The Eureka Method: How to Think Like an Inventor

The Eureka Method

About the Author

Dr. John Hershey holds 144 U.S. patents in fields including spread spectrum, digital TV, 3-D display, medical devices, logistics, e-commerce, jet engine prognostics, radar, cryptography, power line communications, sensors, satellite communications, railroading, and signal processing. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for contributions to secure communications. He is the author or coauthor of eight books and two encyclopedia entries. He worked in the intelligence community and the U.S. Department of Commerce, helped build a regional office of a major government services company, and most recently served at the General Electric Global Research Center in upstate New York. He has taught as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Colorado, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Union Graduate College.

The Eureka Method

How to Think Like an Inventor

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Dedicated to Fergus Ross, a good man and a good inventor

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I            Thinking Like an Inventor

CHAPTER 1    The Three Questions That Should Follow a Eureka! Moment

How Can I Broaden My Invention?

Application-Agnostic Inventions

How Can I Protect My Invention from Becoming Obsolete?

Foreseeing the Evolution of Memory

Do I Understand Who Benefits from My Invention?

Patent Searching

Recap

Discussions and Reflections

CHAPTER 2    Improvement Inventions

Building a Better Mousetrap

How Small Things Add Up

Using Analogy to Help You Improve Inventions

Microwave Ovens and Cell Towers

Persistent Improvement in the Ski Industry

Improvement Invention Opportunities in Infrastructure Upgrades

The Railroad Classification Yard

Traffic Lights

Focusing Your Attention Where It Counts

Selectivity and Moore’s Law

Tricks of IP Mining

Recap

Discussions and Reflections

CHAPTER 3    Developing an Inventive Mindset by Gaming the System

Examples of Gaming the System

Gaming the Game

How Criminals Game the System

How to Seek a Eureka! Moment by Gaming the System

Recap

Discussions and Reflections

CHAPTER 4    Increasing Dimensions to Spark Eureka! Moments

Examining New Dimensions

Language Dimensions

Sales Savvy

A Combinatorial Conundrum

Adding a New Dimension to an Old Space

Choosing the Right Dimensions

Combining Dimensions: Considering Climate

in Risk-Based Pricing

Changing a Dimension: Visualizing Speech

Recap

Discussions and Reflections

CHAPTER 5    Combination Inventions

Combination Invention and Emerging Technology

The Web and the Camera

Bar Codes and Cooking

Subliminal Channel Concept: Locks and Alarms

A Wartime Countermeasure

Frequency Hopping

A No-Holds-Barred Approach to Combination Invention

The POP Score: A Measure of Invention

The Technology Linkage Diagram

Barriers Dissolve with Time

Recap

Discussions and Reflections

PART II          Seeking a Eureka! Moment

CHAPTER 6    Law, Regulation, and Standards

Safety Regulations and Invention

T. J. Hooper Case

GPS

Radio Spectrum Spur to Invention

How Standards Can Stimulate Invention

Patent Pooling

Standards and Cryptography

Recap

Discussions and Reflections

CHAPTER 7    Overcoming and Using Constraints

Energy Limitations in a Mechanical System

Power Limitations in the Railroad Industry

Geographic Constraints

Nonlinearity Constraint

Proving a Negative: Detecting a Null Condition

Recap

Discussions and Reflections

CHAPTER 8    Be Driven by the Bottom Line

Mature Technology Married to New Technology

Invention and Productivity in Agriculture

Caterpillar Patents

Making Snow for the Ski Industry

Making the Most of What You Already Have

Focusing on Bottom-Line Invention

Recap

Discussions and Reflections

PART III          Appendixes

Appendix A      Patents: Mileposts of Invention

The Patent Art

Getting Started

The Claims

Patentability, Infringement, and Design Arounds

When a Patent Is in Your Way

Types of Patents

Le Mot Juste

Why Bother with Dependent Claims?

Speed Is of the Essence and Will Become More So

Patentability: §101 Revisited

Sometimes It’s a Secret

Claim All of It

Recap

Discussions and Reflections

Appendix B      U.S. Patent 6004596 Sealed Crustless Sandwich

Appendix C      Inventors and Inventorship

Who Are Inventors?

Failing Your Way to Success

Success Has Many Fathers

Recognition and Compensation

The Meaning of Inventorship

Inventing as a Passion

Abraham Lincoln

Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard

Kelly Fitzpatrick

Recap

Discussions and Reflections

Index

Acknowledgments

Ithank Roger Stewart of McGraw-Hill for his mentoring and guidance. His encouragement and patience are deeply appreciated. I also thank Scott Asmus, Rich DeCristofaro, Dave Goldman, and Howard Skaist, four outstanding attorneys, for their taking the time to educate me.

Introduction

This book is designed to help you become an inventor. Books about inventing are already numerous, as are conventions and seminars devoted to the topic. So why, you may ask, does the world need yet another book about inventing? The answer is that The Eureka Method: How to Think Like an Inventor offers something unique. While most other books focus on what to do with your device after it is invented—how to patent it or license it or promote and sell it—The Eureka Method steps back to the beginning.

This book will teach you how to think like an inventor. In other words, it will teach you how to come up with new ideas for inventions. This is, after all, for most people the hardest part of becoming an inventor.

The fact that you are reading this shows your interest in inventing. In my experience, a person is interested in becoming an inventor for two reasons: dissatisfaction with an existing product or service (too large, too slow, too expensive, too difficult to use), or a dream and desire to create something entirely new, a product or service that will augment humanity’s capability to reach farther, move faster, aggregate and analyze all sorts of data, or bring together pieces and form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Here we examine how you can fulfill both those inventor roles by developing and seizing white space. This important term denotes that broad unpainted canvas of inventions waiting to be conceived and is used often in this book. It is the inventor’s job to garner, or color, as much as possible of the white space surrounding an emerging invention by broadening and futurizing, two techniques discussed in the pages of this book. The inventor can then proceed to seek patent protection on an invention made more valuable by the coloring of the white space in both contemporary breadth and future time.

The Eureka Method Defined

The Eureka Method is a mental discipline that can be learned and practiced to help you produce a Eureka! moment. You may call it an epiphany or a flash of insight, brilliance, or creative genius. It’s that moment when an inventive solution finally crystallizes in your imagination. Our name for this critical event is a Eureka! moment in reference and tribute to Archimedes who had been wrestling with the problem of certifying a goldsmith’s claim that the crown he had made for the king was of pure gold.

The temptation to the artisan was to fashion the crown from a mixture of gold and another element of lesser value, such as silver, and then to charge the royal treasury for a piece of work of pure gold. As the story goes, Archimedes realized, upon stepping into a bath, that he displaced water of essentially the same volume as the displacing object, himself. He also realized that if the displaced liquid were collected, its volume would equal the volume of the displacing object. Since gold is heavier than silver, more silver would be needed to make a crown that weighed as much as gold; therefore, the silver would have greater volume and displace more water.

Upon realizing this, Archimedes supposedly sprang from the bath and exclaimed, Eureka! Translated, the Greek word means I found it! He had found the solution to the problem in a sudden moment of inspiration. Whether or not this story is actually true, it has nevertheless come to represent, for all time, the moment of inspiration when the scientist, artist, or inventor suddenly and unexpectedly realizes the answer to a vexing problem and this is called the Eureka! moment.

There is a curious parallel between Archimedes’ Eureka! moment and Thomas Edison’s instruction to an assistant to calculate the volume of a particular glass bulb having a pear-shaped appearance. The assistant proceeded to use a complex mathematical approach whereupon Edison countered that he would just fill the bulb and measure the volume directly.

History is replete with stories of Eureka! moments. Another story, often told in high school chemistry classes, is about German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé, who famously claimed to have realized that the benzene molecule must be shaped like a ring after having a dream of a snake swallowing its own tail. That these breakthrough realizations appear to come unbidden from the subconscious mind makes them seem magical, as if they are beyond our control but, in reality, most of these stories are more legendary than true.

Finding Your Own Eureka! Moments

What is needed is a disciplined approach that can be mastered to help the aspiring inventor reach the point of invention. This book will teach you how to do this and will show you that they emerge from the application of tried-and-true principles rather than flashes of inspiration that come out of nowhere. The application of these principles creates the Eureka! moment of inspiration or realization, which is really the end result of applied reasoning.

Edison, for example, held more than 1000 U.S. patents. He certainly did not wait for inspiration to come from the blue. Like other successful inventors, he applied a methodology to invention. He is quoted as saying, I find out what the world needs. Then I go and try to invent it. This is certainly a logical first step, which I call bottom-line-driven invention.

The Eureka Method is a systematic approach to invention that will allow you to find inspiration on a regular basis. The key to thinking like an inventor is to be aware of societal needs and desires, laws and customs. The ideas you are looking for are all around you.

I have found three ways to encourage Eureka! moments. The first is by taking an unbounded thrust at a problem—a sort of no-holds-barred approach that need not be responsive to existing technology or cost considerations. Immersing yourself in a bit of chaos can also help spark creative thought. This can often lead to a Rube Goldberg construction. After the inspiration, comes a realization of the constraints of technology and cost, and the initially unwieldy construction can then morph into something novel and useful.

Another technique for encouraging Eureka! moments is to exploit analogies. As a technical person, you might be aware of an effect, phenomenon, problem, or practice in one field. You and many others might know and understand this effect very well, but suddenly you turn to a completely different set of circumstances and you see a way to exploit an analogy of this effect in this different situation.

A third technique that can lead to a Eureka! moment can be produced by what I call gaming the system. In this method, you identify the system within which society is operating and then try to find a nonprohibited way around the constraints. This can be a powerful technique, and you have probably used it yourself without realizing it.

In This Book

Chapter 1 presents three questions that you should always keep in the back of your mind when you invent. Answering them for your invention will help you ensure that you are getting the most out of your efforts and will put you in a better position should you seek a patent to protect your invention.

Chapter 2 looks at improvement inventions. You have probably used a product or system and felt that it could be improved if only there were a component available that did X. You might then proceed to invent X, or you might search and find that a variant of X has already been invented, and with some adjustment it can be made to function and provide the improvement that you envision. Improvement inventions are the lion’s share of inventions and a good place to start our journey.

After you feel comfortable with improvement inventions and have learned how to nourish their Eureka! moments, you will want to master the next level of invention complexity: combination inventions. This is where you invent to bring to life entirely new products and services. So that you will have the best chance of success, you should stay aware of important changes not just in technology but also in laws and trends in culture. I have found it helpful to learn how to view a societal system as a game and then to consider an invention as a gaming of that system. You will learn how to game a system as one of the preliminaries to stepping into combination inventions.

Another of the preliminaries to practicing combination inventions is to understand the power that results from combining elements drawn from different sources, the very different technologies that can be combined to produce a new and useful invention. We cast this as an expansion of dimensions, joining two or more spaces of technology and function. You will learn how to seek an opportunity for combination invention using tools such as the technology linkage diagram.

After these preliminaries, we tackle combination inventions. We look at examples that bring together diverse technologies and an example of the unbounded thrust, and we review the inventive thinking that led to a patented invention by using this approach. We will then study the POP score, a technique for looking backward and measuring the breakthrough power of a Eureka! moment. You’ll then be introduced to a tool to help you generate your own Eureka! moments for capturing combination inventions: the technology linkage diagram.

The final three chapters are dedicated to helping you seek your own Eureka! moments. Chapter 6 covers the importance of laws, regulations, and standards for your opportunities. These paths involve high stakes and potentially high rewards for successful inventors. They are not the usual paths of opportunity, but they can offer some of the best chances to create inventions that have an enormous impact. Technological progress and regulation are closely intertwined. If you can learn to think ahead of the curve, you will be in a privileged position. Remember Edison’s statement that he first determined what the world needed and then he proceeded to invent it? If you can foresee what regulations are likely to follow an imminent advance in technology, you would be ahead of Edison’s approach and your Eureka! moment might produce an invention that, if protected by patent, would carve out a large and lucrative space.

Chapter 7 deals with examples of overcoming constraints, one of the key motivators for practicing invention. We look at a spectrum of inventions that have resulted from an inventor’s push to overcome constraints that typically involve limitations of availability of such things as power and energy; they can also include problems of geography and implicit constraints that emerge from mathematical models.

Chapter 8 is dedicated to what I call bottom-line invention. This deals with a very important mindset, especially if you are inventing for someone other than yourself, as perhaps invention specifically targeted to a business goal. You will learn how to assume a mindset that is more likely to promote your success by keeping your focus on the business constraints as the invention proceeds.

At the end of each chapter are questions that provoke individual reflection or can be used for group discussion. The questions are designed to help you absorb and consider what you have learned.

Finally, to profit most fully from reading this book, you should be grounded in the essentials of the U.S. patent process. Patents are used to protect the valuable property rights to your inventions, and you should understand and be able to converse in the terminology surrounding patents and the patent process. If you are well versed in patent-related material, it is reasonable to start by reading Chapter 1. But if you are not well versed, or you desire a review or solid introduction to the patent process, you should begin by reading the Appendixes on patents and inventors and inventorship.

A great tool is provided by the U.S. government’s website www.uspto.gov. This extraordinarily well-done site is a national treasure of useful knowledge respecting patents, their applications, and a myriad of subjects associated with such. Note that I am not an attorney or a patent agent, and this book does not presume to give you