What's a Haddock?
It's a fish. It's a captain. And it's an invention lab.
Founded in 2006 on the back of a $20 heat sealer bought on eBay, those of us at Haddock have spent our youth gleefully working on clean energy, clean water, and green packaging disruptions for our clients and for our own initiatives and spin-outs.
As an invention lab, Haddock is different than a startup in that we work on three to five projects concurrently. And we typically work on the entire life of a technology, from the initial need assessment, through constraint and concept development, on through prototypes and finally through the initial manufacturing runs.
Our heroes are Albert Einstein, Jeri Ellsworth, Elon Musk, Paul Polak, Thomas Edison, Amy Smith, and Marcel DuChamp. And we love to meet people who have different heroes.
Harder problems = better solutions.
Most of the products we develop have the potential for “confluence”, or applications in both the developing and wealthy world. We've found that whenever new products are developed to serve new customers at radically different price points, incremental innovation produced by incumbent industry giants is wiped away by a leap forward.
Confluent technologies that Haddock and our partners are working on were developed to solve some challenge in emerging markets, under the pressure of cost constraints very different from the constraints in Silicon Valley.
Our core belief is that emerging markets are the breeding ground for new innovations that will topple industries, not despite their constraints but because of them.
For the first time, the lack of electricity and the scarcity of clean water in the small village of La Borgne, Haiti can force into existence new solutions that have the power to overturn multi-billion dollar empires across the economic divide in rich cities like Tokyo and San Francisco. That is what Haddock and our partners in the Ocean Invention Network are all about – teasing out great inventions from the confluence.
Our invention philosophy
- Simpler is better.
- Frugal engineering. A $0.10 water disinfection system will be fundamentally different than a $100 device. We treat the target device cost as the most important factor in product development, a constraint that often forces into existence new and better technologies.
- Invention happens around the whole world, as often in La Borgne, Haiti as in Silicon Valley. Combining the talents of inventors, designers, and engineers from around the world is the key to solving big problems.
Questions? Email us at