like a super high-performance one") as well as two other pen ideas underway that he isn't ready to reveal because he hasn't yet obtained the patents.
With the attention that the utilitarian pen has garnered so far, it may now be easier to build those future prototypes. Nonetheless, Adelman is not a type that wants to be consumed by mass marketing if his ideas ever go big - he still thinks the amount of craftsmanship and focus put into a design is so important, which is often rare in a mass produced 21st century society.
"I'm happy with the way it came it out it, but it wasn't a coincidence," Adelman offers. "I put so much focus into every detail so it was as perfect as I could get it. That's something that I really, really feel strongly about." |
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