It isn't enough simply to have an idea, you have to do something with it.
I invented a new type of vortex flowmeter.
I decided that patenting was an expensive way to give the idea away because the cost of defending the patents would be prohibitive. A patent is only as good as your ability to spend money defending it.
Instead I used confidentiality agreements to discuss with prospective manufacturers e.g. the company I worked for at the time (protected by the 1977 patents act).
It seemed to me to fit with their core skills, and other companies were busy investing in other conventional vortex meters, but after the presentation, the engineering team tasked to review it decided it was a non starter.
A year or so after I left the company (some few years down the line) the chief engineer had the grace to send me a copy of a new patent by a US university that duplicated my ideas and to apologise. So that idea is out there now with some University teams names all over it. Actually, I made a better job of it in terms of concept and designs for implementation, but so what?
There often comes time when an invention is inevitable.
If there is a need, then as enabling technology emerges, chances are a bunch of people will have the same idea at more or less the same time.
The winner is then the one who gets to market first.
About all you can do is congratulate yourself on being smart enough to spot it but that's about it. For the one guy that patents it there may be just one other guy, you, who also thought of it, or there may be an army of people all saying "Hey, I thought of that. If only....."
If you had the idea and went no-where with it, too bad.
You also get small credit for being smart enough to think of it but not clever enough to do anything with it.
I am still sitting on a new domestic water meter design (if any one is interested).
Much better than the existing mechanical meters but the big names in the industry were reluctant to invest in a new technology when they had a comfortable share of the market.... and didn't invent it themselves.... I went round a couple of major water meter companies with that and the same deal.
It isn't just the "not invented here" syndrome but also economics. Why invest good money to make your original product obsolete if it doesn't actually generate a bigger market share.... it was as much about not upsetting the status quo as anything.
The trouble is there are not enough smaller hungrier companies still big enough to afford the investment and get away with it without being bought up and closed down.
Those of you who like coriolis meters may remember the Exac which was arguably lots better than the MicroMotion at the time. After a patent fight that ran to many millions of dollars, the Exac died when Rosemount bought out Fisher and shut down manufacture.
It didn't matter that the Exac was considered by many to be the better meter.
There are many meter technologies that never made it into the market for various reasons. Not because they didn't work but for other commercial reasons.
I;d like to think I could have invented the mass meter while washing the car, for example, a perfectly reasonable scenario. But if I did, I might still not have beaten MicroMotion to the market. There is more to it than the right idea.
All of which gets you nowhere if you had the idea and didn't get anywhere with it. But what can we say? Except too bad.
JMW