Helping Teams to Innovate
Since my retirement, medical miracle, and rebirth, I have chosen a new career as a speaker and influencer. But the one part of my old career I’m hanging onto is my passion for fostering innovation in technical teams.
A quick look at the things I’ve done will show that innovation is the common thread in my career. Over time, I gradually came to place less emphasis on my own personal innovations, and more on helping teams innovate. That was a significant part of my job at IBM, and most of my job at Mimecast.
What I can offer is to run one or more half-day innovation sessions with your team(s). I prefer to gather a group of ten to twenty of your people, ideally from different parts of the team — not just technologists, but also a few folks from marketing and user support, at least. I will lead them in brainstorming sessions to try to come up with new ideas for taking the next step forward with your technology and products.
The Liberating Role of Laughter Yoga
One of the biggest problems in fostering innovation, I have found, is that people are reluctant to share half-baked ideas that might or might not lead anywhere. No one likes to be embarassed. For this reason, I often break the ice by starting the innovation sessions with Laughter Yoga. I will begin by leading your team in a few extremely silly exercises designed to make them laugh and let their guard down. After a half hour of this, I usually find that people are much less inhibited and more creative in their ideas. (And people tend to love it.)
The Role of Patents
Like many technologists, I have very mixed feelings abut patents, but ultimately I feel it is a major mistake, particularly for startup companies, to ignore the possibility of patenting their innovations. In today’s technology business enviornment, neglecting opportunities for patents can be as big a mistake as walking onto a battlefield without body armor. That’s why I have 33 patents myself.
In my innovation sessions, I will keep a sharp eye open for patentable ideas, and report back to you about them afterwards. If you are a small company or otherwise don’t have much in-house experience with patents, I can also follow up by helping you refine patentable ideas and I can even work directly with your patent attorneys if you desire. If you have a smart technologist in-house who is interested in doing more with patents, I can also help mentor them.
Patent Litigation
If you’re facing patent litigation, I feel your pain. Patent litigation can be unpleasant, prolonged, and expensive. I have served as an expert witness in nearly two dozen such cases. In each case, I have helped get the litigation settled before an expensive trial (although in one case, only a day before the trial was set to commence).
I am available for selected engagements as an expert witness, but please note that I will only accept an engagement as an expert witness if I believe in your position. Many expert witnesses respond to inquiries by asking “which side do you want me to be on?” but I will not argue a case I don’t believe in. This means that I usually — though not always — engage in patent litigation either on the side of defendants unfairly accused of infringing a bogus patent, or on the side of a small company asserting valid patents against a bullying larger one.
Please contact me if you are interested in my innovation sessions or might want me as an expert witness.
