There is a moment in the history of many inventions at which the inventor ceases to exist. Not biologically. Not even socially. He goes on existing — but he no longer exists as the origin of the thing he brought into the world. His name disappears from the history of the technology he invented. What remains is the technology, now owned by others, under other names, in other narratives.
How often this happens nobody knows — and probably nobody wants to know. It happens in every industry and in every country. It is so normal and so taken for granted that it hardly stands out. It is, so to speak, inherent in the system, because it is part of the omnipresent Megamachine.
The pattern
An inventor develops something new. He looks for an industrial partner who can produce it — for inventing and producing are different activities, and the inventor rarely has the means of production for both. He cooperates with a company. The collaboration is real — both contribute something. The company brings infrastructure, capital, sales. The inventor brings the idea, the knowledge, the years of groundwork.
At some point the cooperation ends. Companies are sold, priorities shift, markets change. The company keeps the technology. The inventor keeps — if he was lucky and had good, expensive advisers — the money from a patent sale or from licence payments. But often enough these proceeds do not even cover the accumulated development costs, which the inventor has as a rule financed with borrowed money. So the money first flows back, with interest, to banks and investors. The primacy of capital. What the inventor really wants — to use the returns from one invention to go on inventing, and at a higher level — he achieves only in very rare cases. Against all economic reason, potential sources of innovation are thus systematically dried up.
Then others learn the process. Technicians, design engineers, heads of development. They move to other companies and take the knowledge with them. That is normal, that is legal, it is even desirable — this is how technologies spread, this is how industry develops. The price is that the origin is lost along the way. The new employer knows only the person who brought the knowledge with him — not the one who had it first.
Years pass. The technology becomes the technology of the company that uses it. It gets a new name. It is described in brochures as something this company has developed and refined. The inventor becomes a footnote — and at some point not even that. He simply disappears from history — from his own history.
Sometimes a company even claims to have invented the process itself and developed it over years of work. It even has patents that seem to prove this. But almost nobody actually reads these patents — for then anyone could see that, compared with what the original inventor invented and realised as first mover, only insignificant details have been added. The marginal patent protects an improvement, not the invention. And often enough it is not even a real improvement — it serves one single purpose: the grant of a patent that is, strictly speaking, technically worthless but strategically important. But people read only "patent" and assume that the patent covers everything described in the document. Novelty searches often enough stop at marginal patents of this kind. Why search further — one has found the closest prior art. That this prior art is itself built on an earlier, more fundamental patent remains invisible. The original inventor disappears behind whoever wrote last.
The Virgin appears — and disappears
Behind many company histories that are told as stories of growth, innovation and world renown, there is a moment that does not occur in the official version. The moment when someone turns up — from outside, unexpectedly, unplannably — and changes everything. A person with an idea, a process, a principle that gives the company a direction it would not have found by itself.
Small businesses become medium-sized world market leaders. Craft workshops become technology companies. Contract turning shops become specialists in complex manufacturing processes. If you read the official anniversary publications, these developments sound like the result of foresight, hard work and entrepreneurial courage. And that is true — in part. But if you can look behind the scenes, you often discover the same pattern: there was somebody. Somebody who had the decisive idea, developed the decisive process, brought the decisive knowledge. Somebody who was not at the centre and did not want to be. Somebody whose contribution was so fundamental that it later became invisible — because fundamental contributions at some point appear self-evident, as if they had always been there.
In Colombia they say: apareció la virgen — the Virgin has appeared. What is meant is the unhoped-for stroke of luck, the unexpected grace, the gift that comes from outside and that one has not earned. Some companies owe their rise to exactly such a moment. To a person who turned up and whose appearance changed everything.
What happens then is structurally predictable. The company grows. The person remains who he is — inventor, tinkerer, someone to whom the next thing matters more than the past. The company develops a narrative of its own history. In this narrative there is no room for the stroke of luck, for grace, for the person from outside. The narrative needs continuity, its own achievement, a story that can be told from the inside. So the moment when the Virgin appeared disappears. And with it the person who was that Virgin.
NIH syndrome as institutional logic
Not Invented Here — NIH syndrome — is mostly described as a psychological phenomenon: organisations' aversion to external ideas, the overestimation of their own abilities, the tendency to prefer internally developed solutions. That is correct but incomplete.
NIH syndrome has a structural dimension that goes deeper than psychology. Companies have no institutional interest in naming external inventors. Naming them weakens the company's own innovation story. It creates potential claims even when no legal basis exists any longer. It contradicts the narrative of in-house development that is cultivated for customers, investors and employees.
When an inventor, after years in which his technology has been used, politely asks to be mentioned on the company's website — without financial demands, without legal threats, only with the wish for recognition — the most common answer is not refusal. The most common answer is a chain of deflection: nobody is responsible, decision-makers cannot be reached, processes prevent a response. Nobody says no. Nobody says yes. Institutional inertia produces silence without anyone having decided on silence.
The reason is less malice than vanity. Most companies want to maintain the narrative of a highly innovative enterprise — and in this story no place is provided for an external inventor. Employed inventors usually fare no better: if it is not the company owner who claims the invention for himself, then the company invents as a collective. The individual origin spoils the picture.
Knowledge diffusion as a mechanism of forgetting
The most elegant mechanism of disappearance is knowledge diffusion through employees. It needs no ill intent, because it exists for structurally good reasons.
Knowledge that arose in a particular context — in a cooperation, in a project, in years of development work — is not tied to one person. It sits in the heads of everyone who was involved. When these people change organisations, they take the knowledge with them. That is the way technology spreads, the way industries develop, the way knowledge becomes socially productive.
The price is structural and unavoidable: the origin of the knowledge is lost in the transfer. The new employer does not ask — and has no incentive to ask — where the knowledge his new employee brings with him comes from. He sees the competence, not the history behind the competence. The employee who passed the knowledge on becomes the visible expert. The one who had it first disappears behind him.
This mechanism is legal. Within certain limits it is even legally protected — freedom of movement for workers, competition law, the distinction between company-specific knowledge and general competence. The system treats knowledge diffusion as a good. And it is a good. Just not for the inventor.
A system protocol
What stands at the end of the process is neither a crime nor a fraud. It is a system protocol — the predictable result of selection conditions that nobody chose in this form and that everybody produces together.
Nobody in this sequence is the villain. The company does what companies do: it protects its narrative, avoids unnecessary liabilities, delegates awkward enquiries into institutional non-responsibility. The employee who carried the knowledge on did what employees do: he learned, applied, became an expert. The patent system does what the patent system does: it secures time-limited property rights for applicants and then releases the knowledge.
The result is nevertheless the same. The inventor is forgotten. His invention belongs to the history of the institutions that used it. The history of technology becomes a history of companies and products — not of people and ideas.
A documented case — all mechanisms at once
In the 1970s a freelance inventor worked for twenty years for a medium-sized company in the Bergisches Land. He was the driving force of the business — his ideas formed the basis for products that gave the company a competitive advantage lasting many years. Among his inventions one was particularly fundamental: a kinematic principle that made it possible to generate any polygonal shape through superimposed rotary motions. Not a machine for one shape — a principle for all shapes.
His name does not appear on a single one of the patent specifications produced during this period. Not because the company suppressed it — but because he himself applied not to be named. He had once gone bankrupt and feared his creditors. So he erased himself from the very documents that were supposed to record his work. The system had damaged him so badly that he pursued his own erasure.
Then the trap. The inventor had difficulty paying his health insurance contributions on time — the symptom of a man who was not adequately paid for his work and to whom commercial details were unimportant. The company made him a proposal: they would employ him pro forma and pay the contributions for him. De facto everything would stay as it was. He would remain freelance and work as before.
What was presented as a favour was a legal instrument — but it needed a second step for the trap to snap shut. An employee of the company who was responsible for the technical implementation of the inventions began to appropriate ideas that were not his. Documents disappeared. Achievements were claimed as his own. The bullying became systematic. The inventor complained; no settlement came about. At some point he had had enough — and threw in the towel. Whether this was planned cannot be proved. But it was exactly what was needed: a break that came from the inventor. For with that, the head of the company could close the trap — the inventor had resigned himself, had been an employee, his remuneration was deemed covered by his salary. The answer of the patent attorney he confided in was devastating: "They have taken you in very badly, but legally there is nothing to be done."
The inventor died shortly afterwards — aged sixty, after a stroke, without regaining consciousness.
This case is not an extreme case. It is the complete version of the pattern. All mechanisms at once: self-erasure out of fear, the pro-forma construction as a legally prepared trap, the end of the collaboration through an arranged break, the legal safeguarding of the expropriation. No name on the patent. No money for the inventions. No consciousness left with which to understand his own death. And to this day the basis for products and technologies that established the company's world renown — without the name of the man who first conceived them appearing anywhere.
The system needs no malice. It needs only selection conditions that favour whoever owns the means of production — and no instrument that protects the origin of ideas.
The USA — from land of the inventor to corporate patent system
The United States was long regarded as the land of the inventor. That was not only a myth — it had a constitutional basis. Article I of the US Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to secure for inventors, for limited times, exclusive rights. Edison, Bell, Tesla — the independent inventor as cultural and economic icon. The patent system was conceived as a contract between society and the inventor: you share your knowledge, we protect your lead.
Since the 2000s this system has been reformed step by step in another direction. The decisive cut came in 2013 with the America Invents Act: the USA switched from a "First to Invent" to a "First Inventor to File" system. Whoever files first gets the patent — not whoever invented first. That sounds like a subtlety. Structurally it is decisive. Large companies with patent departments and lawyers on call file faster than independent inventors. The advantage of having invented becomes a disadvantage if one does not at the same time have a well-oiled bureaucratic machinery that sets the application in motion immediately.
Even more consequential is the Patent Trial and Appeal Board — PTAB. It allows third parties to challenge the validity of granted patents. That sounds like sensible quality control. In practice it is an instrument of attrition: the PTAB cancels claims in over 84% of the patents it reviews, and an independent inventor rarely has the means for the legal defence that would be needed — every round costs hundreds of thousands. For a corporation that wants to avoid a licence, this is cheaper than paying. Patent protection thus in effect becomes dependent on the strength of the inventor — not on the quality of the invention.
The Supreme Court's eBay decision of 2006 undermined the principle of the right to exclude: a corporation that infringes a patent has, in the worst case, to pay only what it ought to have paid anyway. There is no real consequence any more. Efficient patent theft thus becomes rational — you infringe the patent, wait to see whether the inventor can sue, and pay, if at all, only the amount that would have been due anyway.
The result is that US Inventor — a lobbying organisation of independent inventors — is fighting in 2025 for the reintroduction of basic protective rights that twenty years ago were still taken for granted. The image of the heroic American inventor is today more myth than reality. What has remained is the rhetoric of innovation — while the structural conditions that make innovation possible have been dismantled step by step.
This is not a peculiarly American problem. It is the global direction. The patent system was conceived as protection for the inventor. It is developing into an instrument of the companies that accumulate patents, defend them and deploy them as weapons. In this system the independent inventor is no longer the main actor — he is the target. The target of easy expropriation. In plain words: exploitation and dispossession.
What could be done about it — and why it does not happen
The solution would be technically simple. A database that links inventions with their origins — not only with the patent holders, but with the actual inventors, the cooperation partners, the contexts in which they arose. A standard obliging companies, when they make commercial use of processes, to document their origin. A culture in which industry associations and trade journals name origins instead of keeping silent about them.
This does not happen because the selection conditions work against it. Transparency about origins costs the users of a technology and brings them nothing. It strengthens claims — even where no legal basis exists, it strengthens moral claims that are uncomfortable. It contradicts the institutional interest in a clean ownership story.
And the inventor himself has no instruments left after the patent sale. The legal claim has lapsed. The moral claim is real but unenforceable. The polite request goes unanswered. Institutional inertia wins without a fight.
This is the Megamachine in the innovation economy. No will, no plan, no centre — only selection conditions that favour those who can use technologies, and systematically disadvantage those who first thought of them. A system that systematically exploits the gap between invention, first realisation and conversion into property — to the advantage of those who already own and to the disadvantage of those who are the source of the newly created wealth. This principle applies to employed inventors to the same degree as to independent inventors. The system is built so that nobody is to blame. That is its real design principle.
In closing — an uncomfortable thought
For those who have never been in an inventor's situation, this system is absolutely right and self-evident. They consider it right — or at most regrettable. After all, they profit from it too. That is simply how the world is constructed. And it is true: compared with what many other people in this world experience, it is practically a luxury problem.
And yet one thought remains. Germany's decline as an industrial location has many causes — energy costs, bureaucracy, lack of digitalisation, geopolitical shifts. But could it also have something to do with how Germany treats its inventors? The former president of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office saw this problem as early as the mid-1990s, named it and formulated a prognosis. It looks as if we are now witnessing that prognosis come true.
A country that systematically dries up its sources of innovation, that systematically exploits the gap between invention and property to the detriment of inventors, that binds employed and independent inventors alike into structures that expropriate their creativity — such a country should not be surprised if creativity at some point arises elsewhere. Or no longer at all.
Carry on as before — until everything lies in pieces. Perhaps that is the real German core competence.