Inventions Management

Inventions Management

          For the first time in my life I am getting a front row seat at the process of inventions management.  My company is trying to innovate in the electrochemical arena which involves everything from filing patents with the U.S. Patent Office and the various international patent agencies to managing the process of commercialization of the inventions, taking them from the laboratory to the marketplace. As one would imagine, there is a lot to this process.  In fact, there is a lot more to this process than most people can even imagine.

          We tend to like associating inventions with certain historical personalities.  Edison invented the light bulb.  Bell invented the telephone.  Marconi invented the wireless (radio).  Notice how all of those are specific electronic inventions.  The prior generation that come off the top of my head are Fulton with the steam engine and Whitney and the cotton gin.  Of course there is Guttenberg and the printing press. Notice that those are mostly mechanical inventions.  Complicated things like television and the internet were not invented by one person, but groups of people working on different parts of the problem (despite what Al Gore might have you believe).

          We’ve all heard, read or watched the movies that show the difference between the deeds of Thomas Alva Edison and Nikola Tesla.  They highlight the difference between commercially successful inventors and high-contribution inventors who never get their name on the door because their work is eclipsed or subsumed by other, more mercenary people who want to make a buck.  Even when there is not a purposeful intellectual property theft involved, there are inventors and there are inventors.  I venture to guess that not many people know the name of William Cullen, the Scottish inventor of refrigeration, which has perhaps done as much as anything to change the way humans live.  By contrast and somewhat connected is the invention of air conditioning (a reasonable thing to pay homage to in this summer of our heated discontent).  The product we now know as air conditioning was invented in 1902 by Willis Carrier, whose name adorns the products from the company that still has the largest share of the air conditioner market. 

          Air conditioning was actually first “discovered” by ancient Egyptians, who used wet mats over their doorways such that the evaporation of the water into the air cooled and humidified the hot desert air.  The Romans also learned that their ubiquitous water-moving invention, the aqueduct, provided the means for cooling their buildings by running water through metal pipes indoors such that the coolness of the pipes cooled the air.  Ben Franklin even messed around with evaporating liquids as a means of cooling.  And Michael Faraday (considered by some to be the father of modern electrochemistry) found that compressing and liquefying ammonia and then allowing it to evaporate into the air, provided an extreme cooling effect.  It stunk up the place, but it sure was cool.

          My point is that invention is a long and arduous process that often involves many pioneering efforts, some of which gain acclaim and fortune for their work and others lie by the side of road of obscurity.

          I am trying to make it a point not to discuss my current work in my blog because someone always thinks that is unwise.  I have already come too close with the mention of electrochemistry and ammonia as I have.  But allow me to talk about another company that I have come to know quite well in the course of my current work.  They are a gathering of very talented scientists and engineers.  They have Ph.D.’s in scientific fields and prior work with such notable scientific and engineering institutions as NASA and the Department of Defense. They have spent years (15 or more) toiling in the field of alternative advanced energy.  Most of their focus was around the perceived fuel of the future, Hydrogen.  Hydrogen is about as primary to the universe as it gets.  It is the most abundant chemical element and enjoys the distinction of being atomic number 1 on the periodic table of the elements. It is the lightest element and constitutes roughly 75% of all mass.  I am unable (due to very finite limits of my mental capacity) to launch into a discussion of particle physics and how these baryonic elements compare to gluons, leptons and quarks, so let’s just say there is a lot of the stuff around and in many forms and thus is the basis of much of alternative energy research.

          After spending a bunch of time and effort trying to invent the next great generation of hydrogen fuel cells, the company got sold to the mother ship of fuel cells.  It chewed them up and spit out the gristle, which turns out to be the inventions management stuff around hydrogen and solid oxide protonic-conducting fuels (SOFC).  This bigger company had no appetite for the hard chewing of inventions management. The group that left with the patents and the dreams founded their own company with a few spare bucks, which is easy to understand.  What is hard to understand is that these same guys took their own efforts in a very pragmatic direction that has them using their SOFC skills to make hydrocarbon-based fuel cells.  The dreams and the Hydrogen were left at the side of the road while they fabricated boxes that could and would sell in the here and now.  Is that to be admired or mourned?

          Does defaulting to the pragmatic make the invention less important or more meaningful?  Should inventions be about breakthroughs or incrementalization?  The answer is a resounding yes. I say that with the strangest of interactions with my friends who are focused on the commercial realities.  I am not an engineer and further yet not a scientist and yet I am running a company that is far more on the spectrum towards scientific invention discovery where these scientists and engineers are far more on the path to a financially rewarding commercialization.  They tell me every day about how hard the path of inventions management can be.  They need the kudos of commercial success to feel good about their work.  I get that.  The victory of a sale, the depositing of a check into the account all feels very good and like a verifiable milestone.  The milestones in inventions management can get much flakier by comparison.

          I often say that I am a pioneer and the settlers’ wagons always crunch over my dried bones on their way to domination.  But this is a different issue altogether.  This is about the best and most productive way to be a good pioneer.  I may not want to produce and sell a million boxes, but is it best to work towards selling one or to work towards a prototype that can lead to someone eventually selling one?  I’ve been told that in the industrial chemical arena it takes 15-20 years to get adoption of a new invention.  At the age of 65, I can either seek to play the long game and just be happy getting part of the way there or I can modify my approach and get a plan that can deliver a generation-one product to market much sooner knowing that it will have to be refined by someone else to sell a million of them.  I can agree on one issue nonetheless; inventions management is a bitch.