nytimes.com -

As inventions go, Jake Zien’s was a clever fix rather than an imaginative breakthrough: Irritation was the mother of his invention.

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 program 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 Mr. Zien as the lead inventor. A year later, in 2011, the snakelike adjustable strip, Pivot Power, was on its way to store shelves.

photo CC by Alexander Baxevanis