Reinventing Retirement
Doris Drucker still has that hankering, the same creative passion that drives millions of other inventors to try to turn their ideas into something tangible, useful and maybe even profitable.
So what if she’s eightysomething?
Like a growing number of other senior citizens, the former patent agent and wife of prominent management scholar Peter Drucker couldn’t be happier forgoing a leisurely retirement to launch her own business and market her latest invention.
“I have a lot of energy and play a lot of tennis, but it can get boring after a while,” she said. “You can’t play tennis forever.”
Early this year, Drucker and her 76-year-old partner, Obie O’Brien, introduced Visivox, a portable battery-powered device that helps public speakers determine whether they are speaking audibly by displaying light signals on a small monitor. Drucker came up with the idea about two years ago, and O’Brien designed the device.
It’s too early to tell whether Visivox will be successful, but for Drucker, creating it has fulfilled one of her longtime goals.
“I had given up on one invention before, and it really annoyed me,” Drucker said. “Thirty years ago, I devised a portable heart monitor that you could wear on your wrist, but cardiologists told me there was no market for it. That was before the fitness craze.”
That experience motivated her to nurture her latest invention to fruition. She believes Visivox is the device the world needs,
but, having worked with inventors as a patent agent, she also knows that coming up with the idea is the easy part. Determining whether there is demand, obtaining a patent and selling the product are often what separate successful inventors from the droves who fail.
“Ten percent is inspiration and 90% is sweat and marketing,” Drucker said.
Alan Arthur Tratner, president of the nonprofit Inventor’s Workshop in Santa Barbara, said less than 10% of all new ideas “shake out to be successful.”
“If you don’t have help, someone steering you, you flounder around and make a lot of mistakes, and it can be expensive,” he said.
It may seem like more of a headache than it’s worth for Drucker and O’Brien to delve into the laborious world of inventing at their age, but neither would rather be doing anything else.
“To me, it’s the most fascinating job on this planet,” O’Brien said. “Most people who reach 65 are ready to quit, but that doesn’t appeal to me. As long as I feel that I can contribute something worthwhile, I’ll be doing it.”
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Said Drucker: “I’m a risk taker, and I like to try things I’ve never done before. At age 69, I went to Nepal on a trek. I like to challenge myself.”
Such sentiments are becoming increasingly common among older Americans, analysts said. Last year, about 3.7 million of the roughly 31.8 million Americans age 65 or older remained in the work force, according to the Labor Department.
Sometimes seniors continue working for financial reasons. But often it has more to do with striving for personal satisfaction, the case for Drucker and O’Brien.
“With the increasing life expectancy, the prospect of 20 years of retirement makes us question whether we really want to move into retirement at 65,” said Sara Rix, a researcher for the American Assn. of Retired Persons.
Tratner said he’s noticed more senior inventors, although they still make up only a minuscule portion of the inventor population.
“We have some wonderfully creative seniors doing this because older adults have a vast wealth of experiences,” he said. “And sometimes when they get into retirement age, they have more time to nurture their ideas.”
Drucker, who has a master’s degree in physics, came up with the idea for Visivox after listening to her husband trail off while speaking at business conferences across the world. Sometimes it got so bad that people in the audience would interrupt his speeches to ask him to speak louder.
For a long time, the only way Drucker could help her husband, who has difficulty hearing, was to sit in the back of the auditorium and signal to him whenever his voice dropped too low. Frustrated with that arrangement, Drucker came up with Visivox.
“He had so much to say, but I used to think to myself, ‘Why can’t he just speak louder so people can hear?’ ” she said.
After conducting a patent search and realizing that no similar product existed, Drucker felt confident there was a market for Visivox. She followed leads from friends and hooked up with O’Brien, an independent engineer from Rescue, Calif., which provided the name of the company, RSQ.
Together, they brainstormed ways the device could be made before O’Brien designed a crude prototype. It took him a few tries, using cardboard boxes and used parts, before he came up with a workable production model.
“A very, very small percentage [of people] get their inventions produced, because it’s overwhelming,” O’Brien said. “Any time you plan on doing something that’s never been done before, you cannot definitely say it’s going to work. Fortunately, I know not to put a lot of money into it before you find out whether something works.”
Once the prototype was made, the pair had a small manufacturer in Redlands make the box holding the device. They also linked up with an assembler in Placentia and a woman in Chino who built the circuit board. They had to go to Home Depot and Radio Shack for the knobs, latches and other small parts because they couldn’t find a manufacturer that would sell them in small quantities.
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Drucker and O’Brien never lost enthusiasm for their creation, but, like a lot of other inventors, they encountered many obstacles. For instance, after producing the first 100 boxes, the Redlands manufacturer had to rework the hinges to allow the boxes to be spray-painted. The company refused to make any additional boxes because it had lost too much money correcting the mistake. Fortunately, Drucker found another company in Irvine to make the next set.
After submitting their patent application, the partners also were dismayed to learn that a similar device had just received a patent. It was a blow, but Drucker believes there are enough differences between the two products to allow Visivox to receive its own patent. Normally, it takes three to four years for a patent application to be approved.
Drucker was fortunate to have the financial backing to launch her invention without having to borrow any money. She has spent less than $50,000 so far, while O’Brien supplied his labor to become a partner in the company.
Even now, after the device has been successfully produced, Drucker and O’Brien face what could be the most challenging part of their job: marketing. They’ve sent out mailings, contacted sites with conference facilities and sold several devices through word of mouth.
“First you have to develop a viable product, something there’s definitely a need for,” O’Brien said. “Then you have to work very hard to put an idea in front of people and have them buy it. We already have a world full of products to buy. You have to have something special or else people won’t buy it.”
Visivox, which weighs about 10 pounds, sells for $480 plus tax and shipping. Drucker and O’Brien initially made 100 devices and plan to order 500 more.
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So far, they’ve sold the product to dozens of groups and individuals, including the American Heart Assn., the American Management Assn. and the Casa Colina rehabilitation center in Pomona, which uses Visivox to help patients correct speech problems.
“Sometimes our patients speak so low that they’re not able to be understood well,” said Jill Wilkerson, Casa Colina’s director of speech and hearing. “This device is very useful because the speech therapist doesn’t always have to interrupt them and tell them to speak louder.”
Bonnie Snortum, director of programming at Claremont McKenna College’s cultural center, said the school plans to use its Visivox to help students improve their public speaking skills.
“We’ll use it to coach students who do introductions or moderate panel discussions,” Snortum said. “When we have speakers, occasionally people in the back of the room can’t hear them because they aren’t projecting their voices.”
Drucker has lined up a distributor in Chicago. She’s also considering placing ads in trade magazines.
“Our market includes speech pathologists, corporations and professional speakers,” Drucker said. “I’m trying to reach those people, and I think we’re on our way now.”
Throughout the experience, Drucker said, she received constant support from her husband.
“He doesn’t know anything about small business, but he said: ‘Go for it. Go for it,’ ” she said. “So that’s what I’m doing.”
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From Idea to Patent
Numerous resources are available on how to patent a service or product and determine what patents already exist:
To develop ideas: Contact the Santa Barbara-based Inventors Workshop, a nonprofit group that mentors inventors and offers programs to help protect, develop and market new ideas. For more information, call (805) 962-5772.
To learn about the invention process from concept to patent: Go to
https://www.idresearch.com/wwwpatent/steps.htm
To find out whether someone has already patented your idea or product: Hire a professional patent searcher through the Inventors Workshop, hire an attorney to do a patent search or conduct a search yourself online.
For links to several online patent databases:Go to https://.uspto.gov/weboffices/ac/ido/cpti/ptdlserv.htm#Electronic. To conduct patentsearch at no charge, go to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web site athttps://patents.uspto.gov/
The Science, Technology and Patents Department at the Los Angeles Public Library’s centralbranch downtown has a computer system that can be used to do a patent search. For more information or to schedule time on the computer, call (213) 228-7299 or visit the department’s Web site at https://www.lapl.org/central/scihp.html. The library also has copies of the U.S. Patent Gazette, a weekly publication that lists new patent information.
