1. For a powerful correlation between invention and market performance, see “Investing in Invention Pays Off,” Technology Review, May 2004, 38. The study by CHI Research Inc. shows that the top twenty-five S&P companies with patents that are most highly cited by papers and other patents, and that yield marketable products the fastest (quick “cycletimes”), have far outperformed the S&P 500 since 1990. $1,000 invested in the S&P 500 in January 1990 was worth $4,500 in January 2004, while $1,000 invested in the 25 most “inventive” corporations was worth nearly $40,000. Correlations aren’t proof of cause and effect, and there may be counterexamples of successful companies that aren’t innovative and inventive, but these correlations are remarkably consistent over time.
2. Numerous studies have shown an extremely high correlation between patents per million people and a nation’s standard of living. One of the most comprehensive annual study is “Ranking National Innovative Capacity: Findings from the National Innovative Capacity Index,” by Michael Porter of Harvard Business School and Scott Stern of the Kellogg School, Northwestern University, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Rankings are based on the following metrics: U.S. patents per million people, proportion of scientists and engineers, innovation policy, number and size of technology hot spots, degree of connection between those hot spots and other institutions, and other metrics. See “Global Invention Map,” Technology Review, May 2004, 76-77.
3. Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler, Current Anthropology, vol. 36, no. 2 (April 1995), 199–221. “The expensive-tissue hypothesis: the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution.” (PET is positron emission tomography, MRI is magnetic resonance imaging, and EEG is electroencephalograph.) Also see John Morgan Allman, Evolving Brains (New York: W.H. Freeman & Co, 1999).
4. Thea Singer, “The Innovation Factor: Your Brain on Innovation,” Inc. magazine, September 2002.
5. Observation at Edison’s laboratory made by Joyce Bedi, historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.
6. Nick Holonyak Jr., the John Bardeen Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at the University of Illinois, interview by the author, Washington, D.C., 22 April 2004.
7. The blue LED turned out to be one of the most useful and most difficult to produce, because blue has the shortest wavelength (highest frequency) of the visible colors. Japanese inventor Shuji Nakamura, while working for Nichia Corp. in the early 1990s, achieved the breakthough. He is now a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Under a recent intellectual property trend in which Japanese inventors are demanding a share of corporate patent royalties for their inventions under the “fair compensation” rule of the patent code, Nakamura sued his former employer in Toyko District Court. In January 2004, he won a judgment of 20 billion yen (about $200 million), a record sum for a corporate inventor. Also see David Talbot, “LEDs vs. the Lightbulb,” Technology Review, May 2003, 30.
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted from “Letters and Social Aims,” 1876.
9. See QuoteDB.com, the Quotations Database, or www.davebarry.com.
10. “Over Time, America Lost Its Bullwackers,” Wall Street Journal, 24 2002, 1.
11. “The Architecture of Invention,” report on the Lemelson-MIT workshop, March 2003, 14–15. See <http://web.mit.edu/invent/report.html>.
1. Elwood “Woody” Norris, interviews by the author, American Technology Corp., Poway, CA, 19 January 2004, and by telephone 19 May 2003 and 4 June 2003.
2. Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution (New York: W.W.Norton, 1980).
3. Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London: Fontana Press, 1983).
4. Norris, interviews.
5. Donald A. Norman, Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1994).
6. Gerald Messadié, ed., Great Inventions Through History (Edinburgh: W&R Chambers, 1991).
7. Stuart Campbell, “History of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology,” OBGYN.net Conference Coverage, FIGO 2000: International Federation of Gynecology & Obstetrics, Washington, D.C., 2000.
8. Donald W. Baker, interview by the author, 4 June 2003.
9. Norris, Elwood. 1972. “Phase-Lock Doppler System for Monitoring Blood Vessel Movement,” U.S. Patent 3,631,849, issued 4 January 1972.
10. David Perkins, interview by the author, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, 12 February 2003. Perkins cites these four basic types of inventions.
11. Robert V. Bruce, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (New York: Little Brown, 1973).
12. Edwin S. Grosvenor and Morgan Wesson, Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone (New York: Harry N. Adams, 1997).
13. Norris’s most lucrative inventions were probably not his cleverest ones. He created one of the first flash-memory voice recorders as well as a series of car audio systems that ended up being spun out as part of a start-up called e.Digital Corp. The stock in the company rose from a low of 8 cents in 1999 to a high of about $24 in early 2000, netting Norris an eight-figure windfall. He also invented the Jabra headset for cell phones, which embeds a microphone in an earpiece, an invention that fetched about $7 million in the early 1990s and was later resold for much more.
1. Robert Scott Root-Bernstein, Discovering: Inventing and Problem Solving at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
2. Ernö Rubik, Tamas Varga, et al., Rubik’s Cubic Compendium (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1987).
3. Jay Walker, interview by the author, Walker Digital, Stamford, CT, 19 August 2003.
4. Peter Corr, presentation at Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 24 September 2003.
5. In addition to gambling, other behavioral superforces on Walker’s list include: beauty, acceptance, religion, tribalism, security and safety, greed and fear, self-expression, and voyeurism. His four superforces for the Internet are: saving money, entertainment, being informed, and convenience. Inventions that tap into these and other primal urges and desires have a much better chance of success.
6. Neil Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century (New York: Hyperion, 1995); Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley, 1988).
7. Walker, interview.
8. Jay S. Walker, Bruce Schneier, and James Jorasch. 1998. Method and apparatus for a cryptographically assisted commercial network system designed to facilitate buyer-driven conditional purchase offers. U.S. patent 5,794,207, issued 11 August 1998.
1. Abbot Payton Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929).
2. Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
3. Victor K. McElheny, Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003).
4. Leroy Hood, interviews by the author, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, 20 November 2002, and Boston, 24 April 2003; Leroy Hood, “My Life and Adventures Integrating Biology and Technology,” commemorative lecture for the 2002 Kyoto Prize in advanced technologies, Kyoto, Japan, 5 December 2002.
5. Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning of It All (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988).
6. Neil Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century (New York: Hyperion, 1995).
7. Reese Jenkins, in Inventive Minds: Creativity in Technology, eds. Robert J. Weber and David N. Perkins (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century, and Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley, 1988).
8. Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century; Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention.
9. Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century, 84.
10. Max Levchin, telephone interview by the author, 20 July 2001, and in San Francisco, 11 August 2003.
11. Evan I. Schwartz, “Digital Cash,” Technology Review, December 2001.
1. Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, ed. Tony Augarde (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1991).
2. Bernard Meyerson, telephone interview by the author, 28 January 2003, and at IBM Watson Research Laboratories, Yorktown Heights, NY, 5 March 2003.
3. Ira Flatow, They All Laughed: From Light Bulbs to Lasers—The Fascinating Stories Behind the Great Inventions That Changed Our Lives (New York: Harper-Collins, 1992); Mitchell Wilson, American Science and Invention: A Pictorial History (New York: Bonanza/Crown, 1954). This book is also the source of the quotation that opens this chapter.
4. George Polya, How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945).
5. Harold “Doc” Edgarton, as quoted by Claire Calcagno, Lemelson-MIT Workshop, “Historical Perspectives on Invention and Creativity,” Cambridge, MA, 15 March 2003.
6. David Perkins, The Eureka Effect: The Art and Logic of Breakthrough Thinking (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). Originally published as Archimedes’ Bathtub (New York, W.W. Norton, 2000).
7. Wilson, American Science and Invention.
8. Ibid., 125.
9. Ibid., 126.
10. Ibid., 127.
11. Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan, Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997).
12. Meyerson, interviews.
13. Ibid.
14. John Markoff, “IBM Researchers Increase Speed of Silicon Transistors,” New York Times, March 15, 1990, D5. The story stated that the IBM breakthrough almost doubled the world speed record for silicon-based chips, to 75 billion cycles per second.
15. “The Nobel Prize in Physics 2000,” <www.nobel.se>, interview with the 2000 Nobel Laureates in Physics by Joanna Rose, science writer, December 13, 2000.
1. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Arkana, 1989).
2. Isaac Asimov, Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology: The Lives and Achievements of 1510 Great Scientists from Ancient Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982).
3. Nathan Rosenberg, Lemelson-MIT Workshop on Historical Perspectives on Invention and Creativity, Cambridge, MA., 15 March 2003.
4. Ibid.
5. Leroy Hood, interviews by the author, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, 20 November 2002, and Boston, 24 April 2003; Leroy Hood, “My Life and Adventures Integrating Biology and Technology,” commemorative lecture for the 2002 Kyoto Prize in advanced technologies, Kyoto, Japan, 5 December 2002.
6. William Dreyer, telephone interview by the author, 2 April 2003.
7. Applied Biosystems Inc. was acquired by Perkin-Elmer Corp. in 1993, which changed its name in 2000 to Applera Corporation, which also includes Celera Genemics Group. ABI reported sales of $1.7 billion in fiscal 2003.
8. Jerry E. Bishop and Michael Waldholz, Genome: The Story of Our Astonishing Attempt to Map All the Genes in the Human Body (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).
9. Hood, “My Life and Adventures Integrating Biology and Technology.”
1. Quoted in Michael Kanellos, “Intel Unfurls Experimental 3D Transistors,” CNET News.com, 16 September 2002.
2. Kathryn Wilder Guarini, interview by the author, IBM Watson Research Laboratories, Yorktown Heights, NY, 5 March 2003.
3. Isaac Berzin, interview by the author, GreenFuel Inc., Cambridge, MA, 23 May 2003.
4. Evan Richman, “The Smartest Man in Boston,” Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, May 25, 2003.
5. Isaac Asimov, Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology: The Lives and Achievements of 1510 Great Scientists from Ancient Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982).
6. James Tobin, To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight (New York: Free Press, 2003).
7. Fred Howard, Wilbur and Orville: A Biography of the Wright Brothers, (New York: Knopf, 1987), 19.
8. Ibid., 33.
9. Carl Crawford, interviews by the author, Analogic Corp., Peabody, MA, 22 February 2003 and 22 May 2003.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Sandy A. Napel, “Basic Principles of Spiral CT,” in Spiral CT: Principles, Techniques, and Clinical Applications, eds. Elliot K. Fishman and R. Brooke Jeffrey (New York: Raven Press, 1995), 1:1-8.
13. Carl R. Crawford and Kevin F. King, assigned to General Electric Co., Milwaukee, Wisc. 1993. Extrapolative reconstruction method for helical scanning. U.S. Patent 5,233,518, issued 3 August 1993. Willi A. Kalender et al., “Spiral Volumetric CT with Single-Breath-Hold Technique, Continuous Transport, and Continuous Scanner Rotation,” Thoracic Radiology, July 1990, 176:181–183.
14. “Cardiac and Preventative Diagnostic Imaging Markets,” Feed-Back.com’s TeleMed E-Zine, July 2001, <www.feed-back.com/july01ezine.htm>.
15. M. M. Morin, Pauline A. Mysliwiec et al., “Screening Virtual Colonoscopy—Ready for Prime Time?,” New England Journal of Medicine 349,4 December, 2003, 2261–2264; published at www.nejm.org on Dec 1, 2003 (10.1056/NEJMe038181), as part of a series of articles on virtual colonoscopy. Nathan Seppa, “No Scope: CT scan works as well as colonoscopy,” Science News, 6 December 2003.
1. Elwood “Woody” Norris, interviews by the author, American Technology Corp., Poway, CA, 19 May 2003, 4 June 2003, and 19 January 2004.
2. James McLurkin, speech given at the Lemelson-MIT ceremony for the Student Prize for Inventiveness, Boston Museum of Science, 26 February 2003; David Arnold, “MIT Student Honored for Robot Design,” Boston Globe, 27 February 2003.
3. For the latest work from Rodney Brooks and his lab at MIT, see <http://www.csail.mit.edu/>.
4. Robert Langer, interview by the author, MIT Langer Laboratories, Cambridge, MA, 29 October 2002; David Brown, Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse, (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003), 37.
5. David Perkins, The Eureka Effect: The Art and Logic of Breakthrough Thinking (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). Originally published as Archimedes’ Bathtub (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).
6. Ibid.
7. Evan I. Schwartz, The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).
8. John L.Vaught et al., assigned to Hewlett-Packard thermal inkjet printer. U.S. patent 4,490,728, issued 25 December 1984.
9. “Spitting image: Engineering insight, dogged determination and a dash of serendipity have made the lowly inkjet imaging device the king of computer printers,” The Economist, 19 September 2002.
10. Robert and Michéle Root-Bernstein, Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
11. Norris, interviews.
12. Evan I. Schwartz, “The Sound War: two very different inventors are locked in a head-to-head battle to tame sound. At stake are billion-dollar markets and lasting fame as the one who redefined how we all think about audio,” Technology Review, May 2004.
1. Daniel Gilbert, Harvard University, as quoted from his presentation at the TED conference in Monterey, CA, on 27 February 2004.
2. Stephen Jacobsen, interview by the author, Sarcos Research, Salt Lake City, UT, 15 November 2002.
3. John Warnock, telephone interview by the author, 14 January 2003.
4. Ibid.
5. Jacobsen, interview.
6. Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1999).
7. Jacobsen, interview.
8. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York, Avon Books, 1984).
9. Elwood “Woody” Norris, interviews by the author, American Technology Corp., Poway, CA, 19 May 2003, 4 June 2003, and 19 January 2004.
10. Max Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” Scientific American, May 2003.
11. Jacobsen, interview.
12. Willem Kolff, telephone interview by the author, 6 January 2003.
13. Jacobsen, interview.
14. Kolff, interview.
15. Jacobsen, interview.
16. Kolff, interview.
17. Jacobsen, interview.
1. Linda Stone, talk given at “The Architecture of Invention: Cognitive Aspect of Invention and Creativity” workshop, Lemelson-MIT Program, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, 21 August 2003.
2. Gary Wolf, “The World According to Woz,” WIRED, September 1998.
3. Kenneth Brown, Inventors at Work: Interviews with 16 Notable American Inventors (Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1988).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Wolf, “The World According to Woz.”
7. Michael A. Hiltzik, “Woz Goes Wireless,” Technology Review, May 2004, 42–45.
8. Dean Kamen, interviews with the author, DEKA Research, Manchester, NH, 8 July 2002, and Boston, 15 February 2002.
9. Steve Kemper, Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen’s Quest to Invent a New World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).
10. William P. Murphy Jr., interview by the author, Boston, 24 April 2003.
11. John Morrell, interview by the author, Manchester, NH, 8 July 2002.
12. Kemper, Code Name Ginger.
13. Kamen, interviews.
14. Doug Field, interview by the author, Manchester, NH, 8 July 2002.
15. Kamen, interviews.
16. Field, interview.
17. Morrell, interview.
18. Stephen Jacobsen, interview by the author, Sarcos Research, Salt Lake City, UT, 15 November 2002.
19. Kemper, Code Name Ginger.
20. Kamen, interviews.
21. Nathan Myhrvold, interviews by the author, Intellectual Ventures, Bellevue, WA, 5 December 2001 and 20 November 2002.
22. Linda Stone, talk given at “The Architecture of Invention: Cognitive Aspect of Invention and Creativity” workshop.
23. Kamen, interviews.
24. Stone, “The Architecture of Invention” workshop.
1. Georg Pólya, How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945).
2. Joel Grey, telephone interview by the author, 4 December 2002.
3. Ronald A. Katz, interview by the author, Ronald A. Katz Licensing, L.P., Los Angeles, 18 November 2002.
4. Ibid.
5. Lee Ault, telephone interview by the author, 9 November 2002.
6. Katz, interview.
7. Ault, interview.
8. Katz, interview.
9. Ault, interview.
10. Katz, interview.
11. James J. Daly, “Masters of the Payment Domain,” Credit Card Management, August 2001, vol. 14 no. 5.
12. Henry “Ric” Duques, telephone interview by the author, 9 December 2002.
13. Katz, interview.
14. Teresa Riordan, “Stockpiling Technologies That Allow Telephones and Computers to Talk to Each Other,” New York Times, 31 October 1994.
15. Barry Augenbraun, telephone interview by the author, 9 November 2002.
16. Katz, interview.
17. Tim Casey, telephone interview by the author, 10 November 2002.
18. Katz, interview.
19. Casey, interview.
20. Katz, interview.
21. Duques, interview.
1. Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (New York: Little Brown, 1986).
2. Jay Walker, interview by the author, Walker Digital, Stamford, CT, 19 August 2003.
3. Geoffrey Ballard, interview by the author, General Hydrogen, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 19 November 2002.
4. Tom Koppel, Powering the Future: The Ballard Fuel Cell and the Race to Change the World (New York: Wiley, 1999).
5. David Wilkinson, interview by the author, Ballard Power Systems, Burnaby, BC, Canada, 19 November 2002.
6. Ballard, interview.
7. Lawrence Burns, speech at Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 23 September 2003, as quoted by the author.
8. Ballard, interview.
9. Leroy Hood, interviews by the author, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, 20 November 2002, and Boston, 24 April 2003.
1. Jeffrey Immelt, as quoted at Technology Review’s “Emerging Technologies Conference,” MIT campus, Cambridge, MA, 25 September 2003.
2. Elwood “Woody” Norris, interviews by the author, American Technology Corp., Poway, CA, 19 January 2004, and by telephone 19 May 2003 and 4 June 2003.
3. Max Levchin, telephone interview by the author, 20 July 2001, and in San Francisco, 11 August 2003.
4. Willem Kolff, telephone interview by the author, 6 January 2003.
5. Bernard Gordon, conversation with author, Analogic Corp., Peabody, MA, 22 May 2003.
6. Stephen Jacobsen, interview by the author, Sarcos Research, Salt Lake City, UT, 15 November 2002.
7. B.F. Skinner, Contingencies of Reinforcement (NewYork: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969.
8. Amy B. Smith, faculty member at MIT, interview by the author, 22 April 2004.
9. Ashok Khosla, interviews by the author, London, 20 November 2003, and Boston, 15 December 2003. Khosla talk given at “Invention and Innovation for Sustainable Development” workshop, Lemelson-MIT Program, LEAD International, London, 20 November 2003.