Keith Schacht flicks a cigarette lighter and holds the flame to a business card.

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"We're looking for things that have a combination of properties you really would have thought was impossible, " says Schacht.

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Schacht, 26, and Kaplan, 27, are new-gadget scouts who track down and try out hundreds of promising novelties in a year.

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Schacht and his college pal, Zachary Kaplan, run Inventables, a firm that seeks out obscure, newfangled textiles, technology and thingamajigs for companies that otherwise might overlook them.

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By October 1997 McGinn's patience paid off: Henry Schacht retired.

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In a statement, Lucent Chairman and Chief Executive Henry Schacht blamed the loss on softening sales to local exchange carriers and service providers as well as lower software sales.

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And that means the card, pocketed at a trade show in Paris, gets added to a pile of intriguing but unsung gizmos that form the basis of Schacht's business.

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The business card idea makes Schacht wonder whether the tiny balls might be added to a birthday card to reveal a surprise message when the card is held over birthday-cake candles.

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Early on, Schacht and McGinn gathered their top executives to tell them the performance bar was going way up: Sales must rise at double the old rate, and the earnings growth rate must triple.

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Kaplan, who met Schacht in 2000 when both attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, figures as many as 50 new products have been created based on Inventables' finds from companies large and small.

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Inventables' Schacht was unfazed.

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