rethink(ip)

The 6 Life Stages of Inventors: Part 6 Senescense

Posted by Bill Meade at January 18, 2006 11:49 AM

The off-ramps of the first 5 stages of inventing are entry points to invention senescence. In addition, there is a sixth entry point to senescence. This entry point happens when a scanning inventor goes dark.

Seems like this would not be a big deal. But it is. Senior technical people going dark on inventing allows IP drift. Senior technical people often hold the purse strings for the IP efforts at a company. When senior techies stop inventing, their residual images of inventing and how it works at the company begin to drift out of date. Over years, the mental image in a senior technical person who is a senescent inventor becomes obsolete, leading to under funding of IP infrastructure, poor follow through on the business processes that underly IP policies, and ignorance-based-budgeting. Ignorance based budgeting takes place when people argue over budgets they don't understand. In the extreme, the work does not matter, just the changes in budget from the previous year.

Beside big problems, scanning inventor senescense can cause small problems. For example, invention workshops are frequently organized around senescent inventors. This happens because senescent inventors don't advertise that they are done with inventing. Organizers of invention workshops think it only natural to assume that a very senior engineering manager with a lot of history in a technology, would be a strategic contributor to an invention workshop. The workshop happens. The senescent inventor is a focus. In fact, the more junior technical members of the invention workshop will defer to the senior manager like s/he is some kind of "silver back" gorilla. The workshop runs for two days. Everyone feels good. But no invention disclosures are completed. Once the emergency repair team goes in and captures a few invention disclosures, none of them are filed. How can this be?

I think because of the off ramps of senescent inventors. The first off ramps of inventing with a senescent inventor is the "war story." When the "silver back" regales the workshop with war stories, s/he is in the zone. But, if the war stories don't lead to future-looking, gap filling, or competitively preemptive IP, they are an expensive distraction. The second off-ramp of a senescent inventor in an invention workshop is hierarchy. When things are unequal, it is nice to be on top. Senescent inventors allow hierarchy, they enjoy hierarchy. But, hierarchy causes self-censorship. Non-silver-back inventors will not follow the trail of discovery wherever it leads. So in the end, self-censorship causes invention disclosures to not be completed.

What causes an inventor to become senescent? It could be that inventors are born with a certain number of ideas in them, and once the ideas are used up, the inventor coasts. It could be that in a person's ego, there is a stomach for inventing. When an inventor has enough disclosures, patents, and plaques to fill up their ego-stomach, they stop inventing. The inventor might run out of ideas on the current technology they work in, and not be willing to learn a new technology. Oxygen depravation at the highest levels of company management could cause inventing to stop. Creeping sense of entitlement that come with rank may choke out inventing. I read biographies for a hobby. I just finished a fighter pilot biography that talked about generals who make subordinates walk 3 steps behind them. Generals that have alarms put in the hall outside their pentagon office so that when they leave their office all subordinates will have cleared the area. It could be a lot of things that stop a senior inventor.

The most important thing we IP managers know about what stops inventors is that it is our job to detect and remove it. We will never have a list of everything that stops inventors from inventing high quality cool, patentable, licensable, future-looking, gap-filling and competitively preemptive IP. So we need to act as invention off-ramp detectors for our organizations. We need to make lists of our organization's inventing off-ramps. We need to keep track of people who should be inventing, but are not. We need to engage with these should-be inventors and show them the love that it takes to get them plugged into making the company more valuable with their brains.

[All-In-One PDF of this 6-part article is here.]
[Part 5 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 4 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 3 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 2 of this discussion is here.]
[Part I of this discussion is here.]

[Bill's previous post on Proactive Invention Management is here.]

Open Sourcing Trademarks?

Posted by Stephen M. Nipper at January 17, 2006 09:09 PM

One of my favorite Rethink(IP) readers I've had the pleasure to trade emails and Skype chats with is Flock design guru Chris Messina. Chris reminds me a lot of Kevin Heller. Chris is open source rethinker extrordinaire.

Chris is a fellow blogger (blog: Factory City) and likes to push IP buttons thereon. For instance: EFF the RIAA and Intellectual Property Perpetuates the Intellectual Police State. With posts like that, you can see why he is a "must read" in my aggregator.

It was his recent post entitled The Case for Community Marks that caught my eye earlier. In that post, Chris makes the point that there is a:

need for a mark that is owned, operated and enforced by a community that isn't driven by purely economic interest. Instead, the motivation derives from the desire to uniformly represent their work product as the output of a specific community. Period.

Hmm...sounds familiar.

Section 4 of the Trademark Act (15 U.S.C. §1054), provides for the registration of "certification marks" and "collective marks:"

The term 'certification mark' means any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof--

1. used by a person other than its owner, or

2. which its owner has a bona fide intention to permit a person other than the owner to use in commerce and files an application to register on the principal register established by this Act, to certify regional or other origin, material, mode of manufacture, quality, accuracy, or other characteristics of such person's goods or services or that the work or labor on the goods or services was performed by members of a union or other organization.

...

The term 'collective mark' means a trademark or service mark--

1. used by the members of a cooperative, an association, or other collective group or organization, or

2. which such cooperative, association, or other collective group or organization has a bona fide intention to use in commerce and applies to register on the principal register established by this Act, and includes marks indicating membership in a union, an association or other organization.

Maybe a hybrid of the two????

The comments are open....

The 6 Life Stages of Inventors: Part 5 Scanning

Even if you can keep your inventor mentors inventing and mentoring, you tend to loose them. It is not that inventor mentors are unwilling or unable to invent. The problem becomes that they have too much to do to budget any time to inventing. It is just a matter of time until an inventor mentor is promoted high enough to force their inventing into dormancy. If you look at senior engineering managers, you see a collection of dormant inventors.

As an IP manager though, you should not give up on these dormant inventors. I think of the dormancy stage as "scanning" because if you can tickle, suck up to, cajole, taunt, bother, flatter, or otherwise stimulate senior dormant inventors into staying in the IP management game, you can capture a tremendous amount of insight into managing your IP portfolio. Scanners are less prolific at inventing, but when they invent, they deliver strategic inventors that capture architectural control points in a technology.

A typical scanner IP contribution will go like this:

Step 1: Over time as the scanner has not invented, guilt builds up.

Step 2: Eventually, the guilt builds up to a critical mass motivating the scanner inventor to do something.

Step 3: Time and other constraints dictate that the scanner must do inventing covertly. Involving the IP department may be an unpredictable or too large a time commitment for the scanner to deal with. Scanners will put together a skunk works type invention project that works for them and their immediate engineering team given the constraints they are under.

Step 4: The team will invest a few intense, very focused hours into the scanner's approach and then do something in the way of inventing.

Step 5: The scanner inventor will returns to step 1.

To give a concrete example. A scanner inventor who had progressed through Steps 1 and 2 above decided to have their team look at all the team's past invention disclosing activity (Step 3: He came up with a project that worked given the team's constraints). Several years worth of disclosures were spread out on a conference table. The team spent time reviewing the gist of each invention disclosure. Once all the team members had reviewed all the invention disclosures, the scanner asked his team "What are all these invention disclosures telling us?"

In this case, the disclosures were all addressed to a process in a best selling product. As the team reflected on what they disclosures were adding up to, they discovered that in a piecewise way, the disclosures were adding up to protection of an architectural control point. The project the scanner put together had actually articulated an architectural control point. To that time, the team had known what they were doing was important. But articulating vague knowledge into an architectural control point brought clarity and efficiency to the team's efforts.

The team was able to say "Have we missed any ways to cover this architectural control point?" and then (Step 4: Do some kind of IP generation) they were able to quickly generate invention disclosures to complete the protection of a best-selling product's key advantage. Scanners put together covert projects like this that draw on a company's culture, its product market history, its competition, future technology directions, and its inventing potential, and they mix all these elements into a ready-made mini-IP portfolio for bureau-cat IP managers. I call scanner inventors scanner because they lay back and by osmosis scan many environments until they can bring together a critical mass of multi-environment information.

Word of advice: Suck up to your scanner inventors. In fact, for an IP manager, this is the key managerial hand hold. You need to dispense your time in such a way that your scanner inventors know that you know that they are strategic competitive advantages that walk on two legs. You won't have a monetary budget for insuring you fully appreciate scanner inventors. Instead you have a time budget. So you need to spend your time on scanner inventors wisely. Never miss an opportunity to attend a patent committee meeting where a scanner inventor will be present. Be resourceful in creating 1 on 1 time (i.e., buy the scanner lunch out of your own pocket) with scanner inventors. Do detective work on the scanner inventor team's invention disclosure history. Speak knowledgeably with the scanner inventor about the team output s/he is generating.

The only entry point I know of into becoming an invention scanner is being a seasoned inventor and an inventor mentor. Scanners ask the beautiful questions about inventions, and lead to IP managers to beautiful answers. IP managers, don't resent scanner inventors for doing your job for you. Celebrate them for doing your job. Create short circuits so that credit you get for what a scanner has done, makes its way back to the true contributor. Scanners will invent when necessary, and often motivate others to invent. But most importantly, they circle back and reflect upon inventing.

Mendeleyev (of periodic table fame) was a card fanatic. What game would you guess was his favorite? Right, solitaire. When Mendeleyev discovered the periodic table, many of the cells in the table of elements were empty. The missing cells in the periodic table allowed chemists to target and rapidly find elements to fill the missing places. Invention scanners do much the same thing for IP managers by articulating architectural control points for shipping products. They abstract the purpose in many small inventions, and then they ask themselves if there are other future-looking inventions, any gap-filling inventions, or competitively-preemptive inventions that could fill in the protection of an architectural control point.

One way to build an IP strategy is to assemble the architectural control points that scanner inventors have built in their work over the years. This is like assembling the periodic table from individual columns, but who cares how you do it? If you can assemble your IP strategy-in-use. That is, map the IP protection that is already in the portfolio, it is a huge step towards being able to manage the portfolio. And, this approach will give you a different, more reflective understanding of your portfolio than you will ever gain by reading patents.

The invention off-ramp for invention scanners is denominator management. When quotas fall mindlessly on patenting and invention capture efforts, and the invention scanners see their carefully developed protection of architectural control points disabled or inactivated, these managers will become busy somewhere else in their busy schedules. Think about it, the scanner comes up with a project to protect a new architectural control point. S/he gathers the invention disclosures to provide economical but full coverage of a key market differentiator. When s/he arrives in the IP department however, the answer is "Sorry, we've already reached our quota for the year. Come back next year."

What is wrong with this picture? A patent attorney telling an inventor to bring the ideas back next year. The person in charge of policing patent bars telling the inventor to bring back the IP after the patent bar has cut. Given the workloads scanner inventors carry, the next thing cut will be the inventing.

The final stage in the development of inventors is senescence. I will cover inventor senescence in the final installment of this article.

[Part 6 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 5 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 4 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 3 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 2 of this discussion is here.]
[Part I of this discussion is here.]

[Bill's previous post on Proactive Invention Management is here.]

TGIM - You Know you are old when....

Posted by Douglas Sorocco at January 16, 2006 05:28 PM

 

… You have absolutely no idea why women would want a hair straightener when they are out and about. 

Via the Popgadget blog comes the Hair strenghtener vending machine

 

 

 

The 6 Life Stages of Inventors: Part 4 Mentoring

*Note* To read comments on posts to rethink[IP] you need to click the permalink. Part 3 of this article series has a comment (with response) from Scott Allred. You can read Scott's comments at the bottom of this link..

The fourth phase in the transformation of an employee into an inventor is mentoring. The entry point to mentoring is having accomplished a body of patenting work, and the development of a sense of intellectual security. This security comes from a feeling of acceptance from other senior inventors in the patenting community at a company. Intellectual security as an inventor allows the inventor’s enjoyment to shift from creating, to creating with and through other people.

Inventor mentors are prolific in their own right. But, their significance to an IP management program is much larger than their individual inventions. Inventor mentors are recruiting on-ramps to the invention program. They are also scouts of high inventor potential, and walking rapid prototyping laboratories for improved IP business processes.

High Inventor Potential:
Inventor mentors specialize in finding what we at BasicIP call "chuckleheads." A chucklehead is often a young engineer just out of school or new to the company. Chuckleheads have are naive in the sense that they don't know what they can't do. The corporate culture-induced cynicism has not yet impregnated the chuckle head's mind and there is raw enthusiasm as well as talent waiting to be tapped. Inventor mentors are sociological chemists bringing enthusiasm, training, future-looking problems, and chuckleheads into inventing reactions.

Rapid Prototyping:
IP managers can be tempted to feel threatened by inventor mentors having to play with, refine, tinker, and invent improvements in, their business processes. I know I was threatened while at HP by my inventor mentors. Once inventor mentors see the invention disclosures that are inactivated by the patent review committee, for example, they often "improve" their process by emulating the patent committee immediately after inventing in a group. What happens is that the ideas and the enablements that would be inactivated by the patent committee, are simply not submitted by the inventor mentor's team. [*Aside* If any IP attorneys are reading this, I'd be interested in what you think about this. Would you trust a senior inventor to filter out ideas like this? What if you are getting 300 invention disclosures a year from an inventor-mentor-led team? In the beginning of the phone company, there were telephone operators that worked for end-users. As the system grew, the operating function shifted to the end users: we are all our own operators today. Is it appropriate for the same thing to happen in shifting invention filtering to inventor mentors?]

Managerial Hand-Hold:
The first managerial hand-hold for inventing mentors is infrastructure. Inventing mentors need a place and a time around which to form their inventing communities. One way to provide these is to set up inventing office hours. Reserve a conference room every Friday afternoon from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm for a year. Make a double batch of chocolate chip cookies on Thrusday nights (add 2 packages of butterscotch pudding and one egg to the standard Toll House recipe). Let all the employees at your site know they are invited to come and ask invention questions, eat cookies, and turn in any invention disclosures that they’ve completed in the previous week. Inventing mentors will learn of “office hours” and bring their rag tag team in every week.

A second managerial hand-hold to keep inventor mentors productive is fairness. Mentally put yourself into a patent committee meeting that is being fed by a team of enthusiastic inventors lead by an inventing mentor. At the table are:

- Patent attorney for the assigned business entity or technology.
- Managing Counsel who sits in on all meetings to keep patenting criteria consistent.
- Patent Coordinator from the business unit of the first inventor to speak to technical and market aspects of the invention.

When an inventor mentor's team gets into a hot strategic area, they will often have 10 to 50 invention disclosures per meeting to review. If there are say 65 disclosures total in a meeting, an unseen bias against the inventor mentor can creep in as disclosures are reviewed. Think about it a string of 5 invention disclosures all with better than average patentability that are directly on the strategic patent survey for the division. This is every patent attorney's dream. The first five are filed as patent applications without discussion.

Then, a couple disclosures from other inventors, and another string of 8 invention disclosures from the inventor mentor's team again. Something happens when the inventor mentor's name comes up again. It somehow seems unfair that this inventor is getting so many patent applications. Silently, the bar goes up for the inventor mentor. Unless the idea is so strongly non-obvious that the managing counsel in the meeting will want to write the patent, the rest of the disclosure with the inventor mentor's name, will be inactivated. Even though the idea quality, idea strategic value, and disclosure quality of the inactivated disclosures is higher than the quality of the disclosures that are selected to be applied for as patents.

An inventor mentor sees the patent committee meeting as a meritocracy: may the best ideas win. The patent committee will theoretically, see the process as a meritocracy as well. But the theory in use during the patent committee meeting will not be a meritocracy unless the IP management team intervenes. Patent committees evolve implicit norms as they meet time and again. These norms are not discussed. And their undiscussability is also not discussed. So, a simple managerial hand hold for keeping your inventor mentors going is to articulate the criteria that your patent committee should be using. Should be using according to company IP policy. If your patent committee follows the IP policy, your inventor mentors will not shut down on you.

Even if the policy is using a roulette wheel to select disclosures for patenting. People will deal with processes they can understand, inventor mentors see patent committee selection processes as just another corporate game that is fun to play. But, if your disclosure selection process selects disclosures based on reasons other than those articulated in the corporate policy, your inventor mentors will be at risk. The problem is that if your patent coordination process is a meritocracy, you will have to tolerate skewed distribution of patents among inventors.

At HP the top inventor as of 2005 had 145 patents. This inventor is a patent agent working in one of the HP IP offices. This could seem very unfair to some companies. But at HP the question is "how good" the IP is, not "how fair" the IP process is in terms of uniformity of patent distribution. At Micron four top inventors all have in excess of 400 patents. Again, the value seems to be "how good" not "how fair."

Many patent committees will not select patent applications based only on merit. A variety of other factors can crowd merit off the table. For example, "This is this inventor's first disclosure, we need to file on it to encourage them." Or, "We are not getting enough disclosures in this area of technology, we need to file on this disclosure because we need more coverage here." Or, my personal favorite non-merit-based reason "Might be useful." When taken with the "This person has more than his/her fair share of patent applications this meeting" norm that inventor mentors have inflicted on them, these seemingly innocuous norms can become an oppression to your company's best and brightest inventors, your inventor mentors.

Rag tag team:
Inventing mentors create inventing teams out of unorthodox collections of under-valued people. Chuckleheads, old birds that have never been appreciated for what they can do. An inventing mentor is a kind of recycling engineer of careers. The metric important to the inventor mentor is ideas that excite the patent committee. Given this metric the inventing mentors will provide resourceful combinations of under-valued people to generate a steady stream of strategic IP. Mentors build strong short-lived teams with norms like “No invention disclosure no cookie at office hours.”

The most common off ramp for inventing mentors is alienation from the patent committee. That is, going from closed loop interaction giving the IP department what it wants, to becoming open loop. When a mentor can feel the ground shake as s/he sends massive quantities of cool, strategic, licensable, and patentable, IP into the patent committee, the mentor is “in the zone.” But when patent committee feedback is delayed, or when feedback becomes negative because of unseen political realities, when negative feedback is condescendingly given by senior people, or when negative feedback suddenly starts to be given by junior people in the IP organization, inventing mentors shut down. When an inventor mentor sees the patent committee selecting randomly from his/her ideas, they fall off the grid.

[Part 6 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 5 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 4 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 3 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 2 of this discussion is here.]
[Part I of this discussion is here.]

[Bill's previous post on Proactive Invention Management is here.]

The 6 Life Stages of Inventors: Part 3 Status Seeking

Posted by Bill Meade at January 13, 2006 11:58 AM

By: Bill Meade, Ph.D.
http://www.basicip.com

After employees have completed an invention disclosure ... and lived (Stage 1: Discovery). And, after they have calibrated themselves to the ideas that their company wants from them (Stage 2: Calibration), there is another stage in development that is difficult to describe. I think of it as "status-seeking." I'm pretty sure that this is a distinct stage in the life cycle of an inventor because:

#1 for a 6 to 12 month period after they are fully productive within the IP management system, the newbie inventors only invent by themselves.

#2 These "post-newbie" inventors become very quiet. Their appearances at weekly invention office hours drop off. They will eat the BasicIP inventor cookies, but only if you take the cookies to their desk. When these post-newbie inventors talk to you, they corner you in a 1-on-1 situation, and then they ask a lot of questions about the inventing social environment. "How many patents does X have?" "How long has Y been inventing in the blockso area?" "What is the record for invention disclosures in a year?" "What is the average file rate?" "Who is inventing in widgets?" So, like Neo being interrogated by Agent Smith, post-newbie inventors can be seen to be all ears.

#3 The post-newbie inventor's risk profile shifts dramatically. The inventions coming from the newbie inventor become less forward looking and more "safe" in the engineering culture of the company. While in their first few disclosures the inventor delighted in thinking "outside the box," during the status-seeking phase of development, inventions suddenly focuses "in the box."

Entry point for post-newbie inventors to the status seeking stage is having 2 issued patents and 5 to 10 patent applications in-process. At this point the post-newbie begins to be "known" among other inventors for something. For example, an inventor may become known for creating building blocks for all to use in a technical area (i.e., a “genius”), for being prolific in a certain kind of inventing across technical areas (i.e., being a “renaissance person”), for being an opportunist (i.e., having a splatter-gun pattern across fad surfing-technologies and/or insinuating themselves into other people’s inventions), for being a “one trick pony” (i.e., refusing to invent outside a domain), etc. [*Aside* Please email me any fun/surprising inventor reputations that you've heard about. Inventors can be savage in their honesty describing in reduced-form, what other inventors do.]

The off-ramp for status-seeking inventors is exclusion from membership in the inventing community. If, after an inventor has produced a significant body of patentable work, the community accepts them as a peer, the inventor will stay productive and progress to the next inventing life stage: mentoring. If the inventor fails to find a niche in the inventing ecology, they fall off the grid and stop inventing.

Non-traditional inventors are particularly at risk in the status-seeking phase. For example, engineers who move from technical areas into for example, sales. Cross functionally mobile people, are a fantastic source of inventing. However, sales organizations rarely have any tradition or infrastructure for inventing. While the IP attorneys will be delighted to accept invention disclosures from non-traditional inventors, getting the inventors paid for their invention incentives can be a big problem. Beyond this, getting these inventors integrated into the community of conventional inventors is even a bigger problem.

The managerial hand holds for managing inventors in the status-seeking phase are to make sure there are lots of accolades to go around, and to look for ways to create new niches of inventors. I’m not sure why the status phase has mortality at all. It seems like a calibrated inventor would see an invention that needed inventing in the normal course of work, recognize it, stop, and write an invention disclosure. But this has not been the case in my experience. Calibrated inventors often fall off the grid.

There is a strong social aspect to inventing. I can't provide much more guidance on how to harness sociology. But, IP managers need to be sensitive to the sociology around newbie inventors. An annual dinner for inventors is a good thing. But, to maximize profit coming from your inventors much more is needed.

Post-newbie inventors need to feel the love. They resonate to enthusiasm about what they have done. They never get enough calibration information. They are nourished by the communion of kindred minds produced by fellowship with other post-newbie and senior inventors. So, post-newbies need to be drawn back into community. They need to be checked on, encouraged, and given tough love slap therapy when they come up with ideas not up to their potential. But this slap therapy has to come from another inventor. Not a boss or a bureau-cat like an IP manager.

Like raising teenagers, getting an inventor in with the right friends (i.e., other inventors who are supportive) might be a good strategy. You can develop inventing talent, you get a lot more patentable, licensable, and litigatable IP if you bring your inventors up on success. So, as an IP manager you need to watch for small successes you can celebrate. You need to watch for "successes waiting for an inventor" that you can use to "set up" your inventors to have the successes they need to keep growing as inventors.

I suspect that what is going on during the status-seeking phase is that post-newbie inventors are seeing themselves anew. So, the time period of status-seeking may be what it takes for an inventor to develop a fresh "residual self image" updating his/her place in life, career, and company. Inventing is a celebrated activity in American culture. Becoming an inventor brings a lot of cultural implications into an employee's life. IP managers can have a tremendous positive impact on post-newbies if they take the trouble to be catalysts to the development of residual self images that are positive, rooted in company culture, and rich in inventing fellowship.

The next post in this series will review the fourth life stage in an inventor's development: mentoring.

[Part 6 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 5 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 4 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 3 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 2 of this discussion is here.]
[Part I of this discussion is here.]

[Bill's previous post on Proactive Invention Management is here.]

The 6 Life Stages of Inventors: Part 2 Calibration

Posted by Bill Meade at January 12, 2006 12:12 PM

By: Bill Meade, Ph.D.
http://www.basicip.com

The second life stage of inventors begins the *instant* the inventor receives feedback on an invention disclosure. What is invention feedback? It is information on how the company will or will not use the invention. Will the invention be filed as a patent? Of so, on the fast track or slow track? Will the invention be kept as a trade secret? Or, will it be turned into a design patent or defensive publication? Or, will the invention be inactivated? Inventor motivation goes through a profound and often painful transformation during calibration.

Feedback on an invention disclosure is like receiving a grade on an essay question in college. Except, invention feedback is pass or fail. If the inventor’s disclosure gets filed on as a patent, s/he passes. Otherwise s/he fails. This is not to say that design patents, trade secrets, and defensive publications are not valuable. Instead, it is just pointing out that the vast majority of IP management systems are at root, patent management systems. The real goal for inventors is patents and they seem to learn this by osmosis in the process of receiving feedback.

As soon as the inventor’s first invention disclosure has bee declared good enough (or not) to file a patent on, the invention process ceases to be about money or whatever goal was talked about during inventor training. Feedback changes the invention game into a competition. A competition to have the most valued ideas (patents) in the organization. Inventors whether they were seeing dollar signs or ideals in completing that first invention disclosure, instantly transmute in the calibration phase. Before you have employees. After you have intellectual oxen pulling in the yoke of patentability.

To this point in my discussion of calibration the only entry point has been an inventor who has already invented. But, there are other entry points allowing pre-inventors into the calibration stage before they invent. That is, to have pre-inventors sit in on a patent committee meeting before they turn in their first disclosures. The patent committee meeting is where the organizations representatives from business and legal gather to decide how to dispose of the invention disclosures currently at hand. Patent committees are the source of inventor feedback.

Another entry point to the inventor calibration life stage could be exploited by forward looking IP departments. The idea is to allow pre-inventors to watch the patent committee invention disclosure evaluation process. Watching other people's ideas being processes, would provide pre-inventors with a measure of objectivity that would encourage them to internalize the criteria being used to evaluate ideas. Then, pre-inventors can write their first disclosures, and these pre-calibrated disclosures will be much better than they would have been without calibration.

The inventor off-ramps during the calibration phase are disrespect and unfairness. If an inventor hears laughter at a patent committee meeting (or even that his/her idea was laughed at). If an inventor asks why his/her invention was not chosen for patenting and receives silence or a dishonest answer (remember, inventors are hard-wired to detect physiological, psychological, and sociological truth about their ideas), then the inventor is likely to shut down inventing. Inventors who turn in a flock of disclosures in a burst of enthusiasm, and have them all inactivated, need honest feedback if they are ever going to turn in another invention disclosure. It is not uncommon for inventors whose ideas are all turned off to want to give back any invention incentives they received. Inventors whose first inventions are inactivated have a much higher off-ramp mortality rate than inventors whose first inventions are applied for as patents.

Unfairness is always closely monitored by employees, but in the realm of inventing, unfairness is monitored with electron microscopes, radar detectors, and office gossip. Unfairness in how invention disclosures are treated leads to “high-maintenance” behaviors. Behaviors like refusing to invent if the invention disclosures cannot be proven in advance, to be handled with respect. Behaviors like writing an ersatz-patent application as an invention disclosure. If you hear “A good invention disclosure takes 8 hours” from an inventor, chances are good that the environment is suffering from unfairness in how disclosures are treated.

Managerial hand-holds for inventors in calibration phase are many. For example strategic patenting targets. This is something that HP does very well. Every year senior R&D people are surveyed by the IP section of the legal department. The survey is described in Steve Fox’s chapter in Sullivan’s (1998) PROFITING FROM INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL. In short it consists of a list of 7 plus or minus 2 "strategic" technical areas where the R&D manager wants to capture IP in the next year. Having a list of what is wanted that can be communicated to inventors (for example, as a cover sheet to the invention disclosure form) to help inventors understand the criteria with which their ideas are evaluated.

In addition to strategic patenting targets, process rules can also help prevent inventors from being lost in the calibration phase. For example, good rules are:

• “No laughing at invention disclosures, … ever.”
• “Inventors deserve face-to-face explanations why their disclosures were or were not filed.”

Actually, the best tools for calibration-stage inventors are rules that are backed up with business processes. For example:
• Non-traditional inventors turning in their first invention disclosure get a special in-person support process where their invention disclosure is acknowledged with a phone call from a patent attorney who becomes their single-point of contact for IP issues with the legal department.
• When an inventor turns in their first invention disclosure, it gets logged and then kicked out to a pre-selected sympathetic mentor to review with the inventor.
• When an inventor turns in an invention disclosure, s/he receives acknowledgement within a week of the disclosure’s receipt and notification within a week of the payment of the invention incentive.

Rules implemented in business processes can cover a lot of ground in improving the quality of invention disclosures, and at the same time enlist a much larger segment of the company as inventors. If you want to take your company’s inventing culture to the next level, the first place to look is at the business processes backing up your IP policies.

Digression on feedbackless inventors:
What happens when inventors run without calibration? My experience is that 30% of the population of inventors will write up invention disclosures that will immediately be filed as patents. Another 10% to 20% of the population can’t be motivated to turn in an invention disclosure beyond a token first effort. This leaves about 50% of the population that can benefit from feedback. What is interesting, is that much of the feedback needed to write good quality invention disclosures, is a function of practice. That is, a lot of the feedback needed is self-feedback learned in the process of writing.

In an invention workshop I conducted in 2000, I had an enthusiastic pre-inventor. This individual had not heard about the company’s IP strategy until the attending the workshop. As the training proceeded, this person became more and more excited. When it came time to write an invention disclosure, this person quickly dashed off a 2 page disclosure that, when I read it, made my heart fall. “We are entering the, ‘I am not proud’ zone.” is what I thought to myself. Not even close to usable.

I did my best to maintain a positive countenance, and encouraged the inventor to write another disclosure. Of course, in my mind I wrote him off as never being capable of a good invention disclosure, but on principle, I was upbeat and encouraging. The 2nd invention disclosure was … A LOT better. “Still not in the ballpark of filing, but, surprisingly good for someone who won’t ever write a usable invention disclosure.” I thought to myself.

Invention disclosure #3 was BETTER again than #2. “A borderline file?” I thought. I kept smiling, kept encouraging, and started wondering why I had written this guy off after only 1 disclosure. Disclosure #4 was BETTER YET and was clearly of fileable quality. Disclosure #5 made me think “COOL!!” and Disclosure #6 was “Way Cool!”

The moral of this story was that inventors learn by practicing. Like a kid learning to walk, there are a lot of aspects to writing a quality invention disclosure that the inventors will pick up in the process of writing. A second moral was that I, the expert on getting people to invent, misjudged this guy (with certainty) on the basis of 1 data point. Another good rule for calibration stage inventors is to never give up on them until you’ve seen 6 invention disclosures.

The next post in this series will reivew the third life stage in an inventor's maturation process: status-seeking.

[Part 6 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 5 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 4 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 3 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 2 of this discussion is here.]
[Part I of this discussion is here.]

[Bill's previous post on Proactive Invention Management is here.]

The 6 Life Stages of Inventors

Posted by Bill Meade at January 11, 2006 11:29 AM

by Bill Meade, Ph.D.
www.basicip.com

Part 1: 1/11/2006

Employees don't turn in all the inventions they discover in the course of doing their normal jobs. Why? My answer is that employees self-censor because people are not logical. We are psycho-logical. We are socio-logical. We self-censor while at meetings. We self censor with spouses, kids, friends and in all social contexts. When thinking of bosses seeing our work, and then reviewing it with ... attorneys ... many employees would rather not think about inventing. Would rather not expose themselves to extra criticism or in today's work environment, extra uncertainty.

To understand inventor self-censorship I am going to constructively over-simplify in this article. Oversimplify by dumping all inventors into 6 life stages. Like insects going through life in stages (egg, larva, pupae, etc.), I assume inventors go through stages. Each of these stages in an inventor's development can be characterized by entry points, off-ramps, and managerial hand-holds. The purpose of this article is to discuss each stage in the hope of provoking discussion about how to manage the most non-linear variable in the IP system: inventors.

The 6 invention life stages are:
1. Discovery,
2. Calibration,
3. Status-seeking,
4. Mentoring,
5. Sensing,
and
6. Senescence

1. Discovery Stage

The key event of the discovery stage, is the inventor learning their ideas are important … as assets. In a training workshop where the importance of intellectual property was explained, an inventor raised her hand and asked:

“So, what you are saying is that my ideas are important to the company?”

Yes, exactly! This is the kernel idea of the inventor discovery stage.

I have seen 2 entry points to discovery: (1) Invention Incentive Programs, and (2) IP Training programs. An inventor who begins inventing because of an invention incentive program sees dollar signs. An inventor who starts inventing because of training program sees the importance of their ideas to the organization. Analytically, these are equivalent because they both produce invention disclosures for the IP department to evaluate investing in.

Invention off-ramps are any reaction of “organizational anti-bodies” to an inventor’s efforts, sufficiently strong to shut down the inventor from continuing to invent and/or from developing further as an inventor. Observations of inventors has led me to the conclusion that inventors are hard-wired to read the eyes, the words, and the group dynamics surrounding their ideas.

The big off-ramp for discovery stage inventors is short-term boss reaction. While the inventor may argue endlessly on principle with his/her boss over technical issues, when the boss “blows up” at the inventor for turning in an invention disclosure, the inventor is highly likely to take an invention off ramp and shut down. This happens, I think, because inventors being human are hard-wired to detect what people think about their ideas. When the boss thinks their invention was a dumb idea, the inventor is strongly inclined to shut down.

An important secondary cycle of invention development is the development of the inventor’s boss. The boss’s invention development often spins off a discovery stage inventor. Picture the inventor's 6 life cycle stages like a gear in a clockwise spin. Boss invention life cycle stages are like another gear that touches the inventor life cycle gear at at 1 o'clock (the "discovery stage") and spin counter clockwise through 4 stages.

Digression on the 4 Invention Life Stages of Bosses:

Bosses go through life stages in responding to invention, just like inventors. The first life stage of an inventor’s boss is alarm. Alarm at the inventor’s inventing is triggered in most companies, by >1 invention disclosures being completed by an inventor. The 5 word mantra of the boss in alarm stage is:

“S/he won’t do their job!”

These 5 words are complemented by 6 unspoken words :

“Because s/he will spend all day inventing!”

Is this hyperbole or is it a rational fear? Ask yourself "In my career to date, how many people have I observed not doing their jobs because they were inventing all the time?" How many employees have you seen that will hear this kind of hyperbole, and then sit down and spend all their work time inventing? Or, any of their time inventing?

The 2nd life stage of the inventor’s boss is saber-rattling. Examples of saber rattling:

• Vague verbal threats to “deal with” inventing while laughing,

• Mocking inventing while in meetings,

• Mock accusations of inventors not being "team players"

• A constant stream of cynical comments about inventing.

Stage 3 of the boss’s invention life cycle takes place once inventors shut down or go underground, this stage is “Forgetting.” Once the boss forgets about inventing inventors can watch and wait for the 4th stage which is the “this was my idea all along” stage. Once the boss takes credit for what s/he was recently rattling sabers about, inventors become free to invent again. And, inventors become free to continue in their development to the 2nd stage of development. Unfortunately, many inventors are “once burned twice shy” so that when the boss becomes alarmed and rattles the saber, these inventors are effectively turned off for life. Rookie bosses and invention programs go ill together.

The managerial hand-holds for the discovery phase are: (a) enlist the inventor’s boss, and (b) train the inventors. This can be done many ways. For example, if the CEO changes the organization’s logo by putting the word “invent” underneath it, many bosses will see invention to be their idea from the start. Other things that IP managers can do to enlist bosses:

• Ghost write an email to the inventor’s boss asking for support of inventing and have a CTO or other similarly high-placed technical manager send the email to the inventor’s boss. In most organizations email is cheap and CTOs are supportive of inventing.

• Cookies. BasicIP has had TREMENDOUS success using cookies in IP mangement. Make a double batch of cookies on Thursday nights and take them to rookie inventor bosses to "preemptively appreciate" the bosses for working with inventors. BasicIP's chocolate chip cookie recipe is stolen from the internet. Substitute as many uncooked oats as possible for flour (inventors don't like the taste of flour and cooked oats make the cookies too hard), and to add an extra egg, and 2 boxes of butterscotch pudding to the standard Toll House recipe. Inventors like this recipe.

• T-shirts. Buy 5 of your company’s logo shirts. Have them embroidered with “Inventor” on the back, and then offer the boss of the inventor a shirt if they will be supportive of their employees inventing. The old saying is that "Managers would rather live with problems they can never solve than with solutions they can't understand." But the IP truism is that managers are happy to live with programs they don't understand as long as you recognize the manager's position and importance in advance.

• Write up an invention disclosure and ask the boss of the inventors to be a co-inventor. Canny inventors often assuage alarmed or saber rattling bosses by using this tactic. IP managers can use it as well.

The discovery stage of an inventor’s development can be a lot of fun if well managed. Or, if poorly managed it can alienate inventors, make enemies of inventor bosses, and make the IP department look like a disruptive busy-body. The next post in this series will look at stage 2 in an inventor’s life cycle: calibration.

Please post comments or email Bill Meade (bill@basicip.com) with comments, war stories, criticisms, etc. No flames please. :-)

[Part 6 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 5 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 4 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 3 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 2 of this discussion is here.]
[Part I of this discussion is here.]

[Bill's previous post on Proactive Invention Management is here.]

What is Rethink(IP) Up To???

Posted by Stephen M. Nipper at January 5, 2006 10:24 AM

Posting on our Rethink(IP) blog has been light.  One of us changing firms, one of us preparing to be a first time father, all of us dealing with the Holidays and work...we have lots of excuses.

One of our excuses is that we are spending more and more time working over the various side projects we have (which means less time for blogging).  Through these "projects," we hope to build a legal community that will help us achieve our goal of bringing Web 2.0 content to Web 1.0 attorneys.

That being said, one of our "projects" is about to go live.  We are currently beta testing a forum/bulletin board which we have high hopes for.  The goal of the forum is to create an on-line, collaborative discussion community for our readers, legal bloggers and attorneys in general. 

If you are interested in helping us populate the forums with an initial set of forum topics and threads, please drop me a line (snipper@gmail.com) and I'll get you set up.  Thanks in advance.