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INNOVATION RESOURCES

Gorillapod

Breakthrough:
A flexible tripod with over two dozen flexible joints that bend and rotate, allowing a camera to be mounted on almost any surface.

Inventor:
JoeBen Bevirt, United States

Financial reward:
$20 million+

The Story:

The Gorillapod lets you take your pocket camera to places it has never been before to get the shot you want. Hang your camera from the branch of a tree, wrap it round a railing, or leave it dangling from a door knob - the Gorillapod’s ball and socket type joints bend and twist almost 360 degrees so the legs can be contorted into a variety of different positions.

It’s the brainchild of inventor and visionary JoeBen Bevirt who first came up with idea in the late 1990s whilst at Stanford University. He took a course called Integrated Design for Marketing and Manufacturability and was part of a group of students given the task of coming up with a better tabletop tripod. He designed one with flexible legs and called it Gorillapod, but it stayed at the concept stage for years as after graduation he initially pursued other activities. He joined a pharmaceutical company and automated their genome sample preparation methods before founding a company to develop instruments for the life sciences, which he eventually sold.

Born to Innovate

Bevirt believes he was born an inventor, and growing up on a hippy commune in the Santa Cruz mountains gave him plenty of opportunities to engage in creative problem solving activities. “I lived on 160 acres in the middle of nowhere so I had to entertain myself,” says Bevirt. “People tell stories of the only things that fascinated me were machines, trucks and tractors; any kind of mechanism was fascinating to me.”

Gorillapod came swinging back into his life in 2004. A friend had continually been pestering him to turn it into a product, and so he embarked on the project whilst learning about manufacturing in China. “I thought it shouldn’t be too hard, so I worked on a prototype and it turned out to be a fair bit more challenging. The first couple of manufacturers that I worked with gave up because the injection moulding tooling to make the socket joints was tricky, and it took more time and capital than I expected. But it turned out to be incredibly worth it.”

Major Improvements

For Gorillapod to become a marketable commodity many improvements had to be made on the original Stanford design. And even when they were completed there were still many more refinements that had to be attended to until Bevirt was happy with the results. He says that he has a “scrappy iterative approach” to inventing. “Basically you build lots of prototypes and you test them and do it again and again and again and figure out what works and what doesn’t work. You build lots of different concepts and compare and contrast them, and you take the good things from one and couple with another.” And what comes out at the other end is a viable product.

A patent was filed via his patent attorney and in 2005 Bevirt created a company called Joby as a vehicle for all the inventing he wants to do. Gorillapod was the first product, and it has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. It is sold through national and international retailers as well as via the company website and has spawned further products using the same flexible Gorillapod idea; so now there are Gorillamobile stands for mobile devices and a Gorillatorch - a hands-free flashlight.

Best is Yet to Come

As phenomenally successful as this invention has been Bevirt believes the best is yet to come. He is passionate about renewable energy because he believes it can solve so many of the world’s problems which are fundamentally all about energy. Like other companies he is currently developing prototypes of airborne modular wind turbines to harness the wind from the jet stream - the fast flowing wind currents in the atmosphere. They are much more concentrated than ground-based winds and Bevirt reckons he’s on course to be able to provide cheap clean reliable energy in about five years time.

Bevirt has spent 18 months working with 15 engineers to create lots of prototypes. His “scrappy iterative approach” has also been at work here, and it’s taken him in new directions, demonstrating that creativity in problem solving can take on a life of its own. As his team was working on the modular platform’s control systems they realized they had inadvertently created a new type of energy efficient aircraft. He is now developing this idea to build a highly efficient single-pilot aircraft that takes off vertically.

Bevirt is passionate about the inventing process and when asked what excites him in particular about it he quotes Thomas Edison. “Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Bevirt continues “That’s really the essence of it – it’s important to have that initial idea but to be successful it’s about the execution.”

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