Thomas Astebro, a researcher who studied the fates of almost 1,100 new inventions submitted by eager innovators, found that less than 10 percent of them reached the market, and of those that did, 60 percent got negative returns. Half of the inventors withdrew after receiving objective reviews predicting that their inventions were sure to fail, but 47 percent of the remaining half persisted, doubling their initial losses before quitting. Six out of the roughly 1,100 inventions scored big, however: they yielded returns exceeding 1,400 percent.
