Redesigning Life's User Interfaces

Inventors are really good at pattern matching, and we easily see how one thing is analogous to another.  At the same time, a lot of innovation starts with the discovery of a new understanding of an old problem.  Inventors often find themselves saying "We've been trying to solve a problem with regard to A, but we've already solved a lot of it with regard to B, and B is like A...."  Innovation by analogy.

I was listening to a discussion about voting rights last month when I realized that voting is the user interface for democracy.  Of course, it is only an analogy so it is imperfect, but it is close enough for us to immediately see a lot of the ways we need to improve voting.  Apple is well respected for their excellent user interface design, making their portable devices among the world's easiest devices to use.  Their basic guidance for iOS applications is simple:

iOS 7 embodies the following themes:
 ● Deference. The UI helps users understand and interact with the content, but never competes with it.
 ● Clarity. Text is legible at every size, icons are precise and lucid, adornments are subtle and appropriate, and a sharpened focus on functionality motivates the design.
 ● Depth. Visual layers and realistic motion impart vitality and heighten users’ delight and understanding.

Imagine if politicians decided to write rules requiring that all voting systems follow those three simple rules.  Deference to content, meaning that the user interface never gets in the way of voting.  Clarity, meaning that the design is motivated by keeping the content clear and functional.  Depth, meaning that the users are able to better understand what they are voting on.

Another way to think about it is to ask yourself "if Steve Jobs were alive and in charge of setting up the user interface for democracy, what would it look like?"

 For one, he would fire anybody who tried to make it harder than it already is.  He would insist that any authentication system cause as little trouble for users as possible.  Once authenticated, he would want the authentication to remain valid as long as possible without requiring the user to re-authenticate every time.  He would insist on voters being able to use their interface to democracy at whatever time and place is convenient to them.  He would take steps to prevent fraud (just as Apple takes strong measures to prevent "Jail Breaking", or rooting of their phones), but he wouldn't cripple the entire ecosystem in the process.

Once we start to think about life in terms of user interfaces, we see that user interfaces are all around us.  Communication and shared activities are our user interfaces to our friends and family.  Meditation and self-reflection are our conscious mind's user interfaces to our subconscious.  Our physicians are our user interfaces to the health care system (or should be -- insurance companies are not good user interface designers).  Teachers and books are our children's user interfaces to education.  Tax forms are our user interfaces to the tax system.  Store clerks are our user interfaces to stores.  Judges, lawyers and juries are our user interface to the legal system.

Everything has a user interface.  Any time we have the opportunity to create or modify a user interface, we should be very aware of what we are doing.  Don't make things harder to use.  Don't add design elements just for the sake of showing off or making things harder.  In fact, Apple's three elements of deference, clarity and depth may be all we need to create a much better world.

General thoughts on the question "I have an invention and I want a patent ... what do I do?"

I'm frequently approached by people who tell me that they have an invention they want to patent, but aren't sure how to proceed.  Each situation is different.  There is no single good answer, because the best answer for one innovation is often the worst answer for another.  I enjoy talking and thinking about innovation, and I learn a lot every time I talk with a fellow innovator (and *everybody* is an innovator -- some of you just don't realize it).  This post is not intended as a way of saying "I answered that already, check online".  It is intended to give innovators an idea about how the process sometimes works, and to establish a little bit of common language for people who want to discuss innovation with me.  * Note:  This article is not intended as legal advice.  All inventions are different, and you need to see a patent lawyer about yours. *

So....  You have an invention.  First things first:  All patents require innovation, but not all innovations can be patented.  Patents apply only to a subset of all possible inventions. Democracy is an example of a terrific innovation that would not be patent-eligible.  The patent-eligibility line lies somewhere between obviously non-eligible innovations like representative democracies and obviously eligible innovations like the artificial heart.

The first hurdle is whether your innovation is the kind of thing you can patent.  Sometimes the answer is easy, but for a surprisingly large number of innovations, the answer is unknown.  The language defining patent eligibility in the United States has been essentially unchanged for 220 years, yet the courts are still struggling to figure out where that line lies -- and the ongoing ambiguity is not one of precise line placement, but rather of where the line falls within a broad zone of ambiguity.(see Note 1 below and this article).  The Supreme Court is taking another crack at figuring it out this year, and it remains to be seen whether we will have a better idea about where the line is drawn then (detail in Note 2 below) [UPDATE: Patent eligibility remains a murky area of law].  Until then, the best advice I can give you on subject matter eligibility is this:  Stop trying to answer this question by searching online, because for a lot of inventions the answer is literally unknown.  Hire a patent lawyer and just hope that the lawyer guesses right about what the law currently is and where it is going.

The next hurdles are far better defined.  The invention must be (1) useful; (2) novel; and (3) not obvious.  Again, a patent lawyer is your go-to person for an actual answer.  If, at the time you filed for the patent (note that it is no longer at the time you invented the thing), somebody skilled in the art wouldn't have found your invention obvious, and nobody else has actually made the thing already, you're in good shape.

What if you can't afford a patent lawyer, or if you want to minimize your costs while you drum up investors (or think about the viability of the product, etc)?  You can file a provisional patent application.  A provisional patent application costs $130 (or in some cases $65) to file.  It doesn't need to set out formal claims or follow most of the other requirements for formal patent applications.

Thanks to a provision in the America Invents Act, it is critical that you file at least a provisional application as soon as possible.  Even if you invent first, if a later inventor beats you to the patent office, they will get the patent and you won't (with some complex and rare exceptions that your patent lawyer can explain).

A lot of the time people file provisionally without a lawyer, but doing so on your own does present some risk.  In fact, while in some cases a provisional patent application makes sense, doing a provisional filing with or without a lawyer is not without risk (for example, if you use a provisional to postpone paying for a full utility application, you may find that your provisional application is missing some elements you later want to claim, and you might lose the priority date you think the provisional gives you).  In some cases, particularly where there is a question about subject matter patent eligibility, you may be better off treating it as a trade secret.  If you are ready to launch a product and want an issued patent ASAP, you might want to go with an expedited "Track 1" application.  I know, to people outside of patent land none of that makes easy sense, but that alone is good reason to talk with a patent lawyer.

That said, I'm not a patent lawyer (I'm a licensed California lawyer, but my patent work revolves around developing and patenting my own inventions), and I can tell you that nearly all lawyers who work with patents lack the holistic picture inventors need.  Basically, you're not looking for a patent just for fun (or if you are, that is some expensive fun).  Rather, it needs to fit into your business plan.  You need to be aware of costs, timing, and ultimately how your patent prosecution strategy impacts your ability to later monetize your patent (for example, by keeping competitors from ripping off your idea).

In the course of your patent's lifespan, you're likely to run into at least two legal requirements -- first, you need a lawyer to get your patent issued (yes, you can do it without a lawyer, just like you might be able to set your own broken arm without going to a doctor).  That "patent prosecution" lawyer normally views the job as "get the patent issued".  But a patent prosecutor doesn't know your business.  Second, if you are lucky enough to get a patent that covers something valuable and unlucky enough that somebody else is ripping off your invention, you need a lawyer to enforce or license your patent (again, you can do it yourself, but it isn't easy to do it right).

One thing that your patent prosecution team won't do for you is think through the actual use of your invention in a way that leads to additional claims, patent elements, etc.  Remember that your invention is not going to stand alone.  Rather, the invention will take its place in an ecosystem where additional functions or small adjustments may be critical to success.  Don't limit your patent filing to what you think is the most likely implementation and use of your invention.  The future can be forecast, but is unwritten.  You can easily be surprised to find that something you considered a minor piece of your invention turns out to be the primary source of value in your patent.  You are already sharing your invention and creativity with the world -- you might as well spend some extra time making sure you don't leave the invention half done.

I should also point out that you have some enforcement choices.  Please don't be a jerk about it.  Some patent owners will threaten or sue individual end users of a product that is actually made by a bigger company.  Technically, those individuals are infringing, but you should think long and hard about whether it is right to go after individuals and small family businesses before going after the entity that supplied them with the infringing product.  Sometimes it makes sense, but it should be done only after giving a lot of thought to whether it is the right way to go about it.

I know I said it a bunch of times already, but to reiterate:  See a patent lawyer.  Seriously.  A seemingly tiny error in drafting can mean the difference between validity and invalidity of a patent.

Note 1:  The U.S. Constitution authorized patents ("Congress shall have the power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries...", Art. 1, Section 8, Clause 8).  The Patent Act of 1793 described the kinds of innovations eligible for patent protection very broadly:  "any new and useful art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement on any art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter".  The language in effect more than 220 years later is nearly identical:  "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title".

Note 2: Bear in mind that the Supreme Court normally determines what the language in the statute has always meant -- meaning that filing for a patent prior to the Court's decision is unlikely to make any difference.  If the Court decides your innovation is not patent-eligible, the decision will apply whether you already hold an issued patent, whether you were previously on file with an application, or whether you have yet to file an application.  Congressional changes to patent law (and yes, they're also likely to make some big changes to other parts of patent law) are different, and for those changes filing dates frequently matter.

It's Dark Between All of These Photons

The heart of innovation is the moment that reorients your thinking.  Everybody -- you included -- has always looking at something one way, and then you realize there is another way to see it.  This short post is intended to provide two examples of things you can see differently.

The post's title probably gives this one away, but let's rethink something really basic:  Light.  We know that light can be bright or dim, can be blocked to cast shadows, can occur in different wavelengths, and can be split into component wavelengths by a prism.  Our thinking about light, though, includes one enormous assumption:  We are big.  From the perspective of something the size of a subatomic particle, light would be perceived in an entirely different way.  There are a limited number of photons hitting a surface at any given time, and if we are small enough, we can go quite some time without being hit.  Without even getting into the wave/particle distinction or how we define the size of a photon, we can easily see how light can be analogized to fog.  When it is foggy, the entirety of the atmosphere doesn't turn into water; instead, there are many tiny water particles amid otherwise dry air.  Similarly, when a surface is lit up with photons, there are large portions of the surface that are, at a given time, not being hit by photons.  In other words, it's dark between all of these photons.

Now imagine that I am standing on a flat surface pointing straight up.  I then call you via video conference, have a friend show you what I'm doing, and ask you to point in the same direction I'm pointing.  Most people would simply point up.  There are many likely assumptions that go into this response, and the accuracy of each of them is critical to whether "up" is the right response.  Note that I reference "likely" assumptions.  Innovation is not about guessing the answer to a trick question, so we can forget about answers based on deception, such as imagining that I asked the question while standing in a giant centrifuge.  Instead, look for things that reorient how you understand the question.  Did you think about where I am relative to you?  If I'm in Moscow and you're in San Francisco, "up" for me is "down" for you.  In those circumstances, you should have pointed to the ground.  Even if we're standing next to each other and Jupiter is directly overhead, I may point "in the direction of Jupiter", but the rotation of the earth is such that by the time you've pointed, you are probably off by a small amount.

There is a concept in psychology called "fundamental attribution error".  Wikipedia explains it as "people's tendency to place an undue heavy emphasis on internal characteristics to explain someone else's behavior in a given situation, rather than thinking about external situational factors".  There is a similarity between fundamental attribution error and a failure to innovate.  We try to answer the question we think has been asked, rather than taking a step back and making sure we aren't missing something crucial in the very framework in which the the question exists.  Great innovations often happen when innovators realize that everybody else has been trying to answer the wrong question, or relying on incorrect assumptions in understanding the question.

The Inventor's Cone of Uncertainty

Project managers often use a "Cone of Uncertainty" to describe the possible range of project outcomes, length, costs, and other factors at a given point in time.  A well known variant on this is the National Hurricane Center's "NHC Track Forecast Cone", which represents "the probable track of the center of a tropical cyclone ... along the forecast track (at 12, 24, 36 hours, etc.)."

The "Cone of Uncertainty" applied to hurricane forecasting

While the Cone of Uncertainty is commonly used to visualize the potential outcomes of events such as weather or projects, there is no reason it cannot be used to plan educational and career paths.  Indeed, the Cone of Uncertainty model is one of the best ways to illustrate how important a broad knowledge base and skill set is to innovation.  As I describe in my piece on "The Imposter Superpower", innovation requires that we know enough to know what is possible, but not so much that we internalize what "experts" think is impossible.  Experts can explain how we think things work and why we think we cannot do certain things; innovators have a broader view, bringing together ideas from disparate fields to do what experts in each of those fields would have never imagined, or would have believed impossible.

The cone of uncertainty, in the context of knowledge and innovation, describes what the putative problem solver believes he will need to know in order to solve the problems that face him in the future.  Like all aspects of innovation, children start with a broad, creative view:  "I can do anything, I can solve anything, so I need to be prepared to face anything."  As we shuffle through the education system, we face mounting pressure to reduce the scope of our knowledge in order to allow us enough time to increase the depth of a subset of that knowledge.

There are two ends of the "career track" in determining where the "education/expertise" cone of uncertainty lies for any given person:  Experts and innovators (these are the two extremes of a continuum, and people fall everywhere in between).  An expert operates on the assumption that they need to know everything about a specific area, and knowledge about other areas is less important.  An innovator operates on the assumption that they cannot accurately predict what they will need to know, so they need to know a little about everything.  A sample cone of uncertainty for education and experience for an extremely focused expert and an extremely broad-based innovator illustrates the difference:

By focusing all of his energy on a single subject -- in this case, mathematics, the expert will undoubtedly have a far better grasp of the current state of human knowledge about mathematics.  This firm grasp will include all of the errors and inaccuracies in current human understanding about mathematics, and all of the false limitations that flow from them.  By contrast, the innovator, with a far broader (and far shallower) base of knowledge, knows enough to see the possibilities in many subjects, the cross-disciplinary solutions to problems, and other aspects of the "big picture".  While the innovator's broader knowledge makes her the "visionary", she will often need to turn to experts to actually fashion and test the visionary solutions she comes up with.

One can imagine how this plays out in practice.  Imagine that the expert mathematician works for a government agency and is tasked with developing a formulaic method for breaking public key encryption (while it is thought that no such formula is possible, it has yet to be proven).  Without a formula, brute force attacks require either an impossibly high amount of time on regular computers, or the development of a powerful enough quantum computer (the NSA is on it, though).  Now imagine that the mathematician is not the only one working on the problem; the same agency has a group of programmers working on a classic computing algorithm that would crack the keys more efficiently and a group of physicists working on a quantum computer with enough processing capacity to instantly crack the encryption.

What if there is a solution, but it requires an algorithm, running on a combination of a classical computer and a low-capacity quantum computer, within the framework of a mathematical formula that reduces the number of possible solution sets  but falls short of a fully formulaic solution?  The innovator, with a little bit of knowledge in each of these areas, could shuttle between the three groups of experts and synthesize the solution.  The innovator could never implement all aspects of the solution on her own, but implementation is what experts are for.  The innovator starts with a broad knowledge base, combines ideas from experts in different fields, and creatively combines them into a likely solution.

As the example shows, knowledge and expertise are not enough.  Creativity is also required.  As I've written, humans are born with unbounded creativity, but most people lose a lot of their creativity as they gather expertise and education.  I was initially planning to describe a second cone-type mechanism for understanding creativity, but found the qualities of the "cone of creativity" essentially parallel the knowledge/experience cone of uncertainty.  Humans are naturally creative, and as long as we keep a substantial breadth of knowledge easily accessible, our creativity in combining ideas sourced from diverse places along that breadth of knowledge remains strong.  In essence, there is a strong correlation between creativity and maintaining a large knowledge/experience cone of uncertainty.

One objection to keeping a large cone of uncertainty is that we sacrifice too much depth of knowledge in order to maintain familiarity with far too broad a number of subjects.  This is true, and is the primary reason why highly focused experts are critical to scientific progress.  A single human being cannot simultaneously be the world's leading expert in a narrow subject and a highly prolific innovator broadly knowledgeable across a range of subjects.  But with billions of humans to draw upon, there is room for everything from the most diffusely knowledgeable innovator to the most hyper-focused expert, and as long as we are conscientious about pairing innovators with experts, we will innovate at a remarkable rate.

The counterpoint to the objection that the cone of uncertainty is too large is that the universe is uncertain.  We may think we know what problems we will face, but even the best forecasts can be disastrously wrong.  While an imperfect analogy, the sample cone of uncertainty (near the top of this article) is a good illustration.  It is a forecast cone for Hurricane Katrina, a storm that caused incredible damage to New Orleans.  The forecast cone was issued at 11:00 am EDT on Friday, less than three days before the 7:10 am EDT landfall in Louisiana, but showed New Orleans barely at the edge of a far side of the cone.  At 68 hours prior to landfall in New Orleans, the most likely track for Katrina took it right into Florida's panhandle, with Alabama and Mississippi between it and New Orleans.  As it turns out, the actual track was quite different from the forecast track.

Katrina's actual track

Katrina's forecast track did at least include New Orleans as a lower probability target at the far edge of the track.  The actual point of landfall for storms is frequently outside of the track -- the National Hurricane Center's forecast cone attempts to accurately predict the path around 60-70% of the time.

Given the substantial consequences if emergency planners do not prepare for the risk that the cone of uncertainty is too small, planning is done for potential landfall targets all across the track, and even outside of the track.  If emergency planners in the field of hurricane tracking are analogized to innovators and experts in the field of problem solving, we see why it is important to plan for problems that arise outside of the predicated cone of uncertainty.

The bottom line is that innovators need to think more like DaVinci -- art may seem unrelated to medicine and aviation, but if you study DaVinci's work, you will see the important role his skills as an artist played in studying medical and aviation problems.  In the days before the FAA, degrees in art history and homogenized medical education programs, it was easy to learn about a broad enough swath of subjects to accommodate an enormous zone of uncertainty.  It is still easy -- we have simply forgotten how important it is to have broadly knowledgeable innovators.

Effective Innovators Predict the Future

In college, my best friend told me that his favorite books were “Future History”, by which he meant “hard science fiction”, a genre where the author tries to depict a future based on technologies that scientists believe are possible.  Great innovators and hard science fiction writers are very similar in what they do – they learn about the state of the art, they learn how scientists think the world works, they learn where humans are concentrating their science and innovation efforts, and they synthesize all of that information into a cogent, plausible description of the future.  Writers and innovators diverge in what they do with this information.  Writers craft an interesting story; innovators design technology that combines and leverages tools that do not yet exist – but that are likely to exist in the future.

An excellent, if fictionalized, example can be drawn from the global positioning system (GPS).  An innovator at the time of sputnik could have easily predicted a future where satellites could be placed in geosynchronous orbit; where highly accurate timing signals (corrected as required by Einstein’s theory of relatively) could be transmitted by the satellites; and where computing devices could compare, or triangulate, at least three such signals to generate a location for the receiver.  Note that at the time, the technology needed to build each of those components was understood; it was highly likely that the components would at some point be built, but at the moment the components had not yet been built.  If an inventor had synthesized those pieces into a description of what we know today as the GPS system and GPS-enabled devices, he would not only have a head start (in terms of patents and lead time) when the building blocks of GPS were built.  Perhaps more importantly, the promise of GPS may have expedited the creation of those building blocks, or even altered how those building blocks were developed (for example, by incorporating GPS transmitters as standard equipment on early geosynchronous satellites).

A more recent example is the development of the iPhone.  The building blocks that made the iPhone an innovative leap were predictably on their way to deployment, but for the most part were not yet ready for deployment (technologies such as accurate touch screen displays, high energy density batteries, low power processors, high density non-magnetic storage, high bandwidth wireless connections, and robust content compression and digital rights management, among other things).  While the role of predicting the future in the development of the iPhone has not been documented, Steve Jobs’ combination of those future technologies could not have been accomplished without that kind of predictive imagination.  The quick success of the iPhone, and the notably slower and shallower success of competing phones that did less to integrate future technologies (e.g. Windows Phone) speaks strongly to the importance of designing products that take advantage of the world as it will be when the product is set to be released.  It is not a coincidence that Apple products are frequently in short supply because some cutting edge component is being mass produced for the first time, and cannot be made in large enough numbers to meet demand; rather, it is a predictable problem when releasing innovative products that combine technologies that were predicted but not yet developed at the time the innovative products were designed.

A final example is drawn from my own patented invention, “Method and Apparatus for Delivering Content Via Information Retrieval Devices”.  In the period leading up to my May 8, 2000 filing date, I recognized the future importance of what was then known as a “Personal Digital Assistant”, or PDA.  I also knew some things about the future:  Moore’s Law has processor power doubling roughly every 18 to 24 months; battery technology was predictably improving; memory density and cost were moving rapidly in opposite directions; digitization of human knowledge was increasing at an exponential rate; a lot of attention was being paid to improving user interfaces for small devices, increasing the likely rate of adoption; GPS technology was becoming cheaper and smaller; and wireless data availability, reliability, and speed were all improving.  I engaged in a thought experiment:  What would happen if I could take the processing power, storage space, and/or the network connection speed of a rack full of servers, and fit all of that into a small, hand-held device that would run all day on a single charge?  In other words, what if I could take my vision of what the future would bring and invent things that leveraged those future technologies?  The result was a set of highly innovative, forward looking (and patented) breakthroughs.  Inventing items that are a simple combination of existing, easily available technologies doesn’t hold a candle to inventing for the world as it will be.

Predicting the future is easy.  There are countless web sites, books, and magazines that document where the future is heading (although I’ve never considered it before writing this post, I think I’m going to add “hard science fiction” to my list of sources for understanding the future).  A core piece of any prolific innovator’s DNA is making sure that her understanding of the future is as accurate as possible.  Her reward is that she gets to invent in a space that is nearly devoid of other inventors:  The world as it will be.  There is also an added bonus for innovators who have this technique down: If you ever get bored with inventing things, you’re already 90% of the way to becoming a successful science fiction writer.  Just saying.

My Greatest Invention

I have been working diligently on my book about innovation, and I've rewritten almost every part of it at least once.  The dedication, however, has remained nearly unchanged.  It provides a compelling example of how an innovator can easily re-purpose the tools of innovation into tools of personal and family happiness -- a story I shared this morning with Al Diaz on his radio show.  That show inspired me to share the written version of the story without waiting for the book to be released.

My greatest invention will never be patented, licensed, or mass produced.  It is my blended family.  This [forthcoming] book is dedicated to all of them – my wife Dana, my daughters Eva, Sara and Bel, my ex-wife (and Eva’s mother) Margaret, as well as my daughters’ “bonus brother”, Jack.  Invention, you see, lies not in the complexity of a new idea but in the simplicity of challenging old ones.

It was 2004, and my only daughter Eva had just turned three.  Recently divorced, living and telecommuting in Fresno where Eva lived and where I was able to have half-time custody of her, I had hit an all time low.  I was worrying so much about my situation that I was nearly useless at work.  My inventing came to a near standstill because I was too distracted to connect problems with solutions.  I felt like I was a failure because I hadn’t been able to stay married.  I was sure I had let my daughter down because my family would now be a divorced family.  I went to bed and refused to fall asleep because I knew that I would awake having had nightmares.

What an opportunity I had to reinvent myself.  What an opportunity I had.

I decided to start dating again.  I decided I wanted to meet a woman with a cultural background similar to my own, and with a degree in a subject about which I knew nothing.  I thought I would enjoy the comfort of familiarity and the excitement of somebody who thought differently than I did.

I had no luck meeting such a person close to home, so I joined an online dating service.  I was immediately drawn to a beautiful woman with the user name “docdana”.  I read her profile, and my heart dropped (the sound you just heard was my heart dropping below the floor, since I was already feeling so low).  “Are you willing to relocate?” “No,” she answered.  “Are you willing to date somebody who is divorced?”  Again, her profile said “no”.  “Are you willing to date somebody with kids?”  A final “no” stared back at me from my laptop.

Inventors learn to embrace their annoyance, commit to solving their problems.  My big problem at that moment was that I did not know how I would find the right person when the right person was already staring back at me from my computer screen, telling me the three rules that meant I would never be with her.

Three strikes – and then the inventor genes kicked in.  I felt a rush.  Innovators know that identifying a “rule” that stands in our way is a huge breakthrough, because rules are not freestanding, immutable objects.  Rules are just a snapshot of our assumptions at a specific point in time.  I sure didn’t like the rules that “docdana” had, and I was going to approach this as an innovator.

Maybe she had it all wrong.  Why wouldn’t she relocate?  She said didn’t want to date a divorced man, but could she be convinced?  She wouldn’t date anybody with children, but I love Eva – why wouldn’t she?  I wrote her a note, striking the best balance I could between brevity, wit, and the quick, punchy sentences that would get my note noticed among the dozens this remarkable woman must receive daily.  Maybe each of those “rules” was just a limitation created from a flawed underlying assumption.

To my wonder, she responded.  We wrote back and forth, we talked by phone, and as quickly as I could, I arranged to visit her in person.  We dated, fell in love, and married.  We have since had two more children.  Yes!  Three flawed assumptions, three “rules” that were not really rules at all.  Wouldn’t relocate?  She was just assuming that she wouldn’t meet anybody worth relocating for.  Wouldn’t date anybody with children?  She was just assuming that she wouldn’t like the children – and wow, was that assumption going to change the minute she met my child.  Would not marry somebody who had been divorced?  She just had the wrong idea about how the family structure would play out.

It was so beautiful because it was completely driven by my subconscious – desire, attraction, intrigue, hope – and I didn’t let my analytical thinking stop me.  We have the same ups and downs as other couples, but refusing to accepts limits in the inception of our relationship has cast a wonderful light of possibility over the rest of our relationship.

I knew how critical parental cooperation is to childhood development, and I was determined to keep a strong, healthy relationship with my first wife.  As anybody who has been divorced with children will tell you, this is a tall order.  My current and former wives could, in a different world, have been close friends.  They had plenty in common.  Unfortunately, their first interactions were rocky at best.  Never giving up, I tried everything I could to warm the relationship.  While the vast majority of the work and the credit for achieving that goal rest with those two incredible women, I take great pride in the fact that within a year or two my current and former wives became best friends.  We parent Eva cooperatively, and we function as a healthy blended family.

My first wife has since remarried, we all welcomed her new husband into this healthy family ecosystem, and had a child.  My two youngest daughters now have a “bonus brother” born not of blood but of a loving extended family.  My oldest daughter has continuity of parenting, and a very engaged step-mother and step-father.  And all of us enjoy a family life that, whatever it’s challenges, was birthed free of the constant acrimony, stress, and trouble that plagues so many blended families.  Put simply, the four adults in this blended family are all friends, and that makes everything else much easier and better.

Inventions are all about challenging assumptions.  As I discuss in my book, rules are simply a reflection of our assumptions at that moment in time.   I knew three of Dana’s “rules” before I met her – she would not relocate, date a divorced man, or date a man with children.  While she surely believed in the validity of these rules, it turned out that her underlying assumptions (perhaps, my ego hopes, that she would never meet a man worth doing any of those things for) were wrong.  When the underlying assumptions changed, the rules no longer made sense and were quickly ignored.  I knew the “rules” of post-divorce parenting – even the best intentioned parents could cooperate on parenting issues but the relationship would never be warm enough to truly feel more “family” than “blended”.  Those rules, too, were built on a faulty assumption (perhaps that the bad feelings generated by a divorce would necessarily taint all that comes after).  When I refused to accept that assumption (and my current and former wives joined me in rejecting it), the “rules” about blended families quickly crumbled.

We all live in a world of our own invention.  Some inventions are closer to home, some can be built, some can be sold, some can be lived, but all are built on a stubborn refusal to blindly accept the validity of rules without looking at the underlying assumptions.

Why We Need To Rethink Innovation -- A Story Told By Patent Statistics

I received my 100th patent (together with my 101st and 102nd) today.  This milestone gave me cause to reflect on the amazing experience of answering "what do you do for a living" with "I'm an inventor."  I started to say "inventor" when I had around ten patents, but it was always softened with "I do lots of things, including inventing".  Around fifty patents, the caveats fell away, and at one hundred patents I don't have any hesitation in describing my job as "inventor" (although I've added consultant, speaker and author along the way).

I started to wonder how many people have enough patents that they probably either earn a living as an inventor or are capable of earning a living as an inventor.  Unfortunately, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) does not keep a registry of inventors, so a search for "Smith, John" returns almost 500 patents, but no indication of which patent was invented by which "John Smith".  In the past I used faqs.org's inventor page and top 100 inventor page to get an idea about how many prolific inventors are actively receiving patents, but that data is based on patent applications and not issued patents.  Moreover, I have spot checked the data against inventors I know, and I was not convinced that inventors were accurately identified (for example, the page with Shuster has at least seven different entries for me).

I was thrilled this week to find http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/patent/faces/study/StudyPage.xhtml?studyId=70546&tab=files, a Harvard University project that includes a database of all patents issued between 1975 and 2010.  Critically, the Harvard team processed the data using a complex Bayesian algorithm to generate a data point the USPTO does not provide:  A unique inventor ID.

I had 37 patents issue to me by the end of 2010.  The raw data contained 38 patents issued to a "Gary Shuster", but one was to "Gary B. Shuster", so it appears that the raw data is accurate.  Much more importantly, the data set assigned all 37 of my patents to a single unique inventor number.  I spot checked other inventors, and the unique inventor identification system seems pretty solid.

Digging into the numbers, the data set identifies 2,665,709 unique inventors with patents that issued between 1975 and 2010, inclusive.  Within that data set, 90% of all inventors have 7 or fewer patents; 95% of all inventors have 12 or fewer patents; 99% of all inventors have 32 or fewer patents; 99.61% of all inventors have 50 or fewer patents; and 99.925% of all inventors have 100 or fewer patents.  The actual number of human beings at each point is also illustrative:  2,665,709 inventors had at least one patent; 224,390 had more than 7; 133,443 had more than 12; 24,867 had more than 32; 9,949 had more than 50; and 1,953 had more than 100.  Taking it out to the points at which we cross below 1,000, 500, and 100 inventors, 999 inventors had more than 132 patents; 490 inventors had more than 173 patents; and 98 inventors had more than 305 patents.

The data becomes a lot clearer when graphed:

This chart shows how many inventors (Y axis) have been issued more than a certain number of patents (X axis).  So there are, for example, just under 1.2 million inventors who hold more than one patent.  As you can see from the chart, there is an extremely rapid fall off in the number of patents per inventor.  The fall of is so extreme that a logarithmic chart is more helpful in analyzing inventors of more than around 20 patents:

Done logarithmically, we can take the chart out to show inventors with up to 1,000 patents:

 Before we attach undue significance to the numbers, it is important to understand the limitations created by the range of data behind them and the trends in patent issuance.  First, the rate of patent allowance has been rising, as has the number of patent applications.  The USPTO reports that 276,788 patents were granted in 2012 -- more than double 1997's 124,069 patent grants and more than quadruple 1983's 61,982 patent grants.

The rise in patent grants charted from the USPTO data is quite steep, as shown on the graph above.  Because the grant rate was less than 82,000 patents per year in the years prior to the 1975 start of the Harvard data set, there are a smaller number of prolific inventors who were issued some of their patents prior to 1975 and some after.  Inventors who straddle the 1975 start of the Harvard data set present a problem in that they will be counted as inventors, but their total number of inventions will be under counted (as some of their patents fall outside of the lower bounds of the data set).  An analogous problem exists, but of a greater magnitude, for inventors receiving patents after the 2010 upper bound of the Harvard data set.

My own patent grant history illustrates the problem.  As of the 2010 cut-off date for the Harvard data set, I had 37 patents.  At the time I am writing this in late 2013, I hold 102 patents.  As a result, I appear in the data set as a moderately prolific inventor, in the top 1% of inventors.  However, my 102 patents would have put me in the top 99.987% of all inventors in the Harvard data set.

Another limitation is the Harvard study's failure to distinguish continuation application data from original application data.  Inventors can obtain multiple patents based on a single patent application, usually in the form of patents that issue from continuations of the original filing.  It is common for patent families to exist, representing multiple patents based on a single original patent application.  Some of the patents in a single family are deemed by the USPTO (sometimes incorrectly) to be sufficiently similar that a "terminal disclaimer", tying the expiration date of one patent to the expiration of another similar one, is required.  Continuation practice serves a very important purpose, allowing inventors to disclose a technology that includes multiple patentable elements.  By incorporating the full description of the technology in a single document but separating the covered claims into logically connected groups within different individual patents, the world can better understand the full scope of the technology without having to claim multiple independent pieces of the technology in a single patent claim set.

There is an enormous difference between an inventor who has developed 50 different technological breakthroughs and an inventor who has developed just a few different technological breakthroughs but obtained 50 patents through aggressive continuation filings.  It is possible (though wasteful) to obtain more than 100 patents based on a single patent filing.  It is also possible (though likely a poor strategy) to obtain only a single patent per patent filing.  Unfortunately, the Harvard study does not identify how many patent families each inventor has invented.

Finally, my analysis of the data does not distinguish between somebody who is named only as one of a large team of inventors and an inventor who has developed the invention on his own.  Often, participating as a member of a large team makes it easier to make a small contribution to an enormous number of patents, thereby boosting the raw number of issued patents without requiring the 100% contribution that a solo inventor must make.

Conclusions:

First, I note that since there are only around 2,000 people with over 100 patents out of a global population of 7 billion, only one person in 3.5 million has as many patents as I do.  I know what I do is unusual, but when I do presentations about innovation for kids, I find that more than 10% of the kids could easily create as prolifically as I do.  So as nice as it is for my ego to say that my invention skills are 1 in 3.5 million, this is less a reflection of my creative genius as it is of the failings of our educational system and a fundamental error in how human adults have come to view creativity.

On a more basic level, obtaining patents is expensive and time consuming.  It is safe to assume that almost everybody with more than 100 patents earns their living, primarily, as an innovator.  Some people with more than 100 patents, such as Steve Jobs, can earn a living by innovation without reference to patent revenue, but make no mistake:  Almost all of the 2,000 inventors with more than 100 patents make their living through innovation.

For every innovator who is knowledgeable about patents and capable of filing for them, there are plenty who are not participants in the patent system.  This, and the rapid rise in patent applications and grants, lead me to believe that there are likely 10,000 people who could easily earn their living strictly by innovating.

As people who have seen me speak know, anybody can be a prolific innovator, but those 10,000 people I identify are those who can do it now, without having to rethink how they approach innovation and creativity.  10,000 people out of a global population of more than 7 billion -- one out of every 700,000 people -- is a testament to how poorly we do at helping children to nurture the innovation that comes to them so naturally.  Some time between childhood, when we see no limitations, and adulthood, when we see only limitations, we are failing.  It does not need to stay this way.  And I'm making it my life's work to see to it that it doesn't.