In This Issue: Editor's Introduction
Lemelson Center, Smithsonian Institution
In the Costa Rican countryside grass can grow to lengths of 20 meters. If farmers don't chop it into portions, their cows choke. So, day in and day out, farmers in Costa Rica cut the grass. It is a task that Juan Carlos, owner of 10 acres and eight cows, grew too weary of doing forever. In search of a way out of this chore he went to the big city, San José, his nation's capital. There he found a machine that probably could have cut the grass for him. But its $1,000 price tag was enough to purchase five more cows. Carlos, with no more than an eighth-grade education, returned from San José without the machine.
Instead, he found a passion to invent a grass-cutting machine of his own, perhaps one that would serve his purposes even better than the one a richer farmer could afford. When Carlos returned to his farm he gathered three of his mechanically inclined neighbors and together they built a grass-cutting machine that Carlos had designed.
"I am trained as a mechanical engineer and I have never built a machine of value," remarked Satheesh Namasivayam, who was then senior program manager for the Portland, Oregon–based Lemelson Foundation, at the Lemelson Center's "Cultures of Innovation" conference. "And here is a person who has gone only to the eighth grade and has created a perfectly functioning machine," Namasivayam said of Juan Carlos. Namasivayam had learned about Juan Carlos through a Lemelson Foundation program called "Invention for Sustainable Development."
The machine worked so well at cutting down the grass for cows that when nearby farmers saw it in action, they wanted one, too. So Carlos set up a small manufacturing operation and began making the machines for local farmers. Now he and a small staff make about 60 of the machines each year, selling them for about $400 each. "He has a beautiful home and an expanding income potential," Namasivayam noted. Carlos could have taken his innovative enterprise further. The technology caught the attention of those beyond his local radius in which he and his co-workers were the known experts. A number of more distant farmers began copying his machine. Instead of feeling that they were stealing his invention, however, Carlos's response was, "God bless them all." That is not how most entrepreneurs would respond, but for Carlos, in his context, it was the right response.
This story of Juan Carlos embodies many of the issues surrounding the human ability and compulsion to invent and to innovate. It is also a story about technology transfer, from center to periphery and from periphery to grassroots—literally, in this case. The transfer of grass-cutting technology from San José to Juan Carlos's region produced not local dependency, but the diffusion of new machine-making skills, local empowerment, and self-sufficiency. This case study raises a number of questions about technology transfer: Was Juan Carlos's machine better adapted to use in the region than the one he had seen in San José, which was most likely imported? Was Juan Carlos's apparent generosity with his intellectual property simply a personal matter or an aspect of his culture? Would such behavior have enhanced or impeded the innovative impulse in other cultures or, for that matter, within Costa Rica itself?
For purposes of comparing and contrasting invention and innovation in different places and times, Carlos's story was mentioned repeatedly during the weekend of 13–15 May 2005 at the "Cultures of Innovation" conference in Washington, DC. Focusing on the relationship between innovations in the industrialized world and those in the developing one, the [End Page vii] conference was...
