Today, Inventables is a website where vendors of raw materials and technologies can create online profiles for their products in order to generate qualified sales leads worth their time. Potential customers looking to source new materials and technologies browse through these profiles everyday and submit inquiries about products they are interested in. As a vendor, you are notified by email each time your Inventables profile receives a new inquiry and given an opportunity to purchase the corresponding sales lead. Inventables exists to make it easy for vendors of materials and technologies to get an initial introduction to potential buyers. Microsoft X-Box, PING Golf Clubs, and Kraft Foods are examples of buyer companies using the marketplace. Dupont, 3M, and Eastman are examples of companies participating as vendors–but it didn’t start this way.
In February of 2002, Inventables was founded to help companies innovate. We set out to share our excitement for what technology makes possible with the world’s innovators.
Inventables began by interviewing 50 product developers with the intention of helping these people and their companies understand and then incorporate innovative materials and technologies into their creative process.
The goal of Inventables is to bring innovation and inspiring ideas to every designer and engineer. We are driven by a perpetual curiosity about human psychology and the design process and by a desire to celebrate human achievement. Our intention was, and remains, to empower product developers with knowledge of what is new and now possible. We hired 80 Technology Hunters to find this information by sharing knowledge with designers, scouring trade shows, reading trade journals and magazines, researching foreign markets, and talking with our network of “informants.”
In those days our collection was curated by a small team in our office. The items we select come from five categories: materials, mechanisms, electronics, processes, and “wow” products. Included items had to demonstrate something new, solve a problem in an unconventional way, or be found only in a niche market while remaining largely unknown elsewhere.
Thousands of designers in companies such as Proctor & Gamble, Motorola, and Black & Decker–in industries that include furniture, automotive, toys, sporting goods, and consumer electronics–are being inspired by Inventables. Products directly influenced by Inventables are emerged on store shelves. The Innovation Center as a resource is become part of the creative process in some very large companies. It was exciting to see real products materialize from our work however we felt the pace needed to increase if we were going to achieve or vision.
Motivated by the desire to push innovation forward faster than it had been we launched opened up our once proprietary research for free to the world. The Inventables Marketplace was born. By making access free we are democratizing the researching and sourcing of new materials. Information and access to new materials that was once only available to the largest companies in the world is now available to anyone with an internet connection.
If you manufacture a new material we invite you to create a profile for it on Inventables. Our promise to you is we will deliver sales leads worth your time. We guarantee this claim or your money back. For everyone else our website will help you find the right material for your next project.