The Vanishing Link

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Summary

Germany once had three types of inventors. The institutional inventor, embedded in corporations and universities, with resources but without freedom. The garage inventor, celebrated as a folk hero but structurally isolated. And a third type — the vanishing link: the industrially qualified independent inventor who had both technical depth and economic independence. This type has systematically disappeared.

In the mid-1990s, independent inventors still accounted for a quarter of all German patent applications. Today the figure is 3.7 percent. The essay analyses the structural causes: wrong funding programmes, the debt trap of institutional finance, industry resistance to inconvenient technologies, and a state that — not through conspiracy but through structural complicity — built its innovation system for investors rather than inventors.

The essay draws on decades of firsthand experience with the polygon turning process — a manufacturing technology patented in 1983 that has run in large-scale industrial production at SKF for over 30 years, while the inventor stood outside the door when the machine finally started running.