by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Daniel Paquette stops to grab a long, fluorescent-orange broomstick in the corner of his invention boutique in a highrise at 4050 Rosemont, at the corner of Pie IX. Paquette, a retired Montreal police patrolman, produces and markets the stick as something to shove into your lawn to demarcate the line where snowblowers should not pass.

"I had the idea after noticing people were putting up old hockey sticks so their lawns wouldn't get ruined," he says. "Now I sell 50,000 of them a year to Canadian Tire," where they retail for about three bucks.

Others have tried unsuccessfully to grab his lawn marker market. He demonstrates the competition, a thin plastic rod with a reflector at its head. "These cost $8, they break easily and others will steal them, but nobody's going to steal an orange broomstick."

Paquette, like Q in the invention lab of 007 flicks, displays a variety of newly developed gizmos that line the walls of his penthouse office. The ingenious yet often simple products are the creations of inventors who have shelled out between $2,000 and $5,000 for the assistance of Paquette's crew, who evaluate and do the patenting for various clever contraptions at Montreal's Inventarium (www.inventarium.com).

Headstraps and back scrubbers

"People with ideas for inventions see that I'm an inventor, so I'm their brother," he says. "I also understand that their invention is their baby."

This lineage makes him the spiritual uncle to such products as Paul Lampron's all-purpose spatula, equipped with an arm that affords cooks a squeeze-like grip on the item being scraped from the skillet. Nearby sits a small headstrap invented by a mom from Sept-Îles. Its purpose is to stabilize the drooping heads of infants dozing in car seats. Then there's a loofa-like wall-mounted back scrubber, the invention of Joliette's Florent Thiffault. "It's for people who don't have somebody to scrub their backs for them in the shower," says Paquette. "I've never tried it because I shower with my wife."

Also displayed is a support that helps motorists prop newspapers or laptops on their steering wheel, while parked, ideally. "If I was still a cop and saw you driving around with something on your steering wheel I'd pull you over for sure," he says.

Paquette moved his Inventarium from a Masson Street storefront to the buzzer-code building because of rubberneckers. "It became a tourist attraction," he recalls. "All sorts of people were just coming in and not buying."

No millionaires here

One misconception he tries to blast in conversation and in his three books is that a single invention will get you rich. "A big invention might come along once every 20 years. ‘Invention' and ‘millionaire' seem to go together in people's minds, but most won't make you all that much money."

One surprisingly unprofitable invention is Paquette's now-ubiquitous school bus arm that shoots a stop sign out when a bus stops. He says he dreamt it up a decade back but allowed it to go unpatented. "I didn't do it for the money, I did it for the safety of the children because I read that 22 Quebec children had been run over in previous years."

The commercial triumphs he's nurtured include the sweet-scented and rehydratable Tutti Frutti modelling clay invented by Micheline Desbiens of Lorraine. Another seller is Yves Ponton's $40 box of matchsticks with the flammable end removed, with which you build model boats. The cornucopia of table games displayed is less in demand. "People invent a lot of these games but they don't really move," he says.

Paquette's Inventarium offers would-be inventors a free technical evaluation by pros who sift ideas through a series of practical criteria, including potential market. His advice to inventors is to avoid frothy over-exuberance. "Take it slow. Don't get suckered into paying a lot of money to a patent lawyer."