The hidden world of patents

It’s incredible to work for companies that value innovation and lateral thinking. One of the areas where I believe that shines through at Lenovo is in patents.

The cynical among us will say that patents reflect a company’s desire to protect their profits. Having worked on 25 or so patents, I believe there’s more to it.

Having a healthy culture of patenting ideas means you have a healthy culture of ideas. A culture of generating innovations and experiments that might not go anywhere, of recognizing that those ideas are valuable, and they can come from anyone, anywhere - often long before the technology to make them a reality is available.

Patents reflect that you have set aside defined space for thinking, imagining, planning, postulating, brainstorming - and then doing, once you’ve had the initial ideas. Patents show that you walk the walk of innovation.

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Move over Jerry the hardware guy, it’s Jerry the patent guy!

If I had to guess, I think I’ve worked on maybe 25 patents, though since they take a long time to be hammered out, drawn up, filed, licensed and so on, I’m not sure how many are either final or still in development. But here’s a picture of some of the final patents and award certificates I have framed in my home:

The very first patent I worked on has always been my favorite. It had to do with adapter card testing, and it really got me fired up about the whole process of invention. It got pretty complex, but basically, I found a way to reduce impedance in high-speed manufacturing of adapter cards using certain materials. Manufacturers can produce more, test more, deploy more, ship more, and that has a knock-on effect to the whole supply chain.

I remember having fun with an electronic privacy patent. When we developed this one, the technology was new and we were figuring out what we could do with it. The patent has to do with the activation of geofencing - increasing protections on documents once you leave a secure location - or selectively turning on or suggesting privacy mode. Very useful, for example, for accounting firms with consultants flying around the world, needing to work on sensitive information in public spaces.

Sometimes the simplest of ideas can be fascinating projects - like figuring out how to make the alt-text pop up when you hover over an icon in your taskbar to figure out what it does. In my programming days, we learned that people didn’t use those icons because they didn’t know what they did. They were happy going to File and clicking Save, rather than using the floppy disk symbol. The hover text was a really fun project because of how much time it saves people, and how naturally it was incorporated into operating systems and peoples’ behaviors.

The patent process

Every single day, you run into problems.

This is why I always say that periods of disruption are interesting. In periods of commercial stability, problems can be hard to find! I’m not advocating for deliberate disruption of any kind, but undoubtedly, during periods of disruption, problems arise, and people have to find ways to solve them.

When you find a problem, way before you solve it, you start writing down all your ideas on what the problem is, and all the ideas you have about how to solve it. (Importantly, you put dates on all these notes.) Then you pass all your documentation along to attorneys, who research it and tell you whether there’s anything to it.

My current journals, brimming with ideas!

After that, the attorneys spend weeks - or longer - writing up everything they can find about the problem and your ideas, protecting the claims you’ve made. Finally, all of that gets filed with national and even international patent organizations. I just received one that was filed about five years ago, so that might give you an idea of how long this particular stage takes.

At this point, the law has recognized that the problem is real, and your idea on how to solve it is valuable. That’s when a patent becomes a defense or a protection - when it can be commercialized, cross-licensed, cross-protected.

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Diversity as a strength

Sometimes I wonder where ideas really come from. Personally speaking, if I didn’t work at IBM and Lenovo, would I still be in my garage, figuring this stuff out? I think I would.

Working with my teams, brainstorming regularly, I’ve seen brilliant ideas come from places I never would have expected, from all parts of organizations. I often deliberately go out of my way to include people from diverse working teams and backgrounds, because those are so often the people who see something obvious - obvious to them, but not to me. And then we’re off to the races.

I want to highlight that there should be more diversity in patent holders and patent development. In order to increase diversity of all kinds among our patent holders and producers, we have to increase diversity in our industry, in our engineering teams and our talent pipelines. Trust me - we know, and we’re aiming for it and actively working on it.

Why a patent is more than profit protection

As a young engineer working for IBM, which was a bit of a patent machine thanks to its academic culture, I learned very early in my career that my ideas were valuable.

I had concrete incentivized, certified, legalized proof and patronage reinforcing the message that my ideas were worthwhile.

(For a technology company in particular, building a big patent portfolio is important. They can and will incentivize inventors, because inventing is going above and beyond your job to create value that can affect a whole industry.)

That’s a really strong confidence booster for a young person, whether in an analytical-technical field or a creative one (or both!). It teaches you that you should never be too busy to write down your ideas. You should never be too busy to have ideas. Never be too busy to think.

In turn, I will never stop thinking, and keep talking to people about thinking, because I, too, recognize the value of it, in myself and others. It’s the nature of my job to go to my peoples’ desks and explain what I was thinking about, or ask them what they’re thinking about, and we’ll work on extending it a little further, and writing it up, and there you go.

That happens a lot, and you can tell: we’ve?foldable PCs, 360 degree convertible PCs, and looking at rollable PCs, and those are just the form factors. There are hundreds of thousands of ideas in and under every PC and server chassis. And all of those things start as scribbled ideas on notepads, journals, whiteboards.

The power of people thinking

If my company and I both understand the power of people thinking - if we celebrate and encourage and incentivize people thinking - above all, what we’re doing is creating an environment where people have time and support to think through their job, not just mechanically tick through the motions.

We don’t just reproduce what’s already out there. We’re constantly thinking through what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and finding the next problem to tackle.

As long as there’s a steady supply of problems, there will be a steady supply of patentable ideas.

When you get the right people in the right room and the right environment to think, talk, and write stuff down, it’s genuinely amazing, every time.

So: yes, you can see patents as capitalistic, where intellectual property has to be verified, protected and weaponized.

Or you could look at patents as a representation of a group of people standing up and saying:

“Ideas matter.

Creation - innovation - invention matters.

Don’t get complacent. Don’t stop.

Keep them coming.”