#101 from R&D Innovator Volume 3, Number 6          June 1994

The Inventor's Own Hands
by Rudolph J. Marcus, Ph.D.

Dr. Marcus is president of MoonOak, a technology transfer consulting firm in Sonoma, California.  He was scientific director of the Office of Naval Research Asian Office in Tokyo.

Several Eureka columns have shown that the inventor or originator has to work on his or her own time, not the employer's time.  I also think the creative individual must do the work personally, must be closely involved with the project.  In other words, the project should remain in the inventor's own hands.

One of my first papers proposed an electron-tunneling mechanism for oxidation-reduction reactions in solution.  I was still in graduate school and had done a thorough literature search, collecting experimental data from many sources.  In writing the paper, I threw many literature references to the cutting-room floor, retaining only those necessary to test the theory. 

Feeling sad about the supposed waste, I swept up the rest of the references, and the size of the pile made it obvious that I should tabulate all this data for the benefit of other workers in the field.  That review paper in Chemical Reviews gathered far more citations than the mechanism paper itself did, and for far longer.  Only because I swept up the cuttings myself did I get the idea of the far more productive publication.

Long afterwards, when I "graduated" to paper-pushing, the first computer arrived in the office.  These were the pre-PC days, and this terminal was a paper-tape drive connected to a mainframe across town.  Word processing had yet to be invented.  I had talked vaguely with a psychologist who pushed papers at the next desk about looking at chemical structure-activity relations in large data bases.  As a chemist I "knew" that I would have to code the chemical structures so that the computer could crunch numbers. 

The day the terminal arrived, I returned to the office after five hours in the dentist's chair.  I was obviously unfit to do any work, but too pained to rest, so there was only one thing to do:  unpack the new toy and play.  I typed short word lists and tested which search syllables would recover which words.   

When I recovered "amine" and "vitamin" from a word list by searching for "amin," my toothache suddenly disappeared.  I realized it wasn't necessary to code chemical structures in alphanumeric databases.  I could search for chemical uses by names alone. 

Could I have made this discovery, which became the cornerstone of management information systems in the pharmaceutical industry, if I'd directed a programmer to do it?  I doubt it.  Although a toothache might not have been necessary, sitting down at the console myself and "playing around" with my own hands certainly was. 

I took the cue and did productive research during my spare time, by sitting at the console rather than asking programmers to do it.  I got plenty of hooting and hollering; some called it a waste of highly-paid time--yet I continued to get good ideas that way. 

A Few Million Words of Gibberish?

An anxious call from the operator at the mainframe put us onto another advantage:  "It looks like the 6-million-word job you just initiated is all garbage."  Horrors!  Stop the printout!  But a quick look from the console turned us from horror to laughter--what looked like garbage to the computer operator was actually the names of chemical compounds!  We found, in those pre-PC days, it was easier for a scientist to learn some computerese than for a programmer to learn chemistry.

Only the practitioner can recognize the "ah-so" point.  That's the point at which the client says to the consultant, or the inventor says to herself, that something new appears to fit a recognizable pattern.  It might be a solution to a known problem, or a new material which meets properties previously extrapolated for it, or whatever. 

Data-gathering to test a hypothesis can probably be done by assistants.  If a new algorithm can be written, it can probably be executed by others.  But the spark comes when trying to sort out facts, materials, techniques with your own hands.  There the inventor not only has to work on his own time, but also must get involved in the actual process. 

Involvement Throughout a Project

It's important not just to use your hands (and head) to make a discovery or invention—but to remain closely involved (hands-on) throughout the entire development and production process.

From a news story (Science 256:  1632, 1992):

Over the last 9 months, the Japanese Yokoh satellite has been watching as the sun fumed and flared through the peak of its 11-year cycle.  To catch all this fast-paced action, the Yokoh project itself had to be quick on its feet.  The Japanese space agency (the Institute for Space and Astronautical Science) had to get the project off the ground by 1991 to catch the sun at its peak months during the current solar cycle.  The kinds of delays that often plague NASA missions would have spelled disaster for the Yokoh mission.  But in Japan, U. S. researchers say, the satellites run on time.

How do the Japanese do that?  By assigning one person or a small research group to carry a material or device from the first idea practically to full-scale production.  The "inventor's own hands" are kept busy through production.

In "The practice of chemistry . . . in Japan" (Chemtech 20:  212, 1990), I observed:

In the United States and in much of the western world, the basic researcher does the initial basic research and publishes the findings, either in the open literature, as a company report, or as a patent.  From that external or internal literature, the applied research community picks the new results it needs in the fields it considers to be promising, carries them through applied research, and again publishes the results.  From this pool the development community picks its promising projects.  At each stage, the work is done by different kinds of scientists or engineers with different training and emphasis, and has its own intermediate publication point.  By contrast, the Japanese, even in the academic environment, have one person or one team carrying a particular item from basic research through applied research, development, prototyping, and even pilot plant.  There are no intermediate publication points.  On the other hand, being associated with one particular item or development gives the Japanese research scientist and engineer a tremendous sense of pride and belonging that can be highly motivating.

Japanese methods need not be copied--inventors have done plenty of work by themselves in American technology.  The very phrase "Edisonian approach" recalls Edison's early style of working alone.  "Boss" Kettering was another prodigious inventor who often came into the laboratory with well-developed ideas or devices done in his "spare" time.

The "X" way of working, which started in the aircraft industry after World War II, was another way of taking large steps forward by keeping it simple, making it quickly, and doing it oneself.  The extreme specialization, the large team, and delegation to "a pair of hands" can be harmful to invention and creativity.

The individual who is most instrumental in a project's early successes must remain intimately involved throughout the innovation process.  There’s a great chance that he or she will continue to make important contributions—even without prior experience in development.  The person who initially got the program off the ground is usually the one who has the most emotional investment in the project's success.  The more “hands-on,” the greater the involvement.