Thanks to Hephaestus Heavy Industries opening the floodgates, more than a million new companies were registered in a very brief time. And following that, millions of patents for space-related equipment, ranging from cups and other dishes that were designed to incorporate gravity plating to ensure they didn’t spill during heavy maneuvers all the way to prospective capacitor banks and engines.
It wasn’t that the empire had released their technology to the public domain, but rather that people were allowed to incorporate the tech in their design as a kind of “black box” piece that they could license from the empire. The only requirement was that, if a design incorporated publicly known empire technology, the resulting object could only be manufactured by HHI. That was in the licensing agreement, and no negotiation on that clause would be accepted at all.
The empire, meanwhile, did absolutely nothing to stem the tide of the crowdsourced innovations. Quite a few things, in fact, had surprised both Aron and Felix with the thought processes behind them. Oddly enough, the dishes were what surprised them the most.
“I can’t believe we didn’t think of that,” Aron moaned, leaning back in his chair and covering his face with his palms.
Rina looked at him and snorted a soft giggle, then covered her mouth and looked shocked at the weird noise that had just come out of her mouth.
“We aren’t gods, so of course we’re gonna miss some things here and there,” Felix said, chagrined. “I can only wonder what else we forgot.”
Aron sat up straight and consciously cleared his expression. “We need to heavily reward the people who succeeded. There’s a lot of designs out there that aren’t very feasible, quite a few that barely meet the baseline in terms of performance, and a few that exceed them. But the people who think of things that we should’ve thought of and didn’t...” he sighed.
“How should we reward them?”
Felix looked troubled. “I’d say that I could hire them as designers at HHI, but that’d defeat the purpose of looking for ‘Lamarrs’. Plus, monopolies—even at their loosest—are downright terrible for the economy and we can’t afford that right now.”
“How about an award?” Rina suggested. “Give them money and recognition. The award will give them bragging rights for a long time, if not forever, and the money will be a more tangible thing.”
Aron nodded, then turned to Nova and said, “Notify the press corps. They’re to issue a press release in a week, Earth time. Make it a one-time 10,000 END award and a civilian medal. Call it the Innovation Award, and we’ll hold the award ceremony in...” he looked up at the ceiling and thought for a moment, “two months from now at the beginning of March. Make it a government ‘bank’ holiday called Innovation Day, March first.”
[Yes, sir,] Nova replied, then flickered as she sent the notifications to Gaia, who would distribute the tasks to the proper departments and follow up on them.
“So, when should we send out the offers?” Felix asked.
Aron pondered for a moment, then slowly said, “How about two weeks from now?”
If the empire sent out acceptance notifications too soon, it would instead have an opposite effect. People would think that corners had been cut in the testing process and wouldn’t trust the resulting hardware, no matter who designed it or who manufactured it. After all, everyone was still moving at the speed of humanity and couldn’t think or process information in picoseconds, unlike virtual and artificial intelligences.
The testing procedure used both of those. First, the designs were filtered through VIs, which had a strict set of instructions by which they tested them in the simulation. Any design that passed the VI filtering would then be assigned to Nova, who would simulate the product based on the design itself. She would be the final determiner of which designs would be passed on to the researchers in Lab City, who would refine the designs with practicality and comfort in mind, as well as ease of use.
After all, while idiotproofing things only ensured that better idiots would evolve, they still had to consider the end user. A cockpit design with five hundred unlabeled switches may in fact be the “best” in terms of performance, but a pilot would much rather have five clearly labeled switches when flying the aircraft. They naturally wouldn’t go as far as the US Army did, where the main battle tanks had a clearly labeled button that conspicuously stood out and had a large label that read “PUSH TO START”, but they would definitely make things easier for the end user to operate.
(Ed note: The M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank actually has that exact button in it. It’s conspicuously placed as the only button on a panel littered with indicator lights and has a four or five inch space around it to prevent tank drivers from hitting the indicator lights and wondering why the tank isn’t starting yet.)
......
Two weeks later, in Park Seo-Yeon’s living room.
The five partners behind Imugi-Danche were having a planning meeting when their phones all lit up and sounded a unique alert tone, indicating a message had been received from an imperial official. They all pulled out their phones and unlocked them, then a holographic display automatically lit up with a push notification from the imperial space agency.
[Congratulations, Imuge-Danche, on your design, patent 197-0002-813604-XT588V2-TEP pending, for being accepted into the Innovation Program. A representative will contact you within the next 48 hours with further details. Please follow this +link+ for more information on your rights and responsibilities as a company in the Innovation Program.
[Welcome to the team, Imugi-Danche!]
All five of the people in the room froze as they read the email on their holographic display screens, their mouths open so wide they could swallow a chicken’s egg without breaking the shell.
Then the shouting began a full three minutes later after they all came out of their collective stare state and leapt at each other, jumping up and down in a jubilant group hug. They had done it!
“This calls for a celebration!” Kim Ye-Jin shouted, and went to the kitchen. He soon came back with a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne.
He popped the cork and champagne foam covered the five celebrating friends, who didn’t care in the least about the mess and poured each other a glass.
“To the innovation program and the empire!” Park Seo-Yeon shouted as he raised his champagne flute. “And to the emperor, long may he reign!”
