The 6 Life Stages of Inventors: Part 3 Status Seeking
Posted by Bill Meade at January 13, 2006 11:58 AM
By: Bill Meade, Ph.D.
http://www.basicip.com
After employees have completed an invention disclosure ... and lived (Stage 1: Discovery). And, after they have calibrated themselves to the ideas that their company wants from them (Stage 2: Calibration), there is another stage in development that is difficult to describe. I think of it as "status-seeking." I'm pretty sure that this is a distinct stage in the life cycle of an inventor because:
#1 for a 6 to 12 month period after they are fully productive within the IP management system, the newbie inventors only invent by themselves.
#2 These "post-newbie" inventors become very quiet. Their appearances at weekly invention office hours drop off. They will eat the BasicIP inventor cookies, but only if you take the cookies to their desk. When these post-newbie inventors talk to you, they corner you in a 1-on-1 situation, and then they ask a lot of questions about the inventing social environment. "How many patents does X have?" "How long has Y been inventing in the blockso area?" "What is the record for invention disclosures in a year?" "What is the average file rate?" "Who is inventing in widgets?" So, like Neo being interrogated by Agent Smith, post-newbie inventors can be seen to be all ears.
#3 The post-newbie inventor's risk profile shifts dramatically. The inventions coming from the newbie inventor become less forward looking and more "safe" in the engineering culture of the company. While in their first few disclosures the inventor delighted in thinking "outside the box," during the status-seeking phase of development, inventions suddenly focuses "in the box."
Entry point for post-newbie inventors to the status seeking stage is having 2 issued patents and 5 to 10 patent applications in-process. At this point the post-newbie begins to be "known" among other inventors for something. For example, an inventor may become known for creating building blocks for all to use in a technical area (i.e., a “genius”), for being prolific in a certain kind of inventing across technical areas (i.e., being a “renaissance person”), for being an opportunist (i.e., having a splatter-gun pattern across fad surfing-technologies and/or insinuating themselves into other people’s inventions), for being a “one trick pony” (i.e., refusing to invent outside a domain), etc. [*Aside* Please email me any fun/surprising inventor reputations that you've heard about. Inventors can be savage in their honesty describing in reduced-form, what other inventors do.]
The off-ramp for status-seeking inventors is exclusion from membership in the inventing community. If, after an inventor has produced a significant body of patentable work, the community accepts them as a peer, the inventor will stay productive and progress to the next inventing life stage: mentoring. If the inventor fails to find a niche in the inventing ecology, they fall off the grid and stop inventing.
Non-traditional inventors are particularly at risk in the status-seeking phase. For example, engineers who move from technical areas into for example, sales. Cross functionally mobile people, are a fantastic source of inventing. However, sales organizations rarely have any tradition or infrastructure for inventing. While the IP attorneys will be delighted to accept invention disclosures from non-traditional inventors, getting the inventors paid for their invention incentives can be a big problem. Beyond this, getting these inventors integrated into the community of conventional inventors is even a bigger problem.
The managerial hand holds for managing inventors in the status-seeking phase are to make sure there are lots of accolades to go around, and to look for ways to create new niches of inventors. I’m not sure why the status phase has mortality at all. It seems like a calibrated inventor would see an invention that needed inventing in the normal course of work, recognize it, stop, and write an invention disclosure. But this has not been the case in my experience. Calibrated inventors often fall off the grid.
There is a strong social aspect to inventing. I can't provide much more guidance on how to harness sociology. But, IP managers need to be sensitive to the sociology around newbie inventors. An annual dinner for inventors is a good thing. But, to maximize profit coming from your inventors much more is needed.
Post-newbie inventors need to feel the love. They resonate to enthusiasm about what they have done. They never get enough calibration information. They are nourished by the communion of kindred minds produced by fellowship with other post-newbie and senior inventors. So, post-newbies need to be drawn back into community. They need to be checked on, encouraged, and given tough love slap therapy when they come up with ideas not up to their potential. But this slap therapy has to come from another inventor. Not a boss or a bureau-cat like an IP manager.
Like raising teenagers, getting an inventor in with the right friends (i.e., other inventors who are supportive) might be a good strategy. You can develop inventing talent, you get a lot more patentable, licensable, and litigatable IP if you bring your inventors up on success. So, as an IP manager you need to watch for small successes you can celebrate. You need to watch for "successes waiting for an inventor" that you can use to "set up" your inventors to have the successes they need to keep growing as inventors.
I suspect that what is going on during the status-seeking phase is that post-newbie inventors are seeing themselves anew. So, the time period of status-seeking may be what it takes for an inventor to develop a fresh "residual self image" updating his/her place in life, career, and company. Inventing is a celebrated activity in American culture. Becoming an inventor brings a lot of cultural implications into an employee's life. IP managers can have a tremendous positive impact on post-newbies if they take the trouble to be catalysts to the development of residual self images that are positive, rooted in company culture, and rich in inventing fellowship.
The next post in this series will review the fourth life stage in an inventor's development: mentoring.
[Part 6 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 5 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 4 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 3 of this discussion is here.]
[Part 2 of this discussion is here.]
[Part I of this discussion is here.]
[Bill's previous post on Proactive Invention Management is here.]
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Comments
Scott Allred Says:
January 14, 2006 10:51 AM
This is a fascinating insight into what seems to be the IP culture of large or very large firms, from the point of management or the IP attorney. (In other words it hasn't been my experience in smaller or startup companies). I can't wait for the rest of the series, and am torn whether to comment now or wait for the rest. I'd love to hear comments regarding this viewpoint from practicing IP attorneys in both corporate and outside counsel environments
I shall post my comments now about the other two sections here as well (because I read them all 3 at once).
I found myself generally defensive after part one, because I think Dr. Mead has “inventors” a little askew, from an inventors point of view. I softened a little bit after reading parts two and three, because I think he's getting closer, and his picture is becoming clearer to me.
First, inventors invent because we're inventors. It's always there. Corporate culture can deter it, and certainly it's disclosure is stifled by the policies and attitudes Dr. Mead has alluded to in his articles. But inventors create because that's what we love to do.
As an inventor myself, and what I've learned about both myself and the rest of my colleges is that no matter how intelligent or soft spoken engineers are, our egos rival those of our most prominent celebrities. The difference is that we inventors generally do not share them. They are there, however, and they are powerful forces. (Perhaps what Dr. Mead is referring to in his comments about his psycho- and socio- logicalities? )
This is why we disclose...for the hope of that little plaque. It is a sign of our intelligence, perseverance, and in some way our success as an engineer or inventor. In other words, in our ego-centered mind, a career filled with patents is more successful than one without. The monetary incentives are nice, and the training helps those unfamiliar learn corporate policy / procedure. It could even let some know that management does want to hear their ideas (ego validation). To that point, though, I think that engineers would invent and disclose if they know there's a chance to boost their ego.
I'll save the rest of my comments for later. I hope what Dr. Mead will unfold for us is his experience in ways that companies can Rethink their IP culture. We shall see.
Comments from the industry?
Scott.
Bill Meade Says:
January 15, 2006 05:31 PM
The following is a lightly edited post of the email response that I made to Scott Allred comments above. Scott requested that I post this to the blog which I'm interpreting as an implicit permission to post his part.
On Jan 14, 2006, at 8:51 AM, allredsd@yahoo.com wrote:
This is a fascinating insight into what seems to be the IP culture of large or very large firms, from the point of management or the IP attorney. (In other words it hasn't been my experience in smaller or startup companies).
bill@basicip.com's response:
I thoroughly enjoyed your commments! I was hoping that someone was reading inventor posts! I wrote the entire article in 1 rush, and then have been breaking it up into pieces. I find that as I put the pieces in the blog, that they spontaneously grow and develop. Hope the length isn't a bother to you.
On your large firm comment you are right of course. I was the IP manager for the LaserJet part of HP. When I started working in IP I was doing the business side support to legal for 6 giant patent infringement suits. I have a PhD in marketing with minors in EE, evolutionary ecology, econometrics and statistics and ended up litigating because I can speak to almost any technical person. I was dragged into IP by HP's lawsuits with Xerox. And then, while litigating, I was dragged into inventing by saying "yes" when my clients would ask me to run invention workshops for them. So it is big-company (the HP Boise site had 4,000 employees when I started running workshops in 1999) bias that you are picking up loud and clear.
But there is another dimension to my bias as well. The attached PDF is a Venn diagram.
+--------------------------+
| High Entrepreneurial Potential |
+----------------------+----+ |
| high inventing potential | * | |
| | | |
+----------------------+----+---------------------+
* = self starting inventors
I am detecting in you a significant signal from the right hand circle: entrepreneurship. When I started developing inventors, the high-potential inventors with high-entrepreneurship were not my target. I've always pretty much ignored them. When Carly put "invent" under the HP logo they found their way to the patent department on their own. My focus was the high inventing potential people who were not finding their way to the patenting department. As a by-product of getting non-inventors going, the high entrepreneurship inventors took their inventing up several notches, but that wasn't my doing.
When I was teaching in St. Louis, I loved it when I found "C" students who did not know they were really "A" students underneath. Before they took me they earned Cs, after they took my class, the got all As. That is what I thought of when I read your comment of this being big-company perspective on inventing. I love finding the underdog and then giving them oxygen and encouragement to see what they can do. In teaching the underdogs were C studnets. In big companies, the underdogs are the incipient inventors.
My comment to your observation that smaller and startup companies don't have this problem is, different inventors that the constituency I was targeting. You are right again.
On Jan 14, 2006, at 8:51 AM, allredsd@yahoo.com wrote:
I can't wait for the rest of the series, and am torn whether to comment now or wait for the rest. I'd love to hear comments regarding this viewpoint from practicing IP attorneys in both corporate and outside counsel environments
bill@basicip.com's comment:
The reason I'm writing this article is that my experience with practicing IP counsel inside or outside the company is that many are so locked into their assumptions that they don't know a good incipient inventor when they see one. What I mean by "incipient" is that people who should be inventors, don't know that they should be inventors. Like when you introduce a new-to-the-world product you have "incipient demand" because the people who should love to buy the product don't know they should buy it.
Because patent attorneys know about patenting, there is a hidden assumption that they know about inventors. They do know about people who are already inventing. But what patent attorneys don't know about is the barriers to entry to inventing, and how to remove barriers to entry. And the more emotive and sociological the barriers are, the more likely the patent attorneys are to be unaware and unwilling to deal with the barriers.
On Jan 14, 2006, at 8:51 AM, allredsd@yahoo.com wrote:
I shall post my comments now about the other two sections here as well (because I read them all 3 at once).
I found myself generally defensive after part one, because I think Dr. Mead has “inventors” a little askew, from an inventors point of view. I softened a little bit after reading parts two and three, because I think he's getting closer, and his picture is becoming clearer to me.
bill@basicip.com's comment:
This is likely caused by the big company, "incipient" inventors focus I have ... again, I think.
On Jan 14, 2006, at 8:51 AM, allredsd@yahoo.com wrote:
First, inventors invent because we're inventors. It's always there. Corporate culture can deter it, and certainly it's disclosure is stifled by the policies and attitudes Dr. Mead has alluded to in his articles. But inventors create because that's what we love to do.
bill@basicip.com's comment:
Entrepreneurial inventors will invent. I think of them as "self-starting" inventors. The non-entreprenurial inventors will also do some inventing. They may work on a product with an entrepreneurial inventor and thus get drawn into a disclosure as a co-inventor. But, this is at most 2% of the population of a company.
Where I want to go is to tap the magic of invention in the other 98% of the company, to see what's in there. While at HP I stole that mandate from Carly putting "invent" underneath the HP logo. What I discovered is that there is way more premium quality inventing than any country's patenting system could capture.
I once calculated that a client produced a million patentable ideas per year based on the IP captured in workshops. Of that million ideas they were extremely proud to have 900 patents issue. I play for the not yet inventors in my work because I keep coming back to the "What is wrong with this picture" of 1,000,000 ideas to 900 patents. There is a burning need for the Henry-Ford and Toyota Kan-Ban of quality patenting.
On Jan 14, 2006, at 8:51 AM, allredsd@yahoo.com wrote:
As an inventor myself, and what I've learned about both myself and the rest of my colleges is that no matter how intelligent or soft spoken engineers are, our egos rival those of our most prominent celebrities. The difference is that we inventors generally do not share them. They are there, however, and they are powerful forces. (Perhaps what Dr. Mead is referring to in his comments about his psycho- and socio- logicalities? )
bill@basicip.com's comment:
I just love working with engineers! While at HP I was lucky because in herding the cats into becoming inventors all the ego forces were aimed at someone else. My sense is that you are right on here. The ego forces are strong. Just not my focus. Always more land mines. :-)
On Jan 14, 2006, at 8:51 AM, allredsd@yahoo.com wrote:
This is why we disclose...for the hope of that little plaque. It is a sign of our intelligence, perseverance, and in some way our success as an engineer or inventor. In other words, in our ego-centered mind, a career filled with patents is more successful than one without. The monetary incentives are nice, and the training helps those unfamiliar learn corporate policy / procedure. It could even let some know that management does want to hear their ideas (ego validation). To that point, though, I think that engineers would invent and disclose if they know there's a chance to boost their ego.
bill@basicip.com's comment:
After leaving HP I've worked with clients who don't have an IP incentive program. What I've seen is that while ego will get inventors into the game. After they are in the game they go dark on inventing. A few die hards will invent and eat the time costs just for ego's sake and a ticket to the annual inventor dinner. But the vast majority won't. What worries me is the loss of IP from the majority of inventors giving up on the system. The die hards may generate 50 or 60 good patents in their careers form ego. But, that is a pallid picture of the promise. 4 of the top 10 inventors in the US are at Micron here in Boise. They have approximately 450 issued patents each. I had one inventor who generated 600 invention disclosures in 4 years. This is a glimmer of the potential. Ego won't get us all the way to the inventing potential because along the way life happens. That and most IP business processes concentrate the benefits of the IP on the legal folks and distribute large (and often unnecessary costs) on the inventors. The idealists of patenting are too often converted into cynics of patenting by the poor process engineering and management of IP.