Why I won’t patent my brilliant idea

In the past 30 years, I have driven about 8,000 miles in France in right-hand-drive cars. And I would be lying if I denied that one or two of those miles hadn’t been driven on the left-hand side of the road. This scared the life out of me. One second’s inattention elevated my risk of dying in a gruesome accident to levels previously experienced only by 1950s racing drivers or country and western singers.

Yet driving on the other side of the road is surprisingly easy — provided you start out on the other side of the road. The error occurs in the first minute of driving: setting off at dawn on an empty road, or when befuddled after stopping at a petrol station, where normal lane rules don’t apply.

So could someone please make a device that plugs into a car’s cigarette lighter, and that chimes every time you start the engine to remind you to drive on the right (or left)? Such a device might cost a few pounds to manufacture and could sell for £20. It would also be easy to market, since the only places you’d need to sell them would be at ferry ports, Le Shuttle and airport car-rental firms.

Why don’t I patent this idea? For all I know, it may already be patented. But if not, I still don’t want to patent it myself, for both ethical and self-interested reasons. For one thing, I don’t want to present legal obstacles to the creation of a life-saving product. The other reason is more complex: any idea is more likely to become widely adopted if many people can freely experiment with its possibilities without being mired in legal restrictions.

Having read Matt Ridley’s recent book How Innovation Works, I am now convinced that commonly held beliefs about innovation — and how to foster it — put cart before horse.