Dyson has just launched the CameraJet, a toothbrush with a built in camera that fires a jet of water at exactly the right spot in your mouth instead of flossing. It’s the latest example of a company that spends years on research before it ships a product, the same approach it took with hair before building its haircare range.

But chatting with Jake Dyson, the company’s Chief Engineer and son of founder Sir James Dyson, the conversation goes well beyond one product launch. Two things came up that say a lot about how Dyson sees itself in an industry that moves faster and copies harder than ever before.

“It’s not a two year time gap anymore, it’s three months”

Dyson has a long history of fighting knockoffs in court, something Jake Dyson brought up unprompted when asked how hard it is to protect genuine innovation in a market flooded with cheap imitators.

“There’s always something in our products that is protected, and we hope it will always be the critical thing that makes a difference in its performance,” he said.

“But there are people that copy. There always will be. And the upsetting thing is it’s not just a two year time gap or a year. It’s like three months now.”

It’s not just the products either, according to Jake Dyson. He says copycats are going after the whole brand.

“It’s not only the products they’re copying, they’re copying our advertising, they’re copying our identity. It’s very upsetting.”

His frustration comes from what actually goes into a Dyson product before it reaches shelves. The CameraJet alone took six years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in research into human mouths and teeth. He says that investment gets wiped out by companies that skip the hard part entirely.

“We invest sometimes six years, develop technology, millions and millions of pounds, to do what other people aren’t brave enough to do or haven’t got the patience to do. And then they come along and copy it and have it in six months and don’t do any of the hard work or the investment. It’s very unjust.”

His solution is a bold one. Jake Dyson wants intellectual property protection for inventors to work the same way copyright works for creative work, and to last a lifetime rather than expire after a set number of years.

“My honest opinion is the protection for people that innovate and develop products should be the same as an author or songwriter. And it should be for life, not just for a number of years. And it should be a lot stricter.”

It’s a genuinely interesting position from a company that has spent over a decade in litigation defending its own inventions, and one worth watching given how quickly cheap alternatives now follow every major product launch, in vacuum cleaners, hairdryers and now likely oral care too.

Project Orbit: appliances that call home before they break

The second big idea Jake Dyson is personally driving at Dyson right now is something the public hasn’t heard much about yet, an internal initiative called Project Orbit.

The idea is simple to explain but a big shift for how appliances work. Every connected Dyson product gets sensors that constantly monitor its own health, and the company gets visibility into that data at scale.

“One of the things that I’ve been championing and steering at the moment is this new project called Orbit, which we have in the company, where we’re connecting all of our products,” he said.

“We have sensors inside the product that can sense the battery health, the telemetry, whether there’s a blockage in the product, whether there’s something wrong with the motor.”

That means Dyson can, in theory, see the state of every single one of its machines in use around the world, and step in before something actually fails.

“We can see every single product out there in the world in use, its health and the state of that product. And then, if for example there’s a problem with the battery or there’s a blockage in a machine, we can send a notification straight to the customer with an animated video showing how to unblock it themselves and where the blockage is in the machine.”

Compare that to the current experience of a broken appliance. Ring a call centre, hold, explain the problem, answer a string of questions, and hope someone can diagnose it over the phone.

“Whereas before they would have to pick up the phone and spend 10 minutes getting their details, going through the questions, and it’s painful. So we’re automating that process, and it’s a wonderful experience for the consumer.”

There’s a benefit for Dyson too. All that usage data feeds back into how future products are designed, and even lets Dyson push improvements to machines people already own.

“We’re learning from how they’re using machines, and we can then improve their machines, not only in future designs, but on software upgrades on the machines they have. It’s much more about maintaining them, and being able to make sure that they’re using their machines at ultimate performance.”

The most striking example he gave was a hairdryer with a rare motor fault that the owner wouldn’t even notice yet, because the dryer would still appear to work normally.

“They won’t even know about it because they’re still using it and they don’t realise there’s something wrong with it. And they’ll get a message saying, we are going to get a new one in the morning, we’ve detected a fault.”

It’s a small window into where Dyson wants to take its whole product range, appliances that manage themselves and flag problems before the customer ever notices, on top of a company still fighting to protect the ideas that make those products worth copying in the first place.