No table saw maker would sell a safer blade, because being the one who did would prove the others were negligent

the problem

A safety improvement can be individually rational for every company in an industry to reject, even when every company privately agrees it works: if one manufacturer adopts it and the others don't, a court can read that adoption as an admission that the non-adopting products were unreasonably dangerous all along, making partial industry adoption more legally dangerous than no adoption at all

background

what everyone would do

Keep pursuing a licensing deal with the major power-tool manufacturers -- the standard path for an outside inventor with a safety improvement, since they already have the manufacturing scale, distribution and customer base to bring it to market fastest.

what they saw

Gass saw that the industry's refusal wasn't about cost or doubt the technology worked, it was a structural legal trap: any single manufacturer adopting the brake selectively would look, in court, like an admission that its other saws were knowingly dangerous. No amount of persuading any one company could fix that, because the problem wasn't their judgment, it was the shared liability calculus every manufacturer in the industry faced identically.

the move

Rather than continuing to seek a licensing partner from inside an industry structurally motivated to say no, Gass founded SawStop and began manufacturing and selling table saws directly, bypassing the licensing deadlock entirely. Being a saw maker rather than a technology vendor meant SawStop didn't need any incumbent's cooperation or exposure calculus to align — it simply put a safer product on shelves next to theirs and let the market see the difference.

why it works

Becoming a saw manufacturer himself removed Gass's need for any incumbent's cooperation entirely -- as an outside competitor introducing a genuinely new product line, SawStop faced none of the retroactive-liability exposure an existing manufacturer would create by adding the brake to only some of its saws, since SawStop had no prior unequipped lineup to have implicitly endorsed as adequate. Selling directly let the market, rather than a licensing negotiation, decide whether the technology was worth paying for, and once a proven, commercially available safer product existed on shelves, regulators had something concrete to point to when building a case for an industry-wide mandate that no individual manufacturer could have created by adopting the technology alone.

the payoff

SawStop table saws have sold in the tens of thousands since the company's 2004 launch, and after two decades of the underlying patents largely being unavailable to license, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission moved in 2024 toward mandating flesh-detection safety brakes on all new table saws sold in the United States — a standard that would not have had a proven, commercially available technology to point to without SawStop having built and sold the product itself. In a notable reversal at a February 2024 CPSC hearing, SawStop's parent company pledged to dedicate its key remaining patent to the public if the mandate passed.

where it breaks

This escape route only works when the blocked party can plausibly become a direct competitor in the same market -- it requires enough capital, manufacturing capability and distribution access to launch a competing product, which is a far higher bar than simply licensing a technology to an existing player. It can also backfire once the outsider succeeds: having sidestepped the industry's liability trap by building market power of its own, the same company can become reluctant to license the technology it fought to introduce, recreating a version of the original adoption bottleneck under new ownership.

what came after

SawStop remains cited in product-safety and innovation-economics discussions as the clearest modern example of an inventor sidestepping an industry-wide adoption deadlock by becoming a direct competitor rather than staying a vendor dependent on incumbents' cooperation — though the same market power that let SawStop force the issue later drew its own criticism, with competitors alleging in CPSC filings that once established, SawStop grew reluctant to license the technology on terms that would let rivals catch up.

references

1. [1]KTOO / NPR — After years of trying, the US government may finally mandate safer table sawsKTOO (NPR), 2024ktoo.org
2. [2]ToolGuyd — Companies Allege SawStop Refused to License Safety TechToolGuyd, 2024toolguyd.com

keep it

same kind of clever

• 2000 · AIGA Design for DemocracyAfter Florida's 'butterfly ballot' cost thousands of voters their intended vote, the people who fixed it weren't election lawyers — they were typographers.
• 2001 · Richard Ankrom / CaltransAn artist tired of missing his exit built a Caltrans-perfect sign and installed it himself
• 2017 · Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) / Australian Taxation OfficeAustralia's tax office cut inflated deduction claims by writing to the accountant, not the taxpayer