Since the advent of the cube, people all over the world have asked for help, saying that as I posed the puzzle, I must know the best solution. But this is a misunderstanding!
For me, it was more interesting to find the problem than to solve it, although, of course, I know that practice in solving problems helps us formulate new ones.
—ERNÖ RUBIK
INVENTORS ARE USUALLY THOUGHT of as people who are good at solving problems, but they should be thought of foremost as people who are good at finding problems. Inventors spend considerable effort hunting for a challenge that matches their own set of skills. Some inventors uncover a problem that no one else has seen. Others pick a solvable piece of a larger problem. Still others redefine the predicament so thoroughly that they turn a known problem into something that was at least partially hidden. If the inventor doesn’t pinpoint the problem correctly, then all the effort he and others expend pondering the solution could be wasted. The inventor might create something that no one really needs, or she might take on an impossible task. As Nobel Prize–winning physicist and inventor Albert Michelson attested, “Knowing what kind of problem it is worthwhile to attack is, in general, more important than the mere carrying out of the necessary steps.”1
Ernö Rubik imparts the same wisdom. “To formulate the problem and to solve it are not the same thing,” he notes.2 In posing his cube in 1974, the Hungarian industrial designer worked on a variety of construction techniques and a variety of forms, all the while asking himself the question, How can I create the most challenging problem that is solvable in a variety of ways? He settled on a three-by-three-by-three-face cube, with fifty-four squares total, as the ideal challenge. “If the number is decreased, some of these qualities will be lost,” he wrote. “If it is increased, no new quality is gained.” He applied for a patent on his “magic cube,” licensed it to a local manufacturer, and sold one million units in Hungary alone, a number that is remarkable for a country of only ten million people. After it was exported through an American toy company in 1980, Rubik’s Cube became a worldwide sensation. The lesson: The human mind likes taking on challenging problems, but pinpointing such problems requires a special skill.
Jay Walker, founder and chairman of Walker Digital, a business innovation laboratory based in Stamford, Connecticut, works constantly on developing this skill. Walker is a high-energy thinker who reads voraciously, watches no television, and seems to love nothing more than to hyperfocus on someone else’s problems. Whenever Walker hires new inventors for his laboratory staff, he hands them a new Rubik’s Cube to keep on their desks as a way of showing them what a tough problem looks like. It’s one of the few employee policies at Walker Digital. To Walker, the puzzle’s objective seems simple enough: You must align all the cube’s squares so that each side displays a single color, either red, yellow, green, or blue. But solving the puzzle isn’t as easy as it appears. “Here’s a six-sided figure,” Walker says, “and getting five of them right doesn’t help you. Just when you think you’ve got one side perfect, another side is out of kilter. It’s a perfectly accessible metaphor for what we do [at Walker Digital]. But it’s just a metaphor, because most things are much more complex than a Rubik’s Cube.”3
Problems that require invention often have many sides. “If you can’t find at least six sides to a problem,” Walker says, “you’re not looking hard enough.” Over his career, he has developed a knack for finding and defining problems in original ways. He is always teaching the inventors on his staff how to do it, while picking up new approaches from them. “We focus a lot on problem definition,” Walker says. “Most inventors haven’t learned to spend time thinking about the problem. They’re too busy thinking about the damn solution. It’s a big mistake.”
To show more precisely how this process of pinpointing problems works, Walker cites a recent invention. He decided to enter the problem space of what is called noncompliance: the failure of patients to take medicine their doctors have prescribed. Many elderly people, for example, don’t take their blood pressure pills. Why not? What can be done? “It’s a huge problem,” Walker says.
The magnitude of the problem is underlined by Peter Corr, vice president of research and development at Pfizer. The pharmaceutical giant spends more money on R&D than any other company in the world. At any given time, it has several hundred new drugs in various phases of discovery research. Yet it has little control over how patients use its products or whether they follow their doctors’ orders. “With many medicines,” Corr says, “if patients are noncompliant, the medicine is not effective.”4 He cites the anticholesterol drug Lipitor—Pfizer’s top-selling product—as one example of a pill with an especially large noncompliance problem.
As it turns out, this problem has many facets, according to Walker. The most obvious facet is that patients put their own health in jeopardy. Another facet is the billions of dollars lost by drug companies because people take fewer pills than prescribed. Yet another facet is the cost to health-maintenance organizations of noncompliance, costs such as increased hospitalization and doctor visits. Still another facet is the stress at the families of patients, who are worried and upset about their loved ones.
Making this problem especially gnarly, many maladies, such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol, have no outward symptoms. Patients typically do not feel pain or discomfort. Eventually, the unnoticed damage caused by these conditions might cause a heart attack, but the idea is to alleviate the condition before that happens.
Isn’t the solution obvious? “The classic M.B.A.-type solution would be to send the patients e-mail reminders to take their medicine,” Walker says. “Or let’s program their cell phones or PDAs to go off twice a day to take their medicine.” But those ideas reveal a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the problem. “Those kinds of solutions would appeal to someone who wasn’t taught how to think about problem definition,” he says. “Silicon Valley is guilty of this all the time. They define problems through a technological prism.” People focused on a particular technology often “ignore human behavior,” he says. “During [the Internet boom of the late 1990s], anything could get funded, because [venture capitalists] didn’t think about the real problems. They just said, ‘This could happen, why don’t we do this?’”
Thinking in a more focused way, Walker concluded that the problem wasn’t that people weren’t taking their medicine but rather that people were not motivated to take their medicine. “That’s a different issue,” he says. “Let’s take it even further. The problem is that there is no immediate reward for taking your medicine. The medicine literally doesn’t make them feel better. Most people do not behave without tangible rewards, without the feedback element. If we don’t see the benefits of doing something, we will stop the behavior. That’s just human nature. So the real problem is that you don’t see any benefit in taking the pill.”
Pinpointing the problem in this way, Walker was able to come up with a unique solution. “Our solution is to build a slot machine right into the bottle cap of the blood pressure medication, with a chip in it. So if you open the bottle at the right time, twice a day, the LCD’s lights spin, and you can win a $5,000 prize immediately.”
Like many new ideas, this one seems crazy. Turning medicine bottles into slot machines? What could be more ridiculous? But if you walk into a casino, you can watch all the people lined up at the slot machines. Notice that a disproportionate share of these people are over the age of sixty. Start to think about the human motivations behind the exploding use of slot machines. Walker has done this, and so has James Jorasch, the invention operations chief at Walker Digital. Jorasch spent the early part of his career in Las Vegas, studying customer behavior as an analyst and game developer for Tropicana Resorts.
Walker and Jorasch described the precise workings of this idea in a patent application. They explained how this mini slot machine would operate in conjunction with the medicine bottle and how the slot machine would be programmed to work only during predetermined windows of time. They described the operations of the slot machine itself, along with the lottery system that would administer the prize money. They explained how the winner would be flashed a special code number to use in claiming the prize. They even described how winners would receive a drug test the next day to verify that the drug was in their bloodstream.
Walker and Jorasch believe that this slot machine–activated drug bottle is a good example of their method of developing “business-driven patents.” These kinds of patents derive directly from business problems and goals rather than from technology. The process of finding such problems begins with looking through a behavioral prism, not a technological prism. Walker aims to align his inventions with strong and universal behaviorial traits that he calls “superforces,” and gambling is one such superforce.5
Next, the inventor must understand in a comprehensive way who benefits from the problem and who would benefit from the solution, says Walker. The inventor then determines whether solving the problem would be a good bet in terms of investment of the company’s resources and the potential return. Critical to this process are feedback loops, such as focus groups or early assessments and reactions from those who would be affected by the solution. The process doesn’t necessarily involve building a working prototype. It’s immensely helpful to be able to demonstrate inventions, but it isn’t required or necessary in order to obtain a patent.
Walker became convinced that the slot machine–activated drug bottle was a good bet that would likely be licensed and used by a drug company, a drugstore chain, or another interested party. One question that he left up in the air was where the $5,000 and other prize money would come from. But Walker is confident that so much money could be saved from reducing noncompliance that drug companies, HMOs, or employers would gladly fund this system if it prevented heart attacks and other costly health failures. The relatives of the patients may even want to contribute. “Who is financially motivated to pay?” Walker asks. “If I can get my mother to take the medicine, and all I have to do is pay $1 per month to fund the payouts, I’d do it in a heartbeat, no pun intended.”
Whether or not this invention works in practice, there is no doubt that Walker found an inventive way to pinpoint a problem in a fertile area. Pfizer’s Peter Corr says that 50 percent of healthcare costs are related to behavioral issues, such as overeating, lack of exercise, smoking, and noncompliance with prescription orders. If inventors can come up with solutions that alter people’s behavior, they can strike gold and save lives at the same time. But that can be accomplished only by finding the real problem beneath the surface.
A critical aspect of pinpointing problems is assessing whether it’s a good bet to work on a given problem. Will a solution be received well by the market? Will the payoff justify the effort and expense? For his first patented invention, Thomas Edison learned the hard way about the relative merits of picking one problem over another. After working as a roving telegraph operator, traveling by rail from town to town in search of higher-paying stints, the twenty-one-year-old Edison ended up applying for a full-time position with the Western Union company in Boston. By the time he arrived in town, in 1868, he had invented various improvements to telegraph receivers, but he had not yet patented anything.6
In his off-hours working for the telegraph monopoly, Edison moonlighted, searching for problems that might require invention. One evening, while attending a session of the Massachusetts legislature in Boston’s gold-domed state house, he noticed how inefficient the process was for tabulating votes among the representatives. The roll call was chaotic and confusing. Obtaining a simple count using handwritten ballots could take hours.
Based on his experience working with devices to record and transmit information, Edison became convinced that this was a problem he could solve. He ended up building an ingenious device: an electric vote recorder. Each member of the legislature would position a switch at his seat in one of two positions: yea or nay. The decisions would be relayed by wires to the machine, which would instantly record the votes on rolls of treated paper using a special electrochemical process. The machine would then tabulate the overall result.
But when Edison paid a sales call to the legislature, one of the senior members listened to the pitch and exclaimed, “This is exactly what we do not want!” The chaotic delays that happened during the roll call served a purpose, the politician said. This time was reserved for arguing, bargaining, filibustering, and cajoling other members into switching their votes. “Your invention would not only destroy the only hope the minority would have in influencing legislation,” said one representative, “it would deliver them over—bound hand and foot—to the majority.”
Edison didn’t anticipate this. He failed to take into account a major facet of the problem: Who benefits from the current way of doing things? The main users of the invention might not see it as an improvement. They might push back. They might feel threatened by it. The interests of various groups of users are always key parts of any problem that requires invention. These are exactly the kinds of questions that Jay Walker has learned to ask before he chooses which problems to solve and how. How does the invention affect each of the stakeholders in the problem?
For his part, Edison encapsulated the lesson in a much more straightforward way: “Never waste time inventing things that people would not want to buy,” he wrote. Of course, some inventions are simply ahead of their time and eventually will be accepted. But building and selling voting machines has always been an uphill battle. The political system is not only perpetually short of money but sometimes also corrupt, and it’s usually hesitant to adopt better technologies for fear of giving one side or another an unfair advantage. Is it a good bet to attack the problem of voting inefficiency? Clearly not. This seemingly straightforward problem remains with us today. During the disputed U.S. presidential election in 2000, some commentators noted the irony that the greatest inventor who ever lived once provided a solution that was rejected by the market.
For his next invention, Edison was determined to choose a problem that had better odds of success. After giving up his Western Union job and relocating to New York City, which he considered “more commercially minded” than Boston, Edison stumbled upon an opportunity. Wandering through offices near Wall Street in search of employment, he met the manager of a brokerage firm, who was in a panic because his ticker machine was broken. The Gold Indicator Company made its living by supplying price quotes for gold to banks and traders. When Edison stepped in to replace a loose spring and got the device working again after only a few minutes, he was instantly offered a $300-per-week job to manage, fix, and tinker with the firm’s machines. He quickly learned that the market for gold as well as stocks was swinging so wildly that these specialized telegraph receivers commonly failed under the strain. On Black Friday, September 24, 1869, when robber baron Jay Gould raided the gold market and set off widespread panic, Edison watched from a balcony at the stock exchange as thousands of traders lost fortunes because they couldn’t keep up with current prices.
Edison had found a good bet, a problem worthy of his time and effort. He came away from the Black Friday experience realizing that selling information about the value of gold was worth more than the gold itself. He witnessed firsthand the primal superforces of greed and fear. All the players in the market wanted better information more quickly, and any technology that could accomplish that would command a huge price.
He immediately placed a notice in a trade newspaper, the Telegrapher: “T. A. Edison has resigned from his situation and will devote his time to bringing out his inventions.” When he completed his improved stock ticker machine and filed for a patent on the device, Edison took his invention to the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company. He had planned to ask for $5,000 in return for the patent rights, thinking he would settle for $3,000. When the head of the company offered to write a check for $40,000 to back a new firm to manufacture the machines, legend has it that Edison nearly fainted. He opened Newark Telegraph Works in New Jersey, hired fifty workers, and used the profits from the venture to pinpoint and solve new problems. This was the birth of Edison’s first professional R&D laboratory.
The first thing you notice when you walk into the office of Jay Walker is an authentic Edison stock ticker machine made at that Newark factory. The apparatus sits on an oak base under a glass dome. Walker purchases collectibles such as these at auctions and estate sales. Also scattered about his office are a giant roulette wheel from 1900, one of the earliest typewriting machines, an original Enigma code–breaking machine from World War II, a dinosaur fossil, a moon rock brought back by Apollo 12, a set of Civil War surgical instruments, and a complete atlas of the world from 1620. Hanging on the walls are original documents, including a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript, John D. Rockefeller’s controlling stock certificate in the Standard Oil Trust, President Nixon’s resignation letter, and a $100,000 bonus check from Thomas Edison to his staff, paid to the order of “ourselves.”
Why has Walker amassed all this memorabilia related to the power of ideas and information? Actually, it’s common among the inventors you’ll meet in this book to collect remarkably similar objects. “Inventors make their living on their wits,” Walker explains. “They admire the way other people have solved problems. Inventors are always looking for ways to stimulate their minds and open their thinking. It’s a lot like going to a writer’s house and noticing he has a lot of books. Every writer I visit! I can’t understand why! It must be something about writers! Yeah, it pretty much is!”
But perhaps more than most inventors, Walker collects business artifacts as well as inventions. He has always combined his interest in finding and solving problems with the associated business opportunities. Growing up in Yonkers, New York, in the 1960s, he opened a laboratory in a spare closet, where he built model rockets, ships, and airplanes. By the age of ten, he was having hot times with a soldering iron, ordering build-it-yourself Heathkits to learn how to make volt meters, oscilloscopes, radios, TVs, stereos, microwave ovens, and slot cars. Heathkits were filled with electronic and mechanical parts that could be assembled in many different ways.
As a teenager, Walker honed his skills as a door-to-door salesman, peddling greeting cards, jam, and magazine and newspaper subscriptions. Later he took a leave from Cornell University to start his own local newspaper, quickly ramping up to one hundred fifty employees and competing head-to-head with Gannett for readers and advertising revenue.
Throughout his career, Walker has consistently drawn lessons from makers of games and puzzles, on the theory that a good game or puzzle is an example of a well-defined problem. He also likes to find flaws in problem definitions. A national Monopoly champion during his college years, Walker was once sued, unsuccessfully, by Parker Brothers to prevent him and his sophomore roommate, Jeffrey S. Lehman (who twenty years later would be named president of Cornell), from publishing a how-to book that showed that Monopoly was a game of skill and not chance, as claimed on the box. “Monopoly is a balance of power game,” Walker says. The skill relates to the trading of the properties. If you have three or more players, you can use trading techniques to alter the balance of power in your favor and encourage the other players to destroy one another. Having this kind of knowledge is an unfair advantage of sorts, and it might explain why Parker Brothers was upset.
That experience led to a lesson: Defining challenges in a unique way provides a competitive advantage. “As an entrepreneur, I always selected or invented businesses that were different,” Walker says. “I always liked having the unfair advantage that comes when you can create your own category. Now you’re not competing directly. It’s like the principle from The Art of War. If you attack directly, you better have overwhelming force. If you attack indirectly, or solve problems uniquely, you exploit weaknesses.”7
Walker applied that lesson to the publishing business. While working as associate publisher at Folio, the magazine for the magazine industry, he homed in on a problem that he believed applied to almost every consumer magazine title on the market: getting the largest number of subscribers to renew each year at the lowest possible cost. Working with a partner, Michael Loeb, Walker modeled the problem from all sides and came up with a solution: Sell a subscription discounted at a special rate for those who pay by credit card. At the time (1991), very few magazine subscribers paid by credit card, so this was a novel idea. The method also involved keeping the card numbers on file and sending annual notifications stating that the subscription was being automatically renewed and offering subscribers the choice of opting out.
This “continuous service” method indeed proved successful at retaining a higher percentage of readers at a lower cost than the method of soliciting and processing checks. Walker and Loeb eventually sold the resulting service, now called Synapse, to Time Warner in a deal worth nearly $600 million. Loeb stayed on as CEO of what is now one of the world’s largest magazine subscription agencies. Walker, meanwhile, had already started his invention laboratory. Some of the first patents he filed were on certain aspects of the Synapse business model, and those patents were key assets bundled with the deal. Instead of competing with American Family Publishers, Publishers Clearing House, and other such agencies directly by using the brute force of mass mailings, Walker and Loeb chose a very specific problem and solved it in a unique way. Using a novel idea enabled them to leapfrog the competition.
This approach to finding problems has found fertile ground on the World Wide Web. In the mid-1990s, Walker was among the first to understand that the Internet had attributes that could help solve a wide range of problems in new ways, provided that the problems themselves were rigorously defined. One of the areas that Walker targeted was online travel reservation services.
Obviously, consumers wanted cheaper airline tickets. But the existing systems didn’t allow consumers to express what they would trade off to get those cheaper prices. Perhaps they would be willing to be more flexible about their flight times and the number of connections they’d have to make. The airlines, meanwhile, didn’t have a good way of unloading unsold airline seats (called excess capacity) without undercutting the pricing structure of the other seats on the airplane. Walker calls this “the markdown paradox.” If this paradox could be solved, then revenue could be boosted without an impact on the high fixed costs of running the business.
Although the Internet absolutely enabled the success of the idea, Walker’s invention itself was the result of pinpointing this multidimensional problem in the first place. Like a Rubik’s Cube of sorts, the airlines were one side of the puzzle, consumers were another side, the Internet yet another, credit cards another, traditional marketing channels such as 800 numbers another, and electronic ticketing another. Walker conceived Priceline.com as an intricate system, a process in which all the sides would click into place. In 1998, after convincing several major airlines to sell this way and after convincing millions of consumers to buy this way, Walker suddenly became famous as the entrepreneur who created Priceline.
The value of Walker’s “name your own price” business method, however, has often been misunderstood. At first it was underestimated, then wildly overhyped, and then taken for granted by millions of people. Walker has been consistently amazed that many people miss what Priceline really is and the reasoning behind it. Many people view Priceline as only one of numerous Web sites where they can complete a task, but Walker considers it an invention in the classic sense.
His patent on “buyer-driven commerce” generated immense controversy in the business world when it was issued in August 1998.8 Most people didn’t realize that such an intangible service could receive patent protection. But similar concepts have been patented; chemical processes, for example, have been patentable for more than a century. The confusion stems from the fact that the patent system has been so deeply rooted in the electromechanical world that most people, including patent examiners, couldn’t imagine that such intangible inventions could be protected in the same way.
To many who follow patent law, this confusion was finally eradicated only a month before Walker’s patent was issued. That’s when State Street Bank won a patent infringement lawsuit against Signature Financial. In dispute was the bank’s method of pooling assets in an investment portfolio organized as a partnership. The decision, by the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, had revolutionary implications: It meant that business processes such as frequent flier programs (invented by American Airlines) and credit cards (invented by Bank of America) could have been patented.
Yet when Walker’s patent efforts came to light, people misunderstood the wider implications of what he was doing. In some circles, it was becoming conventional wisdom that you could obtain patents on Web sites themselves. That, of course, isn’t true. The brand names on Web sites can be protected by trademarks, and the content posted on Web pages is automatically protected by copyrights, but patents are reserved for ideas that pass the invention tests of the patent office: The idea must be useful, nontrivial, nonobvious, and original. The form the invention takes is not important. Software-based inventions, for example, have been considered patentable ever since a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1981 affirmed that right.
Meanwhile, the buyers and sellers who began using Priceline saw the problem only after it was solved. Like a completed Rubik’s Cube, it seemed simple. Consumers began taking it for granted, just as they do with most successful inventions. The acclaim that Walker received had more to do with the multibillion-dollar valuation on his new enterprise than with his success as an inventor. “An entrepreneur is high in the pecking order; an inventor is low,” he says. “I don’t think I received acclaim because I was clever. Except maybe in business school classrooms, where they would deconstruct the theory of the idea. They’d say, ‘Wow, what an interesting market-making exercise to capture a unit of demand, strip it of its identity, and allow the seller to grab the unit of demand on a first-come-first-served basis.’ But the general public doesn’t view Priceline as an invention. They view it as one of many solutions they can choose.”
Yet Priceline became one of the few start-ups that thrived in the dot-com era and then survived the subsequent market shakeout. It did so precisely because it filled an untapped need and delivered value to buyers as well as sellers, and because the central concept was granted limited monopoly status by the patent system. In its first five years in business, Priceline sold $4 billion worth of airline seats, rental cars, hotel rooms, and other services to ten million consumers worldwide.
After running Priceline for its first couple of years, Walker resigned from the company, transferred the service to offices in a nearby location, and went back to running Walker Digital full-time, doing what he likes best: finding new problems to solve. For now, Priceline may be the most famous of the hundreds of inventions that Walker and his teams of inventors have devised. But most of the inventions that come from this unique laboratory begin in exactly the same way: as well-defined problems.
Very few of the inventors at Walker Digital are engineers. Typically, they are marketers, doctors, scientists, salespeople, poets, or writers. “We hire people who like to think for a living,” Walker says. “They usually have good creativity and verbal skills. They’ve often had a lot of failures, a lot of real-world experience. They’ve tried to build things that haven’t worked. They know they can make it work, but they don’t yet know how.” When Walker does hire engineers and programmers, they are usually assigned to the operating companies that are spun off from the laboratory to take their inventions to market.
Given the diverse nature of these teams, it’s not surprising that invention happens here in noisy group sessions. Ideas are hashed out on white boards with lots of flowcharts, before teams of hypercritical people. “All of our inventions are team efforts,” says Walker. “If you think you’ve solved a piece of the puzzle, you bring it to the group, and you declare, ‘I’ve got a piece of it!’ Then we argue about how it fits into the system. We argue a lot.”
By at least one numerical measure, Walker’s process of pinpointing problems is well on its way toward becoming history’s most successful method of inventing. To date, the record for the sheer number of inventions still belongs to Thomas Edison, whose name appeared on 1,098 U.S. patents, the first one filed when he was twenty-one and the last one shortly before his death at eighty-four. At his famous New Jersey laboratories in Newark, Menlo Park, and West Orange, Edison also convened groups of creative individuals. As the master inventor of the house, he put his name on all the filings. That’s Walker’s policy, too. “I serve as the captain of the inventing teams,” he says. In recent years, he has been averaging about one hundred patent filings annually. With more than two hundred fifty issued patents and more than six hundred pending, he will most likely exceed Edison’s record before very long. “Assuming I live long enough, I should pass that,” Walker says. “It would be surprising if I didn’t. But other inventors will do it, too.”
Over time, Walker Digital has focused the efforts of its invention shop on several targeted problem areas. Casinos, and especially slot machines, are one strain of Walker’s patent activity. He believes that current generation slot machines are lackluster. He wonders, for example, why winning is based on sheer chance. Why isn’t skill a factor in winning at slots? Cash registers are another problem area. Why do cashiers give customers their change? Why not find a systematic way to offer additional products in lieu of the money? Vending machines are yet another problem area. Why can’t you communicate remotely with a vending machine, or take out an annual subscription to your favorite one? Internet commerce represents another strain of problems, and healthcare is another. Often, Walker’s teams invent at the intersection of these strains. That was the case with the slot machine–activated medicine bottle.
But on September 11, 2001, Walker became instantly focused on yet another set of problems. That morning, he was driving to a meeting with dozens of colleagues and business partners in the Woolworth Building, which stands only a couple hundred yards from the site of the World Trade Center. His colleagues witnessed the devastation up close, watching the horror from the office windows. Several people there that day lost friends and family members. Aside from the personal devastation, Walker had a business stake in the crisis. With the major airlines grounded and facing bankruptcy, the travel industry was devastated, and Priceline was teetering on the edge of shutdown in the weeks that followed the attacks.
Like many people, Walker wanted to do something to help. But what? During the massive cleanup over the coming weeks and months, Walker brainstormed. “Hey, we’re not going to pass out coffee at the Trade Center site,” he says. “It’s important, but other people do that. We as a team said, ‘We’re inventors! This country has a history of citizens solving problems. Somebody has an idea, and says, “Wow, I can build a better bridge. I can make an air brake.” If we as citizens don’t step up to the plate and contribute our skills, who will? Who is going to solve the problems?’”
For the next several months, Walker and a small team pondered all the problems stemming from the events of September 11. There was no shortage of them, but the team wanted to pinpoint one that they could potentially solve. “The problems were everywhere,” he says. “How do you track nuclear material? What about the two million shipping containers that the country receives each week? How do you stop five kilograms of plutonium from coming into a country that can’t stop two hundred tons of drugs from coming in every month? How do you screen people trying to sneak into the city with a basketball-sized bomb? How do you prevent illegal immigrants from getting through JFK Airport? One could argue there are tens of thousands of problems, and it didn’t take a genius to figure that out.” He pauses and then adds, “But we’re not defense contractors, so what are we going to invent? We’re not going to invent a new radar, or a new detector, or a new electronic antimissile defense. That’s not us.”
Finally, after nine months of trying to pinpoint a solvable problem, Walker and his team of three other inventors narrowed it to something promising. To Walker, the solvable puzzle area wasn’t stopping terrorism per se. Rather, the team defined the problem area as one of national security, broadly speaking. “The nation is not secure,” as Walker puts it. His team further narrowed the problem of insecurity to the subproblem of trespassing—more specifically, trespassing in prohibited places where people are almost never supposed to be. Such places might include areas around chemical plants, water reservoirs, nuclear waste dumps, electrical power generators, and the perimeters around airport runways. America has some forty-seven thousand of these vulnerable infrastructure facilities.
Walker admits that this problem is “only one piece of a larger puzzle, and not even the most important one.” But his team of inventors became convinced that they were pinpointing something they could solve. To begin, they went through a precise exercise. As Walker explains it, they had to “name in priority order all the people who benefit from the problem, and why. Normally, you think of problems having negative consequences. But crime is a problem. Insurance companies benefit. No crime, no insurance. There’s uncertainty in crime, which people don’t want. They’d rather have certainty. So you buy insurance against the economic cost of crime.”
The same is true for the lack of security around these sensitive prohibited zones. Who (in addition to potential terrorists) benefits from the fact that there is little or no security around reservoirs? One example is people who like to fish. Often they’re not supposed to fish or boat in certain reservoirs, but sometimes they do. Who benefits from unpatrolled areas around electricity-generation stations? Teenagers who like to make out and not get caught. “Are these significant beneficiaries? No,” Walker says. “Are those beneficiaries going to counterattack if we were to solve the problem? Not likely. But solving a problem often engenders a counterattack.” This insight mirrors the case of Edison’s voting machine. “You have to evaluate the counterattack. If you misunderstand the counterattack, you misunderstand the stakeholders in the problem.”
As his team was devising a solution, Walker met with some of the significant stakeholders. Among them were local reservoir management officials. He found that those officials didn’t want to spend money on a solution for making their reservoirs more secure. “They’re the ones who counterattack,” Walker says. “They say, ‘This isn’t necessary. We’d have to raise utility bills. The mayor and consumers will scream at us. This isn’t good.’” In one meeting, Walker posed this question: “What if someone throws poison into the reservoir?” The official replied, “You don’t understand water dynamics. If you throw poison into the reservoir, it would be diluted to the point that it wouldn’t be unsafe.”
Walker was surprised. “Let me understand this,” he said. “Someone throws a satchel of an unknown substance in a reservoir, and you want to get on television and say that the toxicity seems to be well below the levels we’re worried about? Everyone should drink the water? Don’t worry? You clearly don’t understand people, if you think anyone is going to drink the water.” Again, Walker was viewing the problem through a behavioral prism—this time tapping into the superforce of security and safety.
He went through the same exercise with airport security officials. Although passenger screening was boosted and taken very seriously in the wake of 9-11, far less was being done to secure the perimeter of the airports themselves. Walker asked one security manager, “What if someone fires a shoulder-launched missile at an airplane?” The manager replied, “That’s very hard to do. It’s almost impossible to hit an airplane with a shoulder-launched missile.” Walker agreed but added, “That’s not the issue. They can miss. That’s just fine. They don’t have to hit it.” “What do you mean?” the official asked. “How many people are going to get on airplanes after someone has fired a missile at one?” Walker said. “You’ll knock out a third of the demand overnight. Last time I checked, you knock a third of the demand out of the civil airline system, they’re all bankrupt tomorrow. You don’t have to hit the airplane.”
Walker continued to narrow the problem even further. The problem he could address wasn’t terrorism and it wasn’t security, broadly speaking. The problem was consumer confidence. There needed to be higher confidence in homeland security, at least for the areas that Walker would be addressing with his new invention.
The resulting invention, called U.S. HomeGuard, is a system that connects the thousands of current and future security cameras located in these prohibited zones to the Internet. The cameras peer out at miles of fences around plants, power stations, reservoirs, airports, and other sensitive spots where humans aren’t supposed to be. Instead of hiring thousands of security guards to patrol these areas or hiring professional security personnel at an average cost of $25 per hour, Walker suggests the use of a distributed, decentralized approach: Pay ordinary citizens sitting in their homes $10 per hour to view snapshots taken by the cameras. If they see anything suspicious, such as a trespasser, they click a button and send that image data to a small cluster of professional security people.
The HomeGuard system contains step-by-step protocols for providing security at low cost. The steps include capturing the images, concealing the location identity, uploading the images instantly to the Internet, sending the snapshots at random to thousands of people around the country, mixing the images with occasional test images of suspicious activity to verify the alertness of these citizens, collecting votes as to whether anything unusual is happening in the real images, and sending the suspicious ones to professionals who can view the location identity. For the cost of a penny a picture, humans act as “judgment filters” in this system, Walker says. “The human brain is the best pattern recognizer ever built. You know the difference between a tree and a person dressed up as a tree. You instantly know the difference between a dog and person dressed like a dog. Software can’t do this.”
This technology incorporates a patent-pending method called “digital piecework,” which could also be applied to sending X-ray and MRI images to doctors all over the world for dozens of opinions on a patient’s condition. In the case of HomeGuard, security professionals who receive suspicious images would question the intruders by speaking into a microphone that feeds to the camera. If the answer is not satisfactory, armed guards would be dispatched immediately to the scene.
One might expect a counterattack from privacy advocates. Walker has anticipated that. Because U.S. HomeGuard would capture images only from places where people aren’t supposed to be, who can argue that privacy is being violated? Another issue Walker has addressed is the question of who is going to pay for it. Walker believes that HomeGuard not only would provide low-cost security to these unpatrolled areas but also would lower the insurance premiums paid by these facilities. If you lower the risks involved, you should be able to get cheaper insurance.
Who is going to fund the development of U.S. HomeGuard? Walker has met with officials from the Department of Homeland Security as well as the CIA and has offered to license his patents on the system to the government for $1. “We don’t need to profit from making the nation safer,” he says. If no private contractor is willing to build a pilot, Walker plans to build one himself, under government contract, just to prove it would work. But then he wants to hand it over. “Maybe IBM or EDS could run the large-scale system,” he says.
Again, Walker and his team have devised something that sounds a little crazy at first. Put ordinary citizens to work keeping an eye on possible terrorism targets? It sounds promising only when you consider how rigorously well defined the problem is. All the citizens have to do is to spot humans in the photos and report these photos to security professionals. Use the Internet as a national security system? It may or may not work. Like all successful inventions, this one will sound plausible only after it’s put into practice. Only then will it be taken for granted as something that was obvious all along.