Business inventor James Jorasch says identifying inventions is something that everyone can achieve with a little training. On the premiere episode of Season 4 of the podcast Understanding IP Matters (UIPM), he discusses what companies need to do to identify untapped inventions they and their employees are overlooking.
Jorasch is the founder of Science House, an innovation and collaboration facilitator in Manhattan. Jorasch is a named inventor on 780 U.S. issued patents that focus on the interaction between people and machines, spanning telecom, financial services, healthcare, and gaming. His patents are currently owned or licensed by companies such as Meta, Groupon, Zynga, eBay and Priceline.
In the premiere episode of this season of UIPM, Jorasch and host Bruce Berman discuss how teams within companies can brainstorm more effectively; why and when generative AI should be used by companies seeking to achieve more, faster; how output from large language models (LLMs) can provide insight into the shortcomings of the human input used to train the model; how to share and encourage the inventive spirit in children; and more.
Key Responses
How would you describe the difference between market and technology driven inventing?
James Jorasch: “Technology-driven is sort of classical inventing that is found in Bay Area technology, for example, that’s being developed, or in Taiwan. Advanced technologies that are constantly evolving, smaller, cheaper, faster, and there’s always going to be inventing coming out of that, but there’s also a lot of inventing that is coming out of just solving people’s problems, and those are not necessarily technological ones.
In some cases, you’re creating technological solutions to a very human problem, a very human challenge. So, there’s really both. And I don’t see one as better than the other. It’s all fundamentally about solving problems and creating new ways of thinking and working and doing.”
You talk about the value of rapid prototyping, which I can see, especially with 3D printers that can be remarkably fast and effective, but how do you prototype software or an algorithm?
James Jorasch: “We’ve done a lot of that at Science House now, and as we’ve worked with AI over the years, we’ve created a rapid prototyping system that helps us build out applications really fast, and when you have that combined with large language models, it’s really amazing what you can do. Now, it’s a prototype, it’s some software and you know, we can, in some cases get things up and running in a day or two. It gives you the ability to visualize what you’re talking about, even in a rough way. And the minute you visualize what you’re working on, everyone is instantly on the same page and the level of innovation explodes at that point.”
How is generative AI playing a role in inventing today? Are areas like AI, machine learning, data analytics helping inventors?
James Jorasch: “There’s no question it is helping inventors, in many ways. One way is just helping to educate inventors. I mean, if you need to understand a subject, it is unbelievable what you can get in a short period of time from large language models. So as a teacher, AI has been incredible and that is the ultimate fuel for innovation, right? Learning is what you need. That is the fire that ignites this, the innovation. So, in that respect, it’s been phenomenal, but I think it’s also helping us to understand who we are.”
More Highlights
Ultimately, Jorasch says that for businesses today, inventing requires a broader strategy: “I think that the idea and the notion that inventing might be restricted to an R&D department or that [it’s] for the kind of wacky inventors off to the side of the picture is just not true,” he says.
Listen to the entire episode to learn about:
- How the process of invention mining at Walker Digital was designed and how it began
- The difference between market and technology driven inventing
- How teams can reach inventive breakthroughs; and much more.
