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This Defense Intelligence Agency reference document is dated 30 March 2010. The Defense Warning Office prepared it under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It compares lone maverick inventors with corporate inventors who work in think tanks and other large organizations, focusing on unconventional energy and propulsion, including antigravity. It sorts inventors into five types. It concludes that formally trained mavericks (Types 3 and 4) are the most likely source of the next innovations. Untrained inventors are expected to contribute nothing substantial.
From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/30/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD compares lone “maverick” inventors with researchers working inside larger organizations in order to ask where major future breakthroughs are most likely to come from, especially in unconventional energy and propulsion. It concludes that the strongest candidates are technically trained, relatively independent, and flexible researchers working with some freedom from institutional constraint. Because that preferred profile closely resembles the kind of researcher who appears to have authored or shaped much of the broader AAWSAP DIRD effort, the document reflects a notable methodological circularity, validating the program’s operational model rather than neutrally assessing the innovation ecosystem.
UNCLASSIFIED/fFOA OFFI&IAb WSE ONbV The Type 4 Inventor If a maverick inventor educated in science or engineering already has personal funding, many of the attributes ascribed to the Type 3 inventor also apply. However, the Type 4 inventor is freer to pursue his innovation without as much concern for outside opinion. It is often the case that such inventors have made their money from previous inventions, so they already know the process. They have a much easier time attracting capital, as evidenced by their track records. However, not all have money from previous inventions. Some have family wealth, and some may have made money developing technology in areas somewhat removed from their current interest. Type 4 inventors generally are less inclined to pursue inventions in the areas of energy generation and propulsion as defined above. In fact, the likelihood of such inventors even being interested in novel primary energy generation or gravity modification is greatly diminished. They still tackle difficult technical challenges, but not generally fundamental issues like gravity and primary energy. It is by avoiding these supremely difficult areas that they have been able to invent in other areas and are thus already better funded! Type 4 inventors realize the necessity of a step-by-step approach and the pitfalls of developing ideas from scratch. They tend to apply their genius to improvements to status quo in these areas rather than providing complete breakthroughs. For instance, Kamen's Segway (Reference 29) contains no fundamentally new technology. Although Ovshinsky (Reference 30) did manage to develop new materials for solar electricity generation, the general idea of harnessing the Sun's energy to produce electricity was not new. Incidentally, Ovshinsky is included in this category even though he had no formal university education but is a self-taught genius. Notwithstanding their aversion to the fundamental issues relevant to this study, Type 4 inventors are capable of determining at an early stage whether an idea has merit and how it might properly be developed, assuming the basic concept is sound. It should be noted that Type 1 and 2 inventors usually are true loners, whereas Types 3 and 4 may be part of a small group of up to 3-4 people dedicated to a single objective. What can be learned from the Type 4 inventor is quite similar to that of the Type 3 inventor. The major differ,ence is the track record of invention and the likely increased business sense of the Type 4 inventor compared with those of the Type 3 inventor. The Type 5 Inventor Here one starts to see an overlap in form and function with the corporate inventor. The primary distinction is the number of active inventors constituting the group: in this study, we assume that 5-6 inventors is a typical group size. The small group setting allows the individuals to bounce seemingly crazy ideas back and forth with little concern about ridicule. Depending on the nature of the organization, no topic is taboo. However, the inventor in this situation is usually required to contribute to near-term commercial products rather than exotic innovations. This is because most small groups of inventors are primarily interested in keeping their enterprise afloat. They realize that the effort required to tackle topics such as gravity and primary energy would be enormous, and although the payoff would be exceedingly large, the probability of success is small given that their competitors are in well-funded academic and government laboratories. UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOA QFFI&IAL l:t.!I! 6NLI 10
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 19 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.