Innovation Cafe with Gary Shuster, patent litigator and prolific inventor.
Transcript
This is Innovation Cafe with your friendly neighborhood inventor, Gary Schuster. Today I want to talk with you about high speed innovation or high velocity invention. There are different words I use for the same problem. And the problem is this. If you invent one thing in your lifetime, you’re an entrepreneur. You are going to ride that to the end or fail with it. It’s either going to succeed or not. if you invent one thing every couple of years, you’re still an entrepreneur. You’re still going to start companies, but you’ll have to have other people involved to help you out.
what happens if you invent, say, two really amazing things every year? That’s a little bit more dicey, but you can probably still keep your hands on it and just have a lot of people helping you out. So you’d have several companies and, you know, you’d be involved on the board of directors, but probably not running all of them. But what happens if you get into a really high speed innovation? And I’m talking about, Steve Jobs speed, you’re doing something, you know, maybe once a month,maybe 2 or 3 times a month. Those are way too many inventions to pursue.
what do you do? Well, you really have a choice. You can either pick a few of them or maybe just one of them. And be an entrepreneur. Try to build a company around it. Hope that your company will succeed and just let the others fall by the wayside. Well, there’s another solution too, which is you could be the head of a very, very well-funded company like Apple and throw out as many inventions as you want. Knowing that you’ve got an army of patent lawyers to file on them. Well, most of us don’t have that situation.
So as a practical matter, if you’re inventing, two amazing things every month. there is not a chance on Earth that you can build out all 24 every year into successful companies. You couldn’t even build out a few of them to successful companies in a year. So you have a choice. You can either not file for patents on them, not pursue them, and just pick a couple of good ones. Or you can adopt a licensing strategy where you file for patents on this stuff. Your primary task is working with your brain. And so it’s inventing. And you’re not the one who’s going to be, turning your invention into a gigantic company.
You’re not going to be the one who’s, getting your invention onto an assembly line and built. You’re the one who’s coming up with it, and you are going to find partners or licensees to go and run with your product. And that is the high speed innovation problem. as a high velocity inventor, I faced this. And I’ll tell you, I’ve switched my strategies in the early days when patent law was much more clear. Everyone knew what was patentable, this was before the Supreme Court started making it very, very fuzzy as to what is patentable. And what isn’t.
I was filing on things and I adopted a licensing strategy, which is I’d come up with a good thing, I’d file for a patent on it. patent issues or even while it’s pending, I try to find people to partner with to get the thing built out or whatever. As patents have become far more expensive to get and far less reliable the sense that, they get invalidated all the time in something called an inner parties review or federal district court. And there are a few other ways. And as they become more vulnerable. And I’m talking about every patent is facing this.
I mean, the Federal Circuit even found that improved axle for a vehicle simply implements the laws of physics and is not patentable, which is just a weird whole thing, by the way. given that there’s a lot of uncertainty around how patents will hold up, I’ve switched to a strategy of come up with the thing, throw out a bunch of inventions on the way, pick the one that you want to build out and build it. And I’m going to do another episode on the invention I’m currently working on, which is a really cool vaporizer. You’ll like that one.
I also do file for, patents on things that I’ve come up with that are really good. But the threshold for filing has been raised significantly for me. It’s not like, file because I have a really good idea that I’ve turned into an invention and someone could really run with it. I now file only if those conditions are true, and it’s awesome. I know that inventors fall in love with their inventions. I do, but you have to learn how to break them. It’s a hard thing to do, and especially for high speed inventors. Even they have trouble with it.
I mean, a high speed inventor has a lot of inventions, so you can have favorites and not, but ultimately have to be dispassionate. Look at what you’ve invented and ask yourself, is the cost outweighing the benefit? What is my exit plan? That’s usually actually the first question you should ask yourself is, wow, I me came up with this really cool invention. What’s the end point I want to get to? Do I want a big company that I run? Do I want to sell it to a company? Do I want it to be built or I want to dedicate it to the public?
pick up your end point, and then you can sort of figure out what to do next. From there. So that’s the high speed invention problem. I personally have found my peace with it, but I’m always second guessing There are very few inventors with over 100 patents, very few of us. And, you know, you get over 250 patents. There’s even fewer. So there that many high velocity inventors who also file on their inventions. But I think everyone could be a high velocity inventor. Humans are born with innovation hard wired into our brains. as long as you have the confidence to pursue your inventions, you too could be a high velocity inventor.
it doesn’t mean you won’t have the problem of picking and choosing which of your inventions to pursue, because that’s a big problem. But it will mean that you’ll have the choice of which ones to pursue. coming to you from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, this is Gary Schuster, your friendly neighborhood inventor innovation cafe signing off.