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KATHLEEN CEI PHOTO Open season on ideas: Co-authors Barry Nalebuff (right) and Ian Ayres (left) believe we could be on the cusp of an new age of ingenuity.

Barry Nalebuff is on the phone in his office at the Yale School of Management talking to the BBC about colored salt. He's being interviewed about a new book he co-wrote with Yale law prof Ian Ayres. Colored salt will allow you to know exactly how much you're putting on your food, he says. It's a good idea, like the hundreds of other good ideas in his book and its companion Web site.

The book's about ingenuity, he's saying. It's positive--it's about problem-solving.

It's about pay-as-you-go auto insurance. 1 It's about building a better brake light. 2 It's about an alarm clock that won't rouse a sleeping spouse. 3 It's about using anonymous campaign contributions to get the sleaze out of politics. 4 It's about getting those damn customer service reps to call you back instead of keeping you on hold. 5 Or making it policy to return your VHS tapes un-rewound. 6

In short, he's telling the BBC interviewer in his cluttered Hillhouse Avenue office, it's about the untapped potential of our collective brain power.

Nalebuff, who's almost as dishevelled as his office and has a hint of Jon Lovitz in his enthusiastic grin, is not exaggerating. Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small (Harvard Business School Press) could have one of those oh-so-trendy mass-marketed subtitles like: The Ideas That Could Change the World.

Sound pie-in-the-sky? Sure. But through their book and Web site (http://www.whynot.net/>), Nalebuff and Ayres are tapping into a percolating movement filled with people--from academicians to untrained dreamers--who imagine a better way of doing things. By providing a meeting place, the Web site, the authors believe that some of the ideas will gestate, evolve and ultimately take hold. Nalebuff has seen it happen: He created his own beverage company from an idea (marketing unsweetened, organic iced tea) and has developed a mortgage insurance plan that has helped revive a city. One day, he believes, some of the ideas in the book and on the Web site will also blossom. Maybe you'll be able to get a mortgage that automatically refinances when rates go down. Or maybe your cell phone plan will automatically adjust to give you the best rate for your calling habits. Or maybe someone will come up with something else that will make our day-to-day lives better, save us money, or do both.

Don't be fooled by the name or the Harvard Business School imprint: Why Not? is an easy, stimulating three- or four-hour read that's likely to set your mind ablaze.

Disguised as a business how-to book to teach you methods for analyzing data and looking at problems to find new ways to innovate solutions, Why Not? is more accurately a call to arms, the name itself derived from Bobby Kennedy's famous paraphrase of George Bernard Shaw: "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream of things that never were and say why not?"

Since Kennedy's blood-shortened quest to make things better, our culture has turned inward, less prone to massive community-building and bare-knuckle fixit-ness. "We have drifted into complacency," Nalebuff argues, listing in a kind of "post-9-11 entrenchment," afraid to tackle problems both large and small. Conventional wisdom trumps new ideas. We're running in place, putting up with all sorts of inefficiencies and inconveniences because no one knows what to do with their ideas. American brainpower is locked in neutral as the Average Joe or Joanne keeps their thoughts secret, afraid of having them stolen, someone else making a buck.

But good ideas rarely get stolen and even more rarely get heard. Nalebuff, a premier economic theorist at Yale, can explain--and does so convincingly--why this behavior is self-defeating. It may be counterintuitive, he argues, but revealing your secret ideas, putting them out in the world and giving them a life of their own, provides the best chance for your ideas to flourish.

His goal: "To get people to be innovative and ingenious and to think about possibilities."

"Until recently," Nalebuff and Ayres write, "the economy looked to technology as the engine for innovation. Many great ideas have been born there. But the emphasis on high-tech, bio-tech and the Internet has meant that ideas hatched from everyday ingenuity have been overlooked."

The collective ingenuity could be an enormous human resource, they theorize. Only we have constructed a society that has put all sorts of barriers to developing ideas: In the corporate world, innovators compete against each other to solve problems. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, might be racing to come up with a female-equivalent for Viagra. But Pfizer ain't sharing its research with Bayer, and somewhere between West Haven and Groton if the two companies would only get together, sexually dysfunctional women all across the Big Blue globe could be living more satisfied lives.

"Companies don't know what to do with ideas," Nalebuff argues. "Middle management kills them. If companies would adopt technology inside to allow people to get their ideas heard throughout the organization, it's a no-brainer."

It's the entrepreneurial equivalent of computer technology's Open Source movement, in which techies and programmers give away their code so that others can improve upon it, and everyone benefits. By sharing ideas, Nalebuff contends, innovators can get priceless market research--testing concepts with people thinking about the same problems, and figuring out solutions to roadblocks. "You get a sophisticated discussion by opening it up to the community," Nalebuff argues. "God is in the details."

Another reason to broadcast your ideas: "This is a skill to develop. You could get a reputation for having great ideas, and it stimulates other things." He does admit to one caveat: "There might be things you want to keep proprietary," he says, especially ideas that are actually in commercial development.

But many ideas--like the colored salt--are of no use to the idea-generator. Unless you are a salt-producer, you can't possibly benefit. The idea is not patentable, and Morton, for example, could simply borrow the idea and put you out of business.

But coming forward with potentially commercial ideas is not always self-defeating. As an academic, Nalebuff has studied this question carefully. In his book Co-opetition, he argues that companies that cooperate in developing new products often create new markets and increase profits for all the businesses involved.

He also has experience putting his academic ideas to the test as an entrepreneur. He has cashed in on one idea that he actually pitched to the Pepsi corporation. Pepsi wasn't interested, and Nalebuff now helps run a company that takes in $6 million a year. The company is Honest Tea, which bottles and markets unsweetened and minimally sweetened organic tea, primarily in health and gourmet food stores. By going to Pepsi first, Nalebuff was reasonably assured that the beverage behemoth would not enter the market on its own after he had invested tens of thousands of dollars in the project.

Not all good ideas spring from a profit motive. Nalebuff has helped revive Syracuse, N.Y., by starting a non-profit organization that created what amounts to equity insurance for homebuyers. The city, wracked by massive layoffs at Carrier Corp., watched real estate values plummet. By charging new homebuyers a small fee of 1.5 percent of their mortgage (about $900 for a typical Syracuse mortgage), the non-profit guaranteed to protect their equity by making up some of the difference in value if the houses sold for less than they paid. (In order to avoid mortgage scammers, the payoff would be based not on the sale of a single house, but on an average market value of home sales in each ZIP Code.). This created a safety net for homebuyers, and the real estate market has recovered. "Because home equity insurance helps stabilize housing prices," Ayres and Nalebuff write, "it can break the self-perpetuating cycle of lower prices and falling demand." Nalebuff hopes to bring the program to other cities.

Nalebuff and Ayres both sense that we may be at the cusp of a new era of ingenuity--that people are getting tired of commonplace hassles and a lack of progress.

"I don't want to claim that it can solve all the world's problems," says Ayres in a phone interview. "I think this democratization of ingenuity is important. People should know and get back in touch with the idea that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to come up with a good idea."

The catalyst is the Web site. After just a few months online, whynot.net has already had over 100,000 hits. It's full not only of ideas, but of a community responding to the ideas, amplifying them, working out the kinks.

Nalebuff is in the unique position of being able to take some of the ideas and pitch them to the business elites who visit the Yale School of Management. He spoke with the CEO of Nissan recently, he says, about installing MP3-ready stereos in pre-installed car systems. And about putting electrical outlets in cars so you won't need to buy those annoying cigarette lighter adapters for each cell phone, laptop computer or air purifier.

Other ideas on the site include a complex anti-spam strategy in which users would create variable e-mail addresses all delivering mail to the same box. As soon as one starts circulating to the annoying mass marketers, it would be simple to have all the messages to that address blocked. (Another solution: Charge a small fee per message. The price would be small to send legit mail, but those sending millions of unwanted messages daily would have to cut down on their spam.) Another use of e-mail: Overnight delivery services could use the technology to let you know exactly when they will be dropping off a package to reduce missed deliveries. Once you start thinking this way the possibilities are endless: The same concept can be applied to phone and cable companies, who never provide the precise time their technicians will make service calls. The workers could use wireless technology as the day progresses to provide a more accurate estimate of when they might actually knock on your door.

One of Nalebuff's and Ayres' favorites is a proposal to have experts record MP3 files of walking tours of historical sites, such as museums or interesting neighborhoods. The audio files would be available for download from the Internet.

Whynot.net is one of about 20 similar Web sites doing much the same thing. (The links are available on whynot.net.) Some are humorous, like halfbakery.com, on which someone suggested creating "animated panties" that would come with "custom LED displays." Other sites, such as the MIT Media Lab-hatched thinkcycle.org and the heavy tech-laden yet2.com are scientific-serious.

One of the more serious sites is shouldexist.org, on which one post suggests that technology be used to improve mass transit. The idea: Use GPS and other technology to let bus and train commuters know exactly when the next bus/train will arrive at their stop. Someone named "petere" has this all thought out, and concluded with this comment: "This was just an idea that formed in my head when I was stoned and waiting for a bus, but I think now as I write this that a system like [this] can be a valuable service for commuters who are dependent on public transportation to help them get where they're going."

Someone on globalideasbank.org had a suggestion about giving kids credit for tutoring other students. "Kids who know a lot are rarely put to much use, and rarely get much from their knowledge aside from grades. A great way to validate a child's learning (and teaching) skills would be to give them the opportunity to use those skills in helping their peers learn."

Some sites are product-oriented. Totallyabsurd.com highlights silly inventions, like a plexiglass shield to separate warring siblings in the back of the car.

Then there's Eric Zorn's Idea Oven ericzorn.com/ideaoven>, a site in which he spews out what look to be short bursts of unedited ideas, some silly ("move the Super Bowl to Saturday"), some more useful (add .xxx or .porn to the list of domain names to make it easier to block porn sites, an idea that also springs up on whynot.net).

Already, Ayres and Nalebuff are further evolving the whynot franchise. They're thinking of developing a board game, like Balderdash, in which players will brainstorm possible solutions to world problems, and vote on the ideas they like the best. Perhaps the ideas can then be posted on a Web site. And Ayres spoke last week about moving whynot.net to the next level, and actively linking some of the better ideas through basic networking to the people in positions to make them work. "Our focus is on idea generation," says Nalebuff, "but the process can lead to implementation."

"The last three weeks I'm feeling a lot more optimistic about tapping in to the excess mental capacity of our fellow citizens," says Ayres. "There is this great technological capacity where you can tap into the unused CPU power" of online computers. I kind of feel that there's the same potential with regard to our project. It's like the good version of The Matrix, where you voluntarily let people have some of your extra ingenuity capacity."

jmamis@newhavenadvocate.com

1. Society has developed a complicated apparatus for buying auto insurance, based on geography and demographics and not on how much you drive. Nalebuff and Ayres propose selling car insurance as an add-on to the price of gasoline. Therefore your payment for insurance will be directly proportional to how much you drive, with built-in inducements away from gas-guzzlers. According to Why Not?: "University of California economist Aaron Edlin calculates that if the per-mile fee reflected the incremental risk, driving would be cut back by about 7 percent, and there would be insurance savings of more than $8 billion per year. (The reduced driving would also cut back on congestion, leading to another $8 billion in annual savings.)"

2. A recent post on whynot.net suggests making brake lights brighter the harder you hit the brake, giving drivers the benefit of anticipating how quickly you'll stop.

3. Nalebuff talks about a clock that transmits a signal to a soft wrist band that vibrates at a pre-set time, similar to turning your cell phone off "ring."

4. The problem: Major campaign contributors have too much influence in electoral politics. The solution: Ayres has long advocated for anonymous campaign contributions. In the book (and in previously published articles) he has worked out an elaborate system whereby all contributions to political campaigns would be untraceable. Since politicians will be unable to know for sure who is contributing to their campaigns, they will be less beholden to big spenders.

5. With caller ID and other phone technology, busy corporate phone lines can identify your phone number and automatically call you back when a customer service rep is available to speak with you. "Arranging for an airline to call you back would be no harder than hanging on hold. With caller ID, you wouldn't even have to enter a number. The airline could simply play an announcement: All agents are currently busy. Your call is very important to us. That's why we will be calling you back in approximately six minutes. If you'd like us to call back another time, please enter that time now."

6. Most video stores demand--some more politely than others--that customers rewind tapes before returning them. "What would happen if we flipped around the norm and asked people to rewind at the beginning instead of the end of their rental?" Nalebuff and Ayres wonder. "The downside is that renters would have to endure a bit of delayed gratification while waiting for the movie to rewind before watching. But the upside is that the task suddenly becomes impossible to shirk."

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