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 every day 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 subsequently incorporate, innovative materials and technologies into their creative processes.
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 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 selected came 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 have emerged on store shelves. The Innovation Center has become an important resource for creative teams in some very large companies. It was exciting to see real products materialize from our work, but we felt the pace needed to increase if we were going to achieve or vision.
Motivated by the desire to push innovation forward even faster, we 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’re the manufacturer of a new material, we invite you to create a profile for that material on Inventables. We will deliver sales leads that are 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.