He found the standard power strip maddening because electric plugs would often block the adjacent sockets. So, after his senior year in high school, while attending a summer programme at the Rhode Island School of Design, he devised an adjustable power strip that solved that problem. But his product concept - a brief description, drawings and a crude mock-up - went nowhere until he was a senior in college. At that point, he sent digital versions of his sketches to a start-up called Quirky.
Quirky's designers and engineers refined the concept. "They made it a much more elegant solution," he said. Quirky also handled the manufacturing and marketing, secured a patent and listed Zien as the lead inventor. A year later, in 2011, the snakelike adjustable strip, Pivot Power, was on its way to store shelves.
Zien, 25, now gets a few cents on the dollar for every Pivot Power sold. A software designer in New York, Zien has collected more than $700,000, and counting.
This flexible power strip is the biggest hit so far for Quirky, founded in 2009. The company, based in Manhattan, is a curious creation of the Internet era, a hybrid of the digital and physical worlds. It is a social network, an online retailer and an industrial designer, manufacturer and marketer.
Ben Kaufman, the company's 28-year-old founder and chief executive, calls it "a modern invention machine," whose mission is to commercialise product ideas.
Quirky is Exhibit A for the case that a digital-age renaissance of the small inventor is not only possible but underway. The company taps an online community of one million registered users. More than 400 Quirky-generated products have made it to the marketplace so far.
The company is also a laboratory for testing how far the crowd-based model of innovation and product development can go. Quirky's ultimate goal, Kaufman insists, is to create an engine that accelerates the process of identifying and developing new ideas for all kinds of products. "I'd like Quirky to be a utility like electricity," he said.
Investors are betting that Quirky can build a sizable business. The company has raised $185 million to date. General Electric (GE), the nation's largest manufacturer, has put in $30 million, as part of a partnership to experiment with faster-paced models of manufacturing. The rest of the money has come mainly from venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz.
To realise its ambitious goals, however, Quirky has to go beyond making small-bore products that you could imagine hanging in the aisle of Bed Bath & Beyond, like the Pivot Power. Other popular Quirky products include a gadget for separating egg yolks, a plastic stem that inserts into a lemon or a lime and becomes a push-button spritzer, and a corkscrew that cuts the foil off a wine bottle and doubles as a pour spout. Smart, perhaps, but not essential for a networked future.
That is starting to change. Quirky is pursuing the much-promoted vision of the smart home, or the consumer Internet of Things. The strategy and the timing are guided in part by its inventor community. A quarter of the 4,000 product ideas Quirky fields each week are for products, like light switches and air conditioners, that can communicate with a smartphone or a household Wi-Fi network.
Big companies, not just lone inventors, will increasingly be part of Quirky's future. It says a handful of companies have lined up for its new corporate partnership programme, which builds on Quirky's experience with GE. Though it is not identifying them yet, the new partners will include large companies that make toys, audio equipment and kitchenware. The products created will carry the tagline "powered by Quirky," but will be sold under the big companies' brands.
The corporate-partner strategy is intended to allow Quirky to focus on its design talents while it benefits from the marketing and manufacturing muscle of the large enterprises. But it creates the potential for a culture clash. Big companies want to pick up innovation tips from Quirky, but they will be encountering a corporate culture whose essence Kaufman defines as "a complete disregard for the way things are supposed to be done".
Quirky's motto is "We make invention accessible." For any individual inventor the odds are long. Still, what Quirky has done for many inventors is to make placing a product on store shelves an attainable aspiration. And that has attracted a crowd of enthusiasts: a million registered users, 66 per cent male, with the largest single cluster between the ages of 26 to 36. There are Quirky members in 165 countries, but a majority are Americans.
For its hard work, Quirky takes 90 cents of each dollar of product sales. The other 10 cents is distributed among the inventor community. The person who came up with the product idea typically pockets 4 cents of that. Lesser shares go for contributions like enhancing the idea, choosing the price or coming up with the name.
With nearly 300 employees, it is growing fast. The company is private and does not make public its financial reports, but Kaufman says Quirky's revenue more than doubled in 2014, to $100 million.
How far Quirky can go from here depends on the pace at which the smart-home market develops. Someday, homes will be more intelligent, safer and more energy-efficient as devices including light bulbs, doors, window shades, water heaters and lawn sprinklers become able to communicate and respond to and learn from users' digital commands. It's beginning to happen, but slowly.
© 2015 The New York Times News Service