Sharing Product Ideas & Collaborative Innovation

When I joined my first company, I met people who always discussed their ideas in a guarded way, like they had some kind of treasure and were afraid that someone would steal it. And this pattern continued even after we started SoftCircuits Labs. Every now and then, we would meet someone who would be saying that they had a product idea that could change the world. But strangely, even if they didn’t have time or resources to build it, they would not share that idea with others. They always seemed afraid that someone else would implement it and get credit for it. Even many people in academia and research also seem to have similar mindset.

But I never understood their fear. What good is a solution if it just stays in my head as an idea? I would be fine if someone else implemented it first. What matters to me is that it got turned into a reality. If it's a good solution, then it should reach people who need it, and it doesn't matter if it's through me or someone else.

In the early days of SoftCircuits, we worked on some internal products along with the client projects, and one of those was a home automation solution. One day, a friend of mine told me that a similar product had been launched by a startup. They asked me what would I do if their product is better than ours and my answer was that if their product really is that good, then I would happily buy it for myself and get to the next step in the design of that automation solution. I mean, there is never a lack of problems to be solved or products that need to be built. For that reason, we are always focused on building a solution and not trying to be the first person to come up with something clever or unique. And that's how we became a company that builds customized hardware, because that means, every project is a new puzzle to be solved and not a race to gain recognition.

Maybe that's the reason I like the concept of open source so much - that instead of being guarded all the time, we share our ideas and inventions and together, we try to make it better.

So, as I mentioned in my previous post, this year, we would be open sourcing our in-house hardware projects. And next week we will put the design and code for the plasma torch height controller (THC) on github. This THC has been a very niche product, but our team has really worked on it for many years and sold it across the world.

Hopefully these open source projects/products will help someone out there looking for a similar solution and we would be able to take it forward together.