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Thomas Edison famously patented 1,093 inventions in his 84 years. Charles Bombardier, however, is attempting to invent new things each week – a pace that puts him on track to outdo Edison when he’s 60.
Bombardier, 41, may be the grandson of Joseph-Armand Bombardier, creator from the snowmobile and founder of Bombardier Inc., so it isn’t surprising that the entrepreneurial streak runs deep in the veins.
Even when Bombardier was working at his namesake company, he spent a lot of his free time thinking about ways to result in the world a better, more effective place.
The goal is to share my ideas, because I have a lot of them every week
By 2006, after working seven years as an engineer at Bombardier Recreational Products and another decade before that working various jobs at the family firm, Bombardier couldn’t resist the lure of entrepreneurship and decided to strike on their own.
“My father wanted me to stay at BRP, however i make my own decisions and I chose to take my chances,” Bombardier said. “I’ve always had this urge to do something great, probably due to my grandfather. And I’m more happy like this, being on my own, than working in an environment just like a corporation.”
After a few years doing various things within the transportation space, together with a stint as Segway Inc.’s distributor for Canada, Bombardier decided it was time to begin sharing his seemingly infinite convenience of inventions using the world.
But, unlike Edison, Bombardier doesn’t patent his inventions because that goes against his principle of open innovation. He’s sharing his suggestions to take full advantage of them, and tries to publish a minumum of one new idea a week on the website of Imaginactive, a Montreal-based non-profit he founded in 2013.
Imaginactive allows him to utilize industrial designers to render his good flow of ideas. He funds the business and pays his designers out of their own pocket using income produced by previous ventures, such as the sale of vehicle dealerships he owned and writing a newspaper column.
“The goal is to share my ideas, because I have a lot of them every week,” Bombardier said. “I’ve always felt bad about not being able to share them with people.”
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The range of ideas is breathtaking. With names similar to comic characters, each invention has a rendering along with a short description of their purpose: Korbiyor, a driverless, multimedia hearse; Snackr, a 3D food printer for autonomous cars and mass transit; Metropolis, a police drone equipped with a friendly holographic avatar; Jacknife, a shape-shifting car; and Firesound, a flying saucer that may extinguish fires using low-frequency sound waves.
But it’s Antipode, a supersonic business jet, which has been generating the most attention for Bombardier lately, with no wonder. His idea for any luxury business jet capable of reaching Mach 24, or 25,000 kilometres an hour, is almost 12 times faster compared to Concorde.
In theory, this means passengers could fly from New York to London in less than an hour.
The idea started out as a different Bombardier invention known as the Skreemr, an aircraft design according to NASA’s scramjets, experimental unmanned aircraft made to fly at hypersonic speeds. However the Skreemr didn’t address the problems of sonic boom and overheating that come from rapid acceleration.
After he published the Skreemr idea, Bombardier said an engineering firm that does work for NASA contacted him in regards to a new idea known as long-penetration mode, which redirects airflow in lowering heat, noise and vibration on hypersonic aircraft.
This prompted him to draft an entirely new supersonic jet: the Antipode.
It sounds elaborate – the type of thing engineers and scientists spend years focusing on – but Bombardier said it didn’t take him very long at all. “I didn’t spend seven years developing that idea; I spent a week developing that concept.”
He’s not attempting to create real-world products that can one day be marketed to the masses, but wants to obtain people referring to boundary-pushing concepts.
“I would like to know what others say,” he explained. “Is there an industry for that? What do you think about it? Will it work? Can we design an electric train engine that would be able to do that? The idea is to share it and get the feedback.”
This is why Bombardier doesn’t bother patenting his ideas.
“I started patenting the first few ideas – but it took so much effort and time to explain the technical invention and every one of that, which i chose to forget it and just skip that part.”
Asked if he’s worried that somebody will steal one of his concepts and switch it right into a money-maker, Bombardier said this is the whole idea.
“I’m being employed as an open innovator. I share my ideas freely with the world, so if anybody wants the concept, they are able to utilize it,” he explained. “If I don’t share it with anyone, the chances are it’s going to remain in my drawer for Ten years.”
Although it’s difficult to tell if his ideas have directly inspired other inventors, he said he’s seen products pop up that are much like his inventions. For example, his Wingsurf concept, a flying wing that the rider can get up on – akin to a wakeboard on the horizon – is reflected within the Wingboard developed by Alabama-based Wyp Aviation.
Most individuals are lucky when they show up with one great invention in their lifetimes, but Bombardier said his ideas just arrived at him unprompted while he’s lying during sex or driving around or reading a magazine.
“It’s a wide open process,” he explained. “I don’t sit and start to draft ideas on a board; it just comes up.”
Ultimately, Bombardier’s goal is twofold: inspire generation x of inventors while helping researchers show their ideas in a new light.
To that end, he is beginning a PhD in mechanical engineering at Universit de Sherbrooke and will set up an innovation lab on campus to help students turn their ideas into prototypes.
He has also published a magazine called Alpha that showcases 48 of his Imaginactive concepts, and he plans to finish an updated version this year he can give away for free to schoolchildren across the nation.
“By publishing my concepts I must inspire small children to pursue careers in engineering and perhaps entrepreneurship,” Bombardier said. “I’m looking for the following Joseph-Armand Bombardier.”
