Outsourcing firm happy to develop other's ideas

Richard Pavelle is betting on it. Pavelle is president of Invent Resources Inc., a six-year-old Winchester company peddling a service it calls "invention on demand," ideal for businesses with shrinking research and development budgets. After a consultation, for which he does not charge, he and his three partners -- all scientists and engineers -- will develop inventions for companies seeking to broaden their product lines. Together, the Invent Resources team has amassed an inventory of more than 100 patents, with technology available to license.

"A lot of companies today just don't have the internal resources to take a concept and develop it," Pavelle said. "We would like to be their external R&D arm."

Pavelle's career as an inventor began in 1970 when, as a Columbia University undergraduate, he came up with the idea for a golf putter head with an expanded "sweet spot," and licensed the technology to a small New York company. "That's what got me involved with the commercialization of inventions," he recalled. "I was interested in mathematics and physics, but I wasn't a marketer."

His customers today have the opposite problem. Many small to midsize companies have little more than a concept for their next product. Pavelle and his team expand the concept, win a patent, and license the technology back to the company for a specific product application. Invent Resources holds onto the patent and is free to license it again for other applications.

When it developed a "self-dosing" sunscreen for a cosmetics company, for instance, it retained the rights to the ultraviolent radiation-absorbing technology for other uses, such as encapsulated dyes for magazine inserts. Other inventions from Pavelle and his colleagues range from a 10-second restroom hand dryer to a microwave coffee maker to an electronic credit card calculator.

Invent Resources is capitalizing on a growing division-of-labor trend that has created an opening for small groups of inventors, independant research labs, and offshore design houses. As cost-conscious companies whittle away at their technology research, they are increasingly turning to outsiders for help. The help can take a variety of forms. Invent Resources is seeking to build a niche as an "idea factory" for consumer product companies.

Larger independent research and development firms such as Battelle, Sarnoff Corp., and TIAX (formerly the Arthur D. Little technology and innovation practice) also license their technology and perform customized product design and testing under contract from businesses and government agencies.

"There's no question of the value such companies can bring," said Kenan Sahin, founder and president of TIAX in Cambridge. "In addition to coming up with ideas, they are blending them with ideas already in the marketplace." Sahin said such work is especially important in the postdotcom era because many technologies-in-progress have been warehoused and there is less venture capital to fund young companies developing new technologies.

Some of the most vital hubs of on-demand activity are overseas, where original design manufacturers, known as ODMs, are cropping up from Taiwan to South Korea to supply Western brand companies with cheap off-the-shelf designs for digital cameras, music players, and other consumer electronics products. With these designs, "anyone can slap their name on a box and ship a relatively quality product into the US market," said Charlie Kim, vice president at Bain & Co.

The partners at Invent Resources -- Pavelle, Sol Aisenberg, George Freedman, and A. Ze've Hed -- focus more on niche products. One example was a quiet electric pencil sharpener they developed for the Hunt Corp. of Philadelphia. "We were able to reduce the sound level in the sharpener by almost three times," Pavelle said. "It was a combination of changing the grinding mechanism and insulating the components with sound-reducing materials."

For Pavelle, it was a straightforward engineering problem. "Invention is very, very easy," he said. "We do it in our sleep. But marketing is very tough."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.