Any Bright Ideas?

Fleming, a clinical psychologist, is the man behind SparkBugg.com, a blog about ideas, based on his belief that -- surprise! -- ideas beget more ideas. Which is why he's not overly concerned about someone stealing his.

Besides, he says, "it needs to be your own baby to really run with it, to really believe in it."

Says Don Kelly, president of the United Inventors Association: "People in general are clueless as to where to start and how much actual work and dedication has to go into it."

Only 54 percent of patent applications receive approval, according to the patent office. A patent application typically costs upward of $3,000 and can easily run more than $20,000, depending on the complexity of the patent and whether an inventor chooses to hire a patent lawyer (as opposed to a patent agent) to write the claims.

"Inventing is a crapshoot," Levy says. "It's a high-wire act without a net."

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As local inventors go, Frampton Ellis, 62, is a success story. The Arlington resident earned his first patent for an athletic shoe designed to limit ankle injuries by mimicking the bare foot -- an idea that came to him one day while he was playing basketball without shoes and noticed that his naked foot provided more stability than his sneakers.

The result: Ellis got the big payoff. In 1994, he signed a licensing agreement with Adidas, and the company trotted out its Feet You Wear line based on his design. Steffi Graf won the 1996 U.S. Open wearing the shoes.

Later, when Adidas stopped paying royalties in 2001, Ellis had to litigate. He won the suit -- and a hefty settlement, though he won't disclose the amount.

But none of this would have come to be if Ellis hadn't spent seven years tinkering with and peddling his invention, sacrificing nights, weekends and vacation time while holding a full-time job as a budget analyst. He estimates that he spent close to $200,000 on patents and a prototype of the shoe. To market it, he attended trade shows and networked with industry engineers. At one footwear convention, he hopped onto a table barefoot to demonstrate his design -- a desperate attempt to call attention to his product.

"That took some guts," he says.

Indeed. Inventing requires intrepidness and persistence. After all, even Edison acknowledged that genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.