Innovating To Win

Connecting Innovation Dots

On his blog Medinnovation, Dr. Richard Reece discusses the interconnectedness of innovation across domains of innovation activity in this post.  It’s interesting to see his commentary on 10 coming medical innovations in this regard.  It is doubly so because this phenomenon is not unique to medical innovation.

Great and transformative innovation stem from the confluence of many different advances and observations.  The accumulation of knowledge into the global pool of information provides the water of life for innovation.  People seeking to find novel and valuable solutions to needs draw upon this fund of knowledge to synthesize new answers.  This is the act of innovation creativity in its pure form.

We should understand the consequence of this as it relates to driving sustainable innovation in the enterprise.  Knowledge worker need knowledge with which to work.  Connectedness to knowledge of all types is an essential ingredient to create the working environment needed to drive continuous, value creating innovation.  This must include seamless access to the enterprise’s internal knowledge, global knowledge from both inside and outside the company’s domain of expertise, and the tacit knowledge of team mates.

Have you ever noticed the degree of innovation serendipity?  It is not by chance that different people seem to be creating the same innovation at the same time.  Any really interesting, high value challenge is going to attract many potential innovators.  Don’t flatter yourself and think you are the only one working on your great project.  Also, many potential innovators have access to the same informational resources that you do.  This means there is a reasonable chance that when you find a great solution, you won’t be alone.

Yet, it is also the case that most potential innovators have the same poor access to knowledge that you do.  This means that you have an opportunity to create an innovation edge.  By investing in establishing the best innovation intelligence infrastructure—one that provides seamless access to all sources of knowledge when and how you need it—you can tilt the scales of innovation providence in your favor.

This is a key lesson that innovation leaders must take to heart.  You can influence the frequency and value of your innovation outcomes by making the right strategic investments in innovation infrastructure and methods.  As we begin to emerge from the past years of economic malaise, companies are all beginning to renew their innovation agenda.  Will you take the right steps to ensure that your innovation workers have the right tools to deliver the goods?

Why Companies Need Pervasive Innovation

It’s hard to keep up with all the articles on innovation these days.  There are so many outlets now where people are volunteering their experience and advice.  A lot of the advice is quiet good.  But, every now and then an article appears that assaults the senses like fingernails against a blackboard.  Such is the case with “Why Companies Need Less Innovation,” by Pat Lencioni which appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.  I feel sorry for any company that takes this advice seriously.

In this article, the author begins with a very reasonable observation.  Many companies do a great job of talking up innovation, and then disenfranchise workers by not doing what is needed to establish a productive and sustainable innovation culture.  This is a horrible mistake that many executives make.  Simply proclaiming that your company is building an innovation culture doesn’t make it so.

Unfortunately, the article takes a very wrong turn.  Lencioni suggests that if workers are innovating, the result will be chaos.  What tripe!  Does Lencioni really misunderstand innovation so much as to equate innovation with workers gone wild abandoning their mission and acting on impulse?  One hopes not, yet this is the message that comes through.  Lencioni goes on to suggest that innovation should be the sole domain of the leadership team.

It is well understood that the ivory tower approach to innovation is a failed model.  The leadership team doesn’t have the full perspective to be the sole contributors to the process.  Yes, the leadership does have the best understanding of the company’s business needs and objectives.  And their position gives them a perspective that the rank and file employees can’t share.  But there are too many proof points that teach us that executives acting in such an insular manor are detached from the practical realities that the workers see every day.  There are equally many examples of companies benefiting greatly from worker led innovation.

The leadership needs to play an active role in the innovation process, and as Lencioni rightly points out, they need to set the innovation agenda and ensure alignment and execution.  However, it is a grave mistake to exclude the workforce from the innovation process.

Worried that innovating workers will cause disruption?  Don’t be.  Innovating doesn’t mean doing whatever strikes your fancy.  For rank and file workers, it means thinking about your job as you do it.  Asking yourself questions about what’s working and what’s not working.  If something’s not working, what could be done to correct it?  If something is working, could it be better?  These thoughts and analysis must then be given a path through the company’s innovation process so that positive change can be initiated.

Will every worker contribute a ton of ideas?  No.  But, building a constructive process to tap into the collective wisdom of the organization will yield strong benefits and fuel innovation.  It will not erode execution. Quite the contrary, it will lead to higher levels of execution.  As a senior manager, I will choose thinking workers over mindless robots every time.

Bottom line… Execution, passion, and focus are not in conflict with innovation.  Successful innovation requires brilliant innovation; winning business execution requires continuous innovation.

In Defense of Improvement

A colleague pointed out a post by Patrick Lefler that appeared on Chuck Frey’s Innovation Tools site this week.  In this article, Patrick proclaims that improvement is not innovation.  Of course, in the purest sense, the author is correct.  While all innovation seeks to deliver an improvement, not all improvements are innovative.  But, there is a very important aspect of improvement that, in his fervor to make his point, Patrick has ignored.

Coincidentally, I presented a webinar just yesterday on the topic of harnessing innovation creativity to drive corporate value.  One of the key points I touched on was the importance of incremental innovation.  Yes, incremental innovation is a good and necessary part of building a sustainable culture and environment for continuous innovation.

Breakthrough innovation, incremental innovation, minor improvement—these are all points on a continuum of value creating solution generation.  Incremental innovation is very beneficial to an organization trying to develop the core competence needed to support a high-performance innovation system.  Specifically, incremental innovation delivers both short and long term benefits.  In the short term, immediate business benefits can be realized—extended revenue life of a product, increased market share, better contribution to margin, etc.  In the long term, incremental innovation provides a low risk platform to hone the basic innovation skills needed for successful, repeatable breakthrough innovation practice.

This last point, honing basic innovation skills, is too often overlooked.  Most organizations lack these basic skills and the knowledge of innovation best practices.  These skills must be developed and practiced constantly.  Even seasoned innovation workers should take a page from Basketball legend Larry Bird’s play book.  Larry was well known for his work ethic and diligence in maintaining his skills.  He would arrive for a game hours before anyone else and warm up by taking hundreds of practice shots.

Efforts to improve, even modest ones, are opportunities to practice innovation thinking and skills.  The adept application of innovation practices can move a change further along the continuum of novelty and value creation so that what might have been a minor improvement becomes an incremental innovation that creates strong competitive differentiation.

So while Patrick is correct in the assertion that simple improvements are not innovations, one should not eschew incremental achievements.  In fact sometimes the road to breakthrough innovations is paved a brick at a time.  In my own research team where we are constantly pushing the limits and redefining the concept of the possible in the area of applied computational linguistics, we often use the expression “step by step” to describe the path to innovation success.

Of course, it’s important to remember that you must be constantly trying to reach further up the novelty-value ladder in order to find the breakthroughs that will provide you optimal market position.  But don’t forget to embrace incremental innovation, too.  It’s a good thing.

Prepare Your Innovation Elevator Pitch

Yesterday, an article appeared on Blogging Innovation by Roy Luebke titled “What to Tell the CEO About Innovation.”  Roy goes on to posit what he would say to a CEO about innovation if given just a few moments of the CEO’s attention.

I suspect that Roy’s CEO will be taking a nap about 10 seconds into Roy’s monologue.   Like a lot of innovation practitioners, Roy has not adequately considered how to deliver that initial innovation message to the CEO. 

It strikes me as odd that this is such a common issue.  After all, you wouldn’t dream of introducing a new innovation to the market without understanding the opportunity space.  What is it that your customer actually wants and needs?  How will they feel the impact of your innovation?  Why will they choose your answer to their needs over other available options?  How do you communicate the value of your solution to the client in a way that will resonate with them?  Etc., etc., etc.

Yet time and time again, innovation champions forget that the CEO is an internal customer of innovation.  In the same way that they need to understand the customers who will use innovations, they need to understand the internal customers of innovation.  What’s important to the CEO?  What business imperatives are top of mind?  What are the corporate goals around attainment of revenue growth, market share, and profitability?  What board directives does he need to satisfy?  From where does the CEO perceive the greatest threats on the horizon to be coming?  Which markets look like they are waxing or waning? Etc., etc., etc.

Roy’s message will fail because it is too ethereal and the CEO isn’t going to make a connection to it.  Don’t squander your opportunity to make the innovation elevator pitch.  Plan for it.  Do you homework and understand what’s going to strike a chord with your CEO.  Frame your pitch around the CEO’s agenda and make clear and compelling statements that make it evident that innovation is a vital part of the solution the company needs. 

Even a pro-innovation CEO may not receive your message well if you fail to do this.  After all, the planning and execution of an innovation initiative requires time and money—the two most scarce and valuable resources the CEO has to work with.  You are competing for these resources, and it’s up to you to deliver the compelling value proposition that will allow the CEO to choose innovation over the other available strategies.

Innovation Brewing

Looking at the blog of Invention Machine’s CEO Mark Atkins, I am reminded that June is Innovation Month in New England.  There will be many fun and interesting innovation happenings throughout the region.  One of these is InnoBeer (short for Innovation Beer Summit).  When I organized the first InnoBeer event, I had no idea that it would become so popular.  Yet there have now been InnoBeer events in several locations in both the U.S. and Europe.

Recently, I had the opportunity to learn to make beer.  I joined a group of friends and together we brewed six varieties of beer.  There are innovation lessons to be learned from most things.  Here are some innovation lessons I took away from my beer making debut.

Science
There is science behind making beer.  Understanding what is happening in the process helps you achieve the desired results.  This is true for every domain in which I see people working in the trenches of innovation.  No matter what you are doing, there is a body of knowledge that precedes your efforts.  If you don’t have good access to this knowledge, you are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past and waste a lot of effort reinventing the wheel.  High performance innovation organizations understand the need to knowledge enable their innovation workers by providing them with the best, purposeful knowledge research and delivery systems.

Team
During our little beer making party, we brewed 6 varieties of beer in one evening (90 minute IPA, Summer Ale, Belgian Blonde, Vanilla Honey Porter, Oatmeal Stout, and Scottish Ale).  Getting it all done required teamwork and collaboration.  In business innovation practice this pressure to achieve high-value innovation outcomes with limited resources and time is de rigueur.   To achieve results requires the same type of committed and connected teamwork for innovation workers.  Companies seeking to maximize the effectiveness of their innovation workforce must employ innovation frameworks that connect people to one another when they need based on what they know.

Tools
Making our beer, we have at our disposal the right equipment to make the job easy and efficient: steam controlled boiling vats, wort cooling filters, automatic bottle sanitizers, etc.  Listening to others in our group recount the horror stories of making beer in their kitchens without these tools reminded me of what I see all too often walking into companies that have not begun to deploy state of the art innovation platform technology.  Innovation workers struggle to make sense of problems and find the fit between problem states and solution spaces.  Companies need to invest in providing their workers with the right tools and skills for innovation success.  Sure, you can start a fire rubbing sticks together; but why not give your teams modern torches and set them loose to burn up the competition.

Experience
Having the brew master watching over us made a huge difference.  He was able to tell us in advance what to pay attention to and how to ensure the quality of the final product we were producing.  Preserving, tapping into, and leveraging grey beard knowledge is a huge problem for many companies.  Make sure you have systems in place to harvest and disseminate this knowledge to empower your entire innovation workforce and enable the generational transference of your corporate tribal wisdom.

Immersion
My beer making experience was great.  One of the best aspects of the experience was its immersive nature.  While we were engaged in brewing or bottling, that was the focus of our activity.  There were no interruptions, no need to divert our attention and focus, no co-opting of resources by some other urgency.  Of course, we all have to deal with the realities of the real world when we are working in the trenches of innovation.  But, managers need to find the way to carve out protected time for innovation workers to focus on what’s important, not merely what seems urgent.  You have to willing to invest in your people, giving them the time to master and apply innovation best practices to their innovation tasks.  You will find this is an investment that will pay big dividends by both delivering the benefits of accelerated innovation and product delivery, but also greater per worker productivity.

The next InnoBeer tweetup is schedule for Tuesday, June 15th.  If you are in Boston, stop on by and join in the innovation conversation.  You can get details and sign up (free) here.

Finding Sense ( and Dollars) In The White Space

Spring is a time of change and transition, just right for reading a new book on innovation.  “Seizing The White Space” by Mark W. Johnson is the latest volume to come from Innosight, and seems to be right the right thing for spring reading.  It’s a highly readable and very quick to get through if your mind has already made the transition to summer; yet, it is has enough chewy content for those of us who are still want to curl up hearthside with an interesting book.

Johnson puts forth what he calls the four box business model to capture the dynamic tension between three key aspects of the value system underlying a business.  Yes, that’s right – four boxes to capture three key aspects.  These are:

Customer Value Proposition – What is it that customer derives value from when your offering is selected.  Of course, given the Christensen heritage of Innosight it comes as no surprise that Johnson returns to the job to be done jargon to talk about the value proposition.  Personally, I was just happy to see the value-prop called simply and directly what it is.  (Okay, I’m just weary of some authors who feel compelled to try and coin new jargon for what is already a well understood concept.)

Profit Formula – The strategy for monetization of the Customer Value Proposition.

Key Resources and Process – The things, people, and processes that are needed to deliver the Customer Value Proposition.  Johnson separates the concepts of resources and process in his representation.  Hence, the four boxes to represent three key aspects.

While these concepts may seem pretty basic, there are far too many companies that seem to forget that this system, and more importantly, the need to harmonize and balance these elements of the system exist.  Ignoring some of Clayton Christensen’s best advice (be patient on revenues, but impatient about profit) many companies attempting to claim a white space opportunity as their territory burn through loads of capital to try and drive the revenue engine only to dilute the share value so much that no one can hope to extract value from the venture.

Throughout “Seizing The White Space,”  Johnson uses many examples and comparisons of how these various elements interact in both successful and failed business models.  The examples help to bring to life what could otherwise be a very dry and boring domain of study.  You will need to filter some of the discussion through your analysis.  Some of the issues around the cases studies are open to interpretation.

After addressing the questions of when and how to look at business model innovation, Johnson reminds us of how existing demands and practice of a going concern can block the organizations ability to define and implement a new system to attack a white space opportunity.

I enjoyed “Seizing The White Space” and certainly recommend it as a worthwhile read for innovation practitioners or managers responsible for considering, planning for, or executing on new business platform opportunities.

This is the fifth stop on a virtual book tour for “Seizing The White Space.”  Earlier stops on the tour can be visited at:

Working Knowledge – Andrea Meyer’s excellent blog

Blogging Innovation – A multi-author innovation blog maintained by Braden Kelley

Innovate on Purpose – Jeffrey Phillips thoughtful blog on innovation strategy and practice

FastForward Blog – An Enterprise 2.0 blog where Jim McGee review the book 
 
Yet to come on the virtual book tour is Dan Keldsen’s interview with Mark Johnson which will appear on the  Information Architected blog.

Boyd on Linking Strategy and Innovation

I read a nice post on Drew Boyd’s blog, Innovation in Practice, discussion the idea of linking innovation with company strategy.  In it, Drew discusses two models of interaction between company strategy and innovation:

Strategy informs innovation – in this model the company defines a strategy, then innovation efforts are pursued to find way to deliver on and enhance the value of the strategy;

Innovation informs strategy – in this model, innovation activity first generates scads of potential concepts which are subsequently mapped to a strategic evaluation model to select the innovation path that builds the optimal strategy.

Whichever approach you select, it is critical that your corporate strategy and innovation efforts are aligned.  Without alignment, you have no chance of achieving the level of execution required for successful innovation delivery.

However, I would like to highlight a third model: Innovation and Strategy inform each other.  In other words, you are only looking at half of the picture if the dialogue between strategy and innovation is a one way exchange. 

If you are responsible for strategy, you don’t want to lament “Gee, if I’d only known that was an option I would have set that as a strategic goal.”  As an innovation practitioner, you hate saying “Gee, if I had only known that was important, I could have helped achieve that objective.”

Optimal value is achieved through an on-going dialogue between these two drivers of corporate value.

Innovation Chickens and Eggs

Just before I left for my end of year holiday, there was an interesting post on Bruce Nussbaum’s BusinessWeek NussbaumOnDesign blog.  It mentioned a recent statement by Don Norman, a key leader in Design, in which he had stated that innovation is driven by technology and science rather than design’s focus on peoples’ needs.  This initiated an interesting discussion that even saw Don Norman weighing in.

I suppose that I should be pleased by such a pronouncement.  After all, my own background is from the science & technology side of things, and more than once I have found myself annoyed by thick-headed design bigots espousing fanciful ideas about design being the only thing that matters or that innovation cannot be planned.  But on the contrary, I find that the esteemed Mr. Norman is wrong.

Does that mean that it is design that drives innovation?  No.  Rather, science & technology and design are two equally important ingredients in successful, sustainable innovation.

Strangely in his comment on Nussbaum’s blog, Norman makes the rather absurd claim that need follows the existence of technology.  Looking at the examples cited, it is easy to see how laughable this argument is.  Norman states, “The need for communication devices (telegraph, telephone, radio, cellphone, internet, postal mail, email) came after the technologies made them possible.”  I doubt that Norman can be so naïve as to thinks this is a credible statement. 

The need to communicate existed before and independently of the vehicles of communication.  As human social conditions evolved, so too did the demand for communication efficiency evolve along various measures.  People made due with the technologies available because they did not imagine that alternatives could be available.  At times, these limitations placed constraints on other aspects of societal evolution.  Naturally, the science and technology needed to enable new modes and models of communication evolved to meet the latent need.  These technologies were not adopted because they existed, but because the need existed to drive the adoption.  The fact that no one stood up and said, “Boy, a Blackberry would sure make my life easier,” in 1950, does not imply that the need case for the device did not exist.

Yes, it is sometimes very difficult to identify the latent need before it is expressed.  But, it is there.  Yes, the enablement of a solution requires the science & technology foundation to make the solution possible.  But, absent a need, the invention is little more than a curiosity.

Successful innovation responds to a need (design influence); successful innovation delivers a novel solution (science & technology influence).  Design leads us to understanding how to marry capability to need in a way that creates value; the language of capability is defined and expanded through invention in science & technology.  Thus, it is that the intersection of design and technology is the wellspring of innovation.

Driving Growth Through Innovation

As I was perusing Chuck Frey’s Innovation Weblog this morning, I noticed a recent post by Charlie Alter titled “Demand innovation step 3: Finding new growth opportunities.”  In this article, seven principles are highlighted.  As I pondered the points, it struck me that the advice put forth in this article was actually pretty poor.  Let’s dissect the suggestions made by Charlie Alter and understand what a good innovation driven growth strategy should look like.

Alter: “Shift from a “Product Centered” sales growth strategy to an “Economic Centered” model”
 
Better Advice:
Customer/Market Centric innovation is the most effect path to growth hands down.  Focusing on the term Economic Centered can lead to serious problems for a company.  The last thing you should want to do is get sucked into the vast gaping void of commodity hell.  Yet, this is exactly where you will end up if you make economics the central piece of your innovation strategy.

The keystone supporting the architecture of your business and innovation strategy must be value.  It is the value proposition that gets customers to buy; it is highly differentiated value that drives market share attainment; it is tight full product value alignment that builds customer affinity.

This high value delivery is achieved by immersive understanding of the opportunity space defined by your target customer’s unspoken needs, goals, and aspirations.  While Alter does acknowledge this, the emphasis on economics is wrong.  The focus must always be on the customer.  Customer focus leads to high value delivery.  Deliver high value and the economics will follow.

Alter: “Stop relying on developing the latest blockbuster products and develop a series of evolutionary”

Better Advice:
Sorry, if you want to be the leader, you can’t pick between ‘Big I’ and ‘little i’ innovation.  The only winning game plan is to pursue both.  Strategy and tactics are two sides of the same coin.  The evolutionary innovations that provide incremental value enhancements to your existing customers are very important.  It is these everyday innovations that sustain the value of your existing revenue channels, help ensure the ongoing profitability of the business, and can provide the cash needed to fund new opportunities.

However, becoming reliant on incrementalism is a go out of business strategy.  It is this mindset that creates the environment for disruptive market change.  By focusing too tightly on the current needs of today’s best customers, companies become inured to the constantly changing market/customer ecosystem in which they operate.  They stop changing and developing.  In an ever changing world, when you stop changing, you start dying.

Learn to eat your own lunch before someone else does.  In parallel with the incremental innovation, companies must engage in continuous reevaluation and innovation of their products, their services, and themselves.  It can be scary to think of creating a new product that may undermine an existing cash cow.  But always remember that someone is going to do it.  Isn’t better if that someone is you?

Look for new markets, too.  You can tap into vast new revenue opportunities and extend the revenue life of your current products by applying simple sustainable innovation practices.  Can you identify new communities of users for your existing product?  What is the fundamental component of your offering that is the source of its value?  Can that component be retargeted to a different space where it can enjoy a second revenue identity?  Are there licensing opportunities to be had?

It is these two approaches, self re-invention and white space development, which should be at the heart of your strategic innovation thinking.  With the dual tracks of tactical and strategic innovation, you will ensure both the short-term and long-term success of your company.

Alter: “Look at the size of your business, no matter how large or small, for the advantages it represents”

Better Advice:
It is always import to look at the elements of your business and consider how they can be leveraged to competitive advantage.  But never try and justify the status quo by focusing solely on the positive.  Every aspect of your business, its size, your organizational design, your sales mechanism, etc., presents both advantages and disadvantages.  You need to understand both sides and consider how to optimize each element of the whole to deliver maximum customer value and corporate performance.

Taking the specific issue of organization size as an example, don’t assume your current configuration is the right one.  Does your size and organization really fit the optimal business model for your market and target customers?  The answer to this question may change the way you think about the business.  You might find you need to grow the organization to map properly to the business model and growth goals; perhaps you will find that you have excess capacity that must either put to a value driving use or trimmed out.  You might even come to the realization that a fundamental shift in the business model is important.

Alter: “Make sure profitable growth is driven through every level of your company”

Better Advice:
On this point, I fully agree with Alter.  Every company must maximize its return on investments.  Every dollar (Euro, Pound, Yen, etc.) which is misspent detracts from that attainment.  As Charlie advises, do redirect those wasted resources into activities that can drive revenue and value growth for the company.  This is as true for a start-up as it is for a major enterprise.  As Clayton Christiansen put it, “Be patient on revenue, but impatient on profitability.”  One doesn’t have to look far these days to see the wreckage of start-ups that became proof points for this when their venture capital partners decided to turn off the funding flow.

Alter: “Develop lots of small or even maverick ideas for growth rather than a few large ones”
        “One simple rule is that the more ideas for growth the better”

Better Advice:
More is not always better.  Contrary to the popular mantra that you need to throw as much stuff against the wall to see what will stick, the go generate a ton of ideas approach to innovation is counterproductive and a legacy view of the world that tenaciously hangs on because sometimes something does in fact stick.  When you have too many ideas to wade through, the sea of ideas itself becomes the roadblock to innovation.

Companies have limited resources and cannot afford to waste cycles winnowing down a mountain of questionable and mostly incremental concepts looking for that one gem.  Rather than letting a million flowers bloom and die only to find that in doing so they have depleted the nutrients in the once fertile ground that was your business, you are much better off selecting a handful of high quality ideas that have a much better chance of success because you can properly focus your energies on tending the innovation garden.

This is fundamentally where needs led innovation diverges from the old school thinking of idea first innovation.  By clearly identifying the target audience, their needs, and then applying sustainable innovation methods to find the best way to deliver value to that audience through a brilliant solution that meets the needs, you will have the surest path to corporate value creation.  In short, you don’t need 3000 ideas to create one new product, you just need one.  Sustainable innovation practice is all about identifying the one idea the first time.

Alter: “Form a small cross-functional team and visit your best customers to determine what types of challenges and problems they encounter during their business processes that “surround” the products or services they buy from you”

Better Advice:
On the surface, this is basically good advice.  Understanding the entire use model and eco-system that your product or service is a part of can help you develop many good strategic insights.  However, always remember the limitations of your current customer experience.  Today’s best customers may not in fact be tomorrow’s high value customers.  Be wary of the pitfalls of steering the future course of your enterprise by always looking in the rearview mirror.

Do pay attention to your top customers, as they can help you understand the requirements for on-going incremental innovation as well as give you insights into easily entered adjacent markets.  But don’t neglect your underserved customers.  Understanding their issues can give you insights into vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a disruptive agent.  Also remember to listen to all the voices of innovation: the voice of the customer, the voice of technology, the voice of regulatory influence; and the voice of your business.  When you can properly harmonize these different voices, you are properly orchestrating the business strategy for innovation.

More Than Meets the Eye

On his blog, Thirty Minutes from Andromeda, my friend Jim Belfiore writes about Michael Jackson.  But Jim’s post points out a side of Michael that goes beyond the iconic King of Pop image.  Did you know Michael Jackson was also an inventor?  Check it out on Jim’s blog.

Of course, there are many celebrity inventors.  We come to see people through the lens of persona and tend to forget that people are often more complex than what we see from the outside.  Here are some of my favorite examples of people we all know who have also made their mark as inventors.

Gary Burghoff: US Pat No. 5,235,774
Still waters run deep.  Many of us remember Gary as the quiet, wide-eyed “Radar” O’Reilly of MASH.  However, Gary also created a chum dispensing device to attract fish.

Jamie Lee Curtis: US Pat No. 4,753,647
Who knew the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh was so clever.  Here she describes an improve diaper with a sealable pouch for clean-up wipes.

Samuel Clemens: US Pat No. 121,992
The iconic American writer and humorist known as Mark Twain patented three inventions.  This patent describes an improved adjustable clothing strap.

Zeppo Marx: US Pat No. 3,473,526
The youngest and perhaps underappreciated of the Marx brothers, Zeppo appeared in the first five of the Marx brothers’ films before he went his own way as an agent.  However with the patent, we can see Zeppo’s range was quite broad.  This patent describes a device for monitoring cardiac pulse rate.

Paul Winchell: US Pat No. 3,097,366
As a child watching Paul Winchell on television, I had no idea that besides being a great ventriloquist he was also a prolific inventor.  He has loads of patents to his credit covering a broad array of subject areas.  This one is for an artificial heart.

Abraham Lincoln: US Pat No. 6,469
Abe has always been among my favorite US presidents, but he is also my favorite celebrity inventor.  In this invention, Lincoln describes a system to add buoyancy to river barges.