Good afternoon everyone and thank you for tuning in from across
the country. I'm delighted to welcome you all today,
to today's USPTO speaker series event with
Dr. Marian Rogers Croak. These events are truly special because they give us an
opportunity to engage with inventors, learn their stories and give a personal
dimension to the work we do. We've been fortunate to have incredibly
accomplished innovators share their struggles and triumphs, their
inspirations, their dreams. Today's guest is no
exception and in fact she was a trailblazer in a technology
that we are using to communicate with right now, voice over internet protocol.
In addition when hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans,
Dr. Croak was inspired to create text to donate technology which facilitates
rapid receipt of donations via text. Dr. Croak is now vice president of
engineering at Google where her focus is on reliability
engineering to improve the performance of Google systems and services
and she's a source of inspiration for many including myself.
I'm also proud to introduce my friend and colleague Director Andrei Iancu
who will interview Dr. Croak. Director Iancu. is Under Secretary of Commerce for
Intellectual Property and the Director of the United States
Patent and Trademark Office, before joining the USPTO he was a
partner at Irell & Manella in the great state of California where we both
hail from and represented clients from across the innovation spectrum
including those associated with genetic testing
the internet and tv broadcasting among others.
Like Dr. Croak and myself, Director Iancu is an engineer
and prior to becoming a lawyer he worked at Hughes Aircraft in Los
Angeles. His dedication to protecting and improving our IP system
and defending American inventors is invaluable
especially during these challenging times and I
am honored to be serving alongside of him.
Despite these challenges we are proud to see how smoothly
everyone at the USPTO has adapted to full-time telework.
Our productivity is up as our patent filings for small and micro entities and
trademark filings. Which is an indication that
entrepreneurs are looking forward to
introducing new and perhaps life-changing innovations.
We are glad that all of you can take a break away from your busy schedules to
join us for a chat with Dr. Croak today.
Please join me in a warm welcome for Director Iancu
and Dr. Marian Croak.
All right, thank you very much Laura for the kind introduction.
Good to see you once again Dr. Croak Welcome.
Thank you so much for having me and I want to welcome
everyone who's tuning in. I know that when we
first started these events a couple of years ago when I first
arrived, the initial impetus was to introduce
our examiners patent and trademark examiners and the rest of the PTO staff
to the amazing inventors and entrepreneurs who come
before us, but these events have grown and now we
have opened them up to others in government and to the
public and in particular I'm especially excited
that we often get students and children from across the united states to join
and today is no exception. I know that we have students from across
the united states and I know that some of you have already
prepared questions and send them in and I will try to
ask as a result fewer of my questions and ask
some of the questions that we have received from the public
and especially the students. So just a bit of a warning Dr. Croak,
we have a very diverse audience from really
highly trained experienced patent examiners
to students all the way down to kindergarten and
everything in between. What's really amazing though is
that here we are, in the middle of a pandemic normally we would have had you
come here to the PTO we'd have sat side by side and have this chat in front of a
live audience but we can do that right now and instead
as many other people are doing we're doing this via video conferencing.
Which is remarkable that we're capable of doing this
and one of the big reasons we're capable of doing this is because of your work
with voice over ip or voip technology which enables in large part these types
of communications. So let me just start there
maybe you can first
describe briefly what is voip? What is voice over ip?
Oh sure would be happy to first of all I want to thank you for
the honor of being here with you in the interview and I also want to just
acknowledge the work that your office is doing
in bringing these inventors to the general public and the immense
work that your examiners have done. I
really appreciate it, they must have fantastic jobs and I would love to
interview them one day. I would love to sit and just watch all
the innovation coming in and decide what is worthy of being
patented or not. That must be one of the best
jobs on the planet. So VOIP is really the ability
for us to communicate with one another through sound waves you know,
like, when we talk our speech is like a wave
and let's see in order for us to transmit that
type of sound over the internet so when we when we talk to each other
we're making, like, a sound wave and prior to the
use of packet technology the whole wave used to be communicated
across a telephone line. With the advent of the internet which is
mostly packet technology you could actually
encapsulate, break up that sound wave into information bites
because a lot of times when we're speaking to each other surprisingly
there's silence. There's a lot of signals which is our words that we're
communicating with each other but then there's also
periods of surprisingly, long periods of silence
and that allows you to break up the sound wave into discrete
Packets. That you can then encapsulate and send over
an internet communication network. One way I think about this and correct
me if I'm wrong. If you take all the sound and if you can
imagine you as you said break it up and you put it in little envelopes and
you seal the envelope. You put it in the mailbox and off it
goes and you do many of these envelopes and
they go all over the United States and then they
eventually end up at the destination point and then somebody
there's a little guy or a little gal at the end
point that opens up the envelopes and then has
to rearrange the packets in the order that they were
transmitted. Exactly, and so you can think of the art
the way that we're communicating as information and as data you can turn
it into data and the data has an address on it an
identifier with it and the order of it is known
and that as you said that's a brilliant way to describe it
is all encapsulated in envelopes and it can go.
It can take all different routes, you Know, it doesn't all have to go in a
continuous line and then at the end point it's all
converged together again and we get the information
that we're communicating. It's amazing. I still think of it as a miracle,
you know. I still, even though I know how it works, it's still a miracle to me.
So, it's very complex technology but it's absolutely amazing that it works as well
as it does. What did you invent? I know you
have, so Dr. Croak has over 200 patents. Most or many of them in this
Area. What, what? I know that you have many inventions but
maybe you can pick one of the major ones and describe that a little
bit. Sure so there's a whole class of my patents that
focus on creating better voice quality and quality of service
over the internet and reliability over the internet for
voice traffic. So by that I mean, when we used to
communicate over what was called the public telephone network. The PSTN.
It was completely dedicated to voice Communication, and it was
just crystal clear. It had very, very high reliability meaning whenever you picked
up a phone rarely did you get any type of noise or
distortion or the service would go down. It was just
tuned for voice communication. The internet was very different than
That. The internet was just a lower layer kind of network and it was mostly geared
for the transmission of something that it
didn't matter whether it was in real time or when it got there or if
the information was, you know, distorted.
It was mostly store and forward what you call
Almost, like, electronic mail. Voice is real time.
You know, I make a sound, you make a sound back to me and that's how we communicate.
That takes a lot of effort to make sure that it's going to be
Reliable, to make sure that it's going to work.
So when I first started working in this technology
area, it didn't work. It didn't work. The voice would sound very distorted.
A lot of times the network would just fail and the more traffic you would put
on the network - meaning the more conversations - the worse it would become.
So a lot of the patents that I received
were all focused on creating more reliable
and more scalable communication using the internet and
Using, being able to transmit voice
communication through it. That was a whole class.
Yes. We saw a few minutes ago of an image of your patents I don't
think we need to put it back up again, but that's just one of the many that
you have in this area. But once an inventor always an inventor
and you didn't do just VOIP. I understand
that you have an invention that has something to do with American Idol.
Or at least it started, you got an idea while you're watching American Idol--
first of all, I probably should not ask, you know, how often you watched
American Idol and why-- but what is that all about?
Yeah, so it's very interesting. As part of my job
I had to watch American Idol because even though it was on quite late at
night, it was after work. We were... a lot of American...
I was responsible for the reliability of the operations of
AT&Tís voice network, and American Idol used AT&Tís network in order for people
to call an 800 number and vote on their
favorite star. And it would be- especially towards the
end of the season when there was a massive amount of voting,
because you could vote as many times as you wanted, those networks would start
failing, and we would have to reroute traffic. This was the reliable network I
was just talking about, but there was such a surge of traffic
with people being so excited in terms of trying to get in as many
votes as they, they possibly could for their favorite star
that the networks would go down, and we would have to reroute traffic
and it was a nightmare, a nightmare. So I would watch it,
but I would also be on the phone the whole time
trying to get the traffic rerouted. So you know, quite cleverly, we came up with
this idea that we would have to offload the traffic from the
reliable network onto something else,
and we thought well why don't we just allow people to text
and use what was called SMS, or it was a different signaling network,
Signaling System 7, and, and let them text their
votes into the network, and that would offload a lot of the calls,
and so that was very clever. It was fast
and the network started working much better. So if you fast forward, I think
American Idol started in 2002, and then if you fast forward a few years,
I remember just being at home watching that terrible tragedy that
happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,
and if you can remember we all thought everything was fine after the hurricane
hit, you know, and for me that meant the
telephone networks were still up and Running,
and and we could see that people were fine. It looked as if the hurricane had
really passed over, but then the dams broke and the levees
broke, and that's when the real tragedy started,
and it was horrific to watch what was happening and many people felt helpless
and they wanted to help. And sitting there watching that, and this
is how ideas often happen, like, concepts. So you have to expose yourself to lots
of new things all the time. I would, I thought, ìHow can we get help to
them quickly?î And that's when I thought about the
concept of using text to donate
and, you know, it just took off after that and there have been many iterations of
It, and it's been enhanced by many others, and it
allows you just to pick up your phone, and, you know, receive
a message and hit a button, and because you have a
billing relationship with the provider, they can take care of
all the back end methodology that needs to happen in
order to get the money to the to the charity or the nonprofit.
It is really an amazing invention actually
if you think about it, and combining charitable giving with
modern technology. I've experienced that in past years going to charitable events
and fundraisers, but I got to tell you since the pandemic
there are a lot of these fundraising events online just like this,
and I've discovered that it's become even
more important to be able to do it through this type
of technology text to donate when it's online it
makes it much, much easier. Well, obviously
the American history is full of amazing inventors going back to the very
founding of this country and the first patent that was issued in 1790,
and we've had great inventors, like Thomas Edison,
Elijah J. Mccoy, the Wright brothers, I could keep going on and on.
And what we've done here at the USPTO is to create
inventor cards of some of the greatest inventors in
American history and they're like trading cards,
you know, kind of you have baseball cards with players and you can trade them
with your friends and what not and collect them until you get the whole
deck. Well, folks should know that we have
recently added one of these cards for Dr. Croak
and, Travis, do you mind showing that, please?
[Music]
[Applause] [Music]
[Music]
Wow. That, that's so special. Thank you so much.
So, this is the way the card looks. It's,
it's like a, you know, it's, it fits in your hand. It's
that size. That's the normal card. This is yours, Dr. Croak. I don't know if you've
gotten some yet, but we've also made a ginormous poster.
I don't evenówe tried to figure out how to show it. It doesn't even fit in this,
on the screen, so we're gonna, we're gonna find a way to get it to you.
This was just introduced. Let me, with that in mind, let me go to
some of the questions we received from some of the students,
actually. A school here in Bethesda, Maryland, the Washington
Episcopal School. There is
Catherine Owen, has a third grade STEM entrepreneurship class. Third grade. They
send many questions, but given everything we've already heard
from you, let me just ask one of the questions
from them. So this is, again, third grade student. Dr. Croak, when
did you first realize you wanted to be an inventor?
Thank you, Catherine, that's a great question.
I think I was probably a little younger than you
are, Catherine. I think you must be, if you're in third grade,
probably eight or nine. And I was, I was still home
so I must have been about four or five. And I remember, I often tell the story
about how my mother used to call my father when
something would break, like you know, the, we would have a stopped-up
toilet or the, the electricity would go out and,
and then my father would call a plumber or electrician and
and they would come to our house. And I just was so
fascinated with someone who could fix something that was broken.
And, you know, when you're little, having a stopped-up
sink or something is a big deal, you know, it seems very dramatic and
like an emergency. And the fact that someone could come in
and start fooling around with a pipe, and I would follow them around, and I liked
the way that they smelled and I just likedóthey seemed like heroes to
me. And so I became very excited with the
thought that I could maybe learn how to fix things, and
thatís kind of what took me off on this journey,
and I feel like Iíve been doing that all my life.
When my children were young, I would come home from work after
taking care of these big networks, and they would always
say, ìThe microwave is broken,î ìMy printerís broken,î
and thatís how I would spend my evenings, is fooling around fixing things.
And, you know, I get annoyed, but then I canít stop, and I,
I just want it to work well. So itís been a passion for a very long time.
Another question from the same third grade class is
ìHow does it feel to have done so many important things
in your career, and what advice do you have
for kids to follow in your path?î What a nice question. Well, first of
all, we all do important things, right? We all
do, and some of us, at some points in time, get recognized
for that, and other times we donít, and so donít assume just because
someoneís getting a lot of recognition or rewards that what theyíre
doing is any more important than what you do every day.
There have been many periods in my life where I havenít gotten
recognized, and, in fact, Iíve been told that what I was thinking about was silly,
or I shouldnít do it, or something needed to be changed about
what I was doing. And I felt, like unimportant,
but I wasnít. You know, it was just that people didnít understand the value
of what I was doing. So I would, I would just say to you itís
very nice when you get recognized, but if you, you have to learn with, you
have to live with not being recognized and kind of,
kind of try to feel good no matter what, like as long as youíre using your mind
and youíre inventing and youíre thinking of making
the world a better place, take pleasure in that, and sometimes youíre going to
get rewarded for it, sometimes you wonít.
You talk a lot about the role of mentors
and role models. Let me ask about that.
All of us adults at least have had role models and mentors of some
sort. Talk a bit about the importance of
that for scientists, engineers, and in particular, inventors.
Yes, I think, I think mentors are incredibly important. You know, there was
this one study where, this was even with college students,
where they had to list what they wanted to accomplish in
life, and they had one set of students just go
ahead and do that, and then one set actually read about
someone that had done something quite spectacular, and then they compared
the list of accomplishments, and the ones that had read about a
person accomplishing something extraordinary, their own ambitions were
much larger and what they hoped to accomplish. So
just modeling, like having, realizing that,
you know, you think that Iím somehow different than youóand Iím not. Iím a
person. I have failures, and I have lots of
failures, lots of weaknesses. So inventors are people, and if you can
see that by having a close relationship or
being able to read about someone who is an inventor, I think you will then
understand you could be an inventor. And the other thing I would also point
out that, is with mentors, they donít actually
have to be real. They can be fictional. You could read
About, you know, some character that does something extraordinary
But if you can get it in your mind that maybe you could do that.
I think that helps as well. So and then you don't even have to have just
one mentor, you can like certain parts of one person and parts of others,
and kind of put them all together in your mind as
a model for what you would like to be like. I think it just helps us to be
able to be inspired by someone who's human,
and who can somehow make what seems impossible, possible.
So, then you start to learn the world is not
exactly a stable place, but needs to change,
needs to be modified, and you're capable of doing that.
A concern I have with creating more inventors, which I think is
really important for the United States to do,
is to make sure that young folks have role models and mentors
close to them in their neighborhoods or folks they can relate to.
I'm wondering what more can we do to get
more people like yourself, more engineers, successful inventors,
scientists and so on out there to
give more exposure to budding up-and-coming inventors to
others who have succeeded? Kids nowadays have a lot of exposure to
athletes and musicians. They're all over the internet, all over the television,
which is fine and great. They're very successful at their trades.
How can we replicate that with inventors? I love that idea.
I've been thinking a lot about that. As you know, I do work for Google and
Google has given employees an opportunity to spend
20 percent of their time on something that's going
to help the world, and it may not be directly related to
Google's business. So, think of that as like one day a week.
And, so, I mean I would love to partner with
you to see if we could start some type of initiative, because I know
many of the people that I work with love to
interact with children and people who are interested in STEM.
But maybe either through some type of video sessions, or even
physically once we're able to be physically present with each other again,
we could work with the Patent Office and and help it
students to become more motivated and interested in STEM
by seeing what we do. Yeah that's great. I think that's exactly the right approach.
I think I've been talking about having
a partnership between industry,
companies like Google and many others, academia,
universities, schools and the like, and government, offices such as ourselves
and others. I think that's a very good way to
create a relevant network and amplify. What about you personally? Who,
well, I'm sure you had many role models and mentors; Who if you had to pick a
couple who would you say were the most
influential in your life? It's so interesting, definitely my father.
My father was so interested in my education.
Both of my parents were, but for some reason
I just took to my father because he was
just very proud of me in things that I did,
and was very encouraging for me to go into science and
in math, and I appreciated that. As I've grown older, and I don't know if
this is going to sound strange, but I get a lot of inspiration
from people who have gone through very, very
difficult times, and then gone on to do something that benefits the world.
And a lot of times I've gotten inspiration from people that have
Survived, like the Holocaust, or wars and become very resilient,
and have sometimes they just go on to live what we think of
as normal lives. But that is an extraordinary thing to me.
So, you know the world can be a very, very difficult place for many people.
And -- you know -- you have to develop skills
somehow to survive some of the worst things in the world,
and go on. And I get inspiration from people who have done that.
That's great. Let me on a related note, let me
go to a question from another question from a student.
Before I go to the question, you've been very
successful and accomplished quite a bit
in your life, here is a question from
a STEM class at R.L. Turner High School outside of Dallas ,Texas, one of the
students asks: How did you keep going? And I'll add how
did you succeed when there weren't many black female
colleagues to relate to in your STEM industry?
Yeah, that's a very good question. I appreciate that question.
So, I think what you have to do is,
you know, you can do multiple things in life. And
if what you're passionate about
you're not surrounded by people who are like yourselves in terms of their
physical characteristics or their ethnic backgrounds or their cultural
Backgrounds. You need to kind of step out of that. You
know, kind of step out of your skin and see what you do have in common with
them. When I'm in a room with other engineers or other
researchers or scientists, we're all alike. You know, we're all
trying to solve a common problem. And you can forget about what people may
look like; where they may come from. Now, your identity on those
issues is important, and I wouldn't say forget about it
forever. You know, do have other groups maybe that you can
connect to that can give you that type of cultural
support and nurturing that you need? But you don't necessarily have to have
it in an endeavor all the time.
You know, I hope that that we improve and progress
in society so that all people will be able to do the things that I've been
fortunate enough to do. But it's not as lonely as you think,
because you tend to think like the other people that you're around.
I like engineers. I feel a very kindred spirit with them no matter what.
Let me encourage folks who are watching and did not send questions
already, please go ahead and send your questions
through the link. Feel free to send them now, and I'll ask my team to
please go ahead and put them on the screen as they come in. You can start
doing that now if you'd like. I wanted to ask you one question. You
talked about the first Patent, I think you said it was in 1798?
Did you say 17? Yes, 1790.
Do you know what that was? Yes, it was for potash,
which is a fertilizer. You know, and so that was 1790. That
was the first patent, and just two years ago we
issued patent number 10 million. Wow. And patent number 10 million was
on LIDAR technology. So, LIDAR is like radar, you know, but with light.
Yes. So you're bouncing light off of objects to find out how far they
are, or how fast they're moving, and so on. And what I find is that these seminal
patents, whether it's patent number one, or a million, or 10 million; they are
reflective of the time. So, if you think about the way ó what was important in the
country when it was first founded in 1790, it was an agricultural economy to a
large extent, so they were automatic, you know,
that was what it was about. Patent
number three was to
to an automated grain processing system.
So here we are, in in our age, you know, it's LIDAR technology,
which is very reflective of technology of the day. Itís used
in self-driving vehicles and things like that.
Yeah, that's interesting. You know, I was looking back at my patents, something I,
you know, it's been a while since I've looked at them.
And when I was looking at them, I was thinking ìthat was amazing that this
didn't exist.î You know, because so many of the
things are just so normal now, you wouldn't even think that they would be
Rare. And yet, when you think 20 years from now
what we'll be hopefully looking at does not exist today. Right? It's probably
going to be one of the students that is going to do something that will cause
the world to benefit in some major way. Well, you know what,
this is a great segue way into another question. Here's a question from Chloe,
an eight grader from Apple Valley school, from the Apple Valley school district
outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Two questions, and they're related; let me
ask you the first one. "When you were our age," so again, an eighth
grader, so I guess what 14 or something?
"...What did you think future technologies would be?"
Oh, that's great.
I think you're more impressed with me than you should be.
Because, goodness only knows what I was thinking in eighth grade. I'm sure I was
not as good a student as you were.
You know, I did always want, like the fact
that to be able to carry
a friend around with me. You know, I was the type of
of child who would have a great day at school and then come home and get
right on the telephone and talk to my best friend for
another, you know, few hours, and I'm sure the way people
talk on their mobile phones. So I did
always want this concept because I loved being outdoors as well
and, like, well how do I play, but still have my friend with me?
So maybe there was, like, a little inkling in my mind about
something that was mobile and that had some video presence to it,
but nothing as sophisticated as what we have today with smartphones.
But I had desires, like I always had desires to change
things that I saw and to, you know, if I was annoyed about something, it's like
ìWell, what could we do to make it better?î Like right now even the thing that I'm
most like, just as a aside, like one of the
things I'd like to see happen is: I don't like
wires. I don't like wires. I just think they're unattractive,
and I wish we could do something about them.
And so, I'm living for the day when someone can come up with,
you know, enough creativity to figure out a workable power source, so that we don't
have to have all these wires around our homes. I hope
that happens in my lifetime. Yes, I'm actually sitting in my office
right now. You can't see it, but it's full of wires. So,
I'm looking forward to developing that technology.
Yes. Well, this is from the same student, who is asking,
ìWhere do you think technology is going now?î But, let me expand upon it, okay,
and challenge your visions of the future.
Here we are, in 2020.
What do you think the world of technology will look like,
let's say, first, in 2050, which is 30 years from now?
So, when this eighth grader will be about 45 years old. Yes. Yeah, that's
amazing to think about. I could be alive. I could be alive. I'd be
pretty old, but I could be alive. So, I think what you're going to see
is a lot of things that we do now that involves
human labor will be hopefully eliminated, and people can go on and do
higher order things. And by that, I mean there's certain tasks
that we do, like going shopping, and
I know that most of us go shopping online, but even that, you still need
people to pack the stuff, drive it to your house, blah blah blah.
I think-- I'm hoping that all of that will be
automated. But, at the same time that that comes to
be--and I believe there will be self-driving cars--
I believe that a lot of the daily tasks that we do
that do take up a lot of time will be done
by automation and by software. But, at the same time, because I do
think that shift is going to come, I think it's extremely important
that we start to retrain the labor force, and that young
people start to understand how to transition into a world like that, so
that everyone can be still fully employed,
where as many people that need to work can work,
and that we don't just eliminate jobs, but we create new ones.
I think those two things have to go together.
I think--well just looking at the past history of
human development and technological development,
folks very often are afraid that automation--further automation --eliminates
jobs. That's always been the case. Yes. But as we see, actually,
what happens is more and more people have
jobs and are employed in these highly skilled--
we can always do better--but historically, at least, technology has
enabled broader employment in more
interesting jobs. I have no reason to think that that would be
different in the future, but, you're right, we need to keep an eye on that.
Yes. Let me ask you, since you're very much an expert of
sending voice and audio over the internet--we
obviously send video over the internet now,
so we have video and audio communication, obviously--
will it come a time when we can send perhaps some other senses
remotely? Might we be able to send--let me just start with an easy one--
smell? You know, so, that was, I think, one of my
concepts in the patent that I got, was the ability to do that. And I know people
have experimented with different ways that you can do that.
I do I don't know how it will happen but I do believe it will happen.
I do believe it will happen. Okay. Here's a wild idea. I will not...I will
take credit for this crazy question. What about sending thoughts?
Oh isn't that an interesting thought. Now many people
believe that we do that today, like there's something that we do
where people can actually read your thoughts and that,
you know, they say that that communication is 80%
non-verbal. So imagine if we trained, you know, computers to understand facial
expressions and they could probably read them much
more so than we can. Right? And you were able to at
least intuit emotion. Right? And
and there's some level of that that happens today.
Like in call centers being able to... I remember one call center that this
was years ago and there was a
application where... A call center is when you call,
like, say an 800 number and you're... a lot of people
are calling call centers because they're upset about something.
And usually the person that's answering the call
is overwhelmed, you know, with a lot of Calls. They're trying to help but the
person is so irate. So what we would do is we had, like,
a system that could detect
the level of rage say, or anger that the person was having
by the sounds that they were making. Even by the length of silence
between the words. Because when you're very angry
you're usually not very rapid in your Speech. You'll be rapid and then
a long pause. Right? Because it's a lot of nonverbal information going on.
And then they would then decide how to route the call and who to route the call
to as a function of the emotional level
that the person was experiencing. So very, you know, empathetic.
The call center agent would get the worst calls. So yes, I do.
I do believe that in some sense, you know, maybe not our our deepest thoughts and
maybe not the most complex Thoughts. But at least some level of
trying to understand how the person is actually feeling
and what they're experiencing. Like itís, you know, and
maybe they'll be able to do it more than we can.
Yes, that's amazing. It's already happening, as you say.
Let me go back to a typical characteristic of
invention and inventors. I talk to many inventors
in in my job and one of the things that almost everybody says that it's a
critically important component of a successful inventor
is not to be discouraged by failure. Because
you're always going to fail most likely and you just need to get it back
up on your feet. Here's a question from the audience that just came in
from Darlene Ritchie. She says...she asks of you, Dr. Croak,
have you ever felt challenged to the point that you weren't
sure that you could continue in your work?
Did you continue anyway? In other words, did you ever have to
try multiple times in order to achieve your goal having
failed along the way? Yeah so I would say
if you think about it and I don't think about it always this way but
most of my life has been a series of failures
and I think any one in in any scientific field or research
field or trying to do something different and
and change things will tell you that the thing is that after maybe the first
hard failure it stops feeling bad, you know. You may feel
discouraged for a moment in time, but then you try to
figure out what can you learn from that failure.
Like science is so much failure, right? Most things fail. Eighty percent of
the time it's going to be failing. But you have to learn from it, so that
you then you can go on and figure out how to make it better. So
there are things that are called prototypes and pilots,
and that allows you to just gradually, in a very incremental way,
try out something and test something so that you don't do it all at once, but
you're testing it and refining it as you go. And I think,
I often make the case that, you know, as you walk, you're going to fall. As you
learn to walk as a child you're falling a lot, right, and you're
not saying that baby's failing, right, you're saying the baby's learning
how to walk. And that's what a life of
of bringing change is going to be like. You're going to feel like
you're not getting anywhere, but as long as you keep learning from it, and
refining it, and refining it, then you're gonna get it. And you
have to have someone around you, sometimes, that can help you understand
that you're not failing- it's not you- you're learning, and you're moving ahead.
That is such a great analogy to learning how to walk, but what about
just the process of invention itself? Some people
think about, gee there is like a eureka moment, or like the cartoon of the light
bulb that goes, goes on above your head all of a sudden, and there you
have it the fully formed idea ready to go.
Is that really how it works? Let me relate to this,
the real question from Nathan Coronado, fifth grader from Happy Valley, Oregon,
who asks you, ìHow do you come up with your ideas?î
So that's a great question, and to your point
maybe some people have eureka ideas, sometimes I think
I do, but usually they turn out to be wrong.
Instead it's almost like a discipline. You can think of it as a switch,
and start out by asking yourself why something is the way it is, especially if
you're not happy with it. Like, why do we turn on a switch for lights?
Ask yourself, keep asking yourself questions about why something is.
And what you'll see is that there's a certain conventional way to do
something. It's a status quo. But it's because someone, and then a
group or society decided that's the way it's going to be.
It doesn't mean that it's always going to have to be that way,
things can change, know that things can change,
and then you can actually say to yourself,
I'm going to think of something new once a week.
You know, I'm going to think of a new Idea, a new way of doing something
once a week. And believe it or not it's like a switch,
if you start training yourself to do that, you can see that it will escalate.
So by once a day, maybe a couple of times a day,
you'll just think of something very creative,
and it's like turning your mind on, because suddenly you
realize the world is very elastic. You know, we can change it.
People have changed it. Everything that's here,
you know, has been changed, maybe inspired by God, but
it's people that are making these things,
and making kind of the conventions about, well, we use the knife and
fork. Maybe 50 years from now, we will not be eating with knives and forks, it would
be something completely different. And so you know, if you can turn on your
mind, turn on that switch, it's almost like a discipline about how
to think out of the box, how to think of discovery. It's fun too. It's a lot of fun.
Let me change subjects a little bit, but it's
Related.
A major initiative we have from here, from the USPTO and the Department of
Commerce in general, is to create more inventors.
We have studies from the USPTO and others that show that innovation is
concentrated in the United States. It's concentrated demographically and
geographically. How,
and this may be a very complex question, but maybe at a high level,
how do we make more inventors like yourself? How do we,
How to we enable more inventors, across the demographics and across the
geography of the United States, even away from the traditional innovation
eco-centers, Silicon Valley, you know, and so on? Yes, you know the companies
corporations, especially corporations like Google,
their culture is invention right, and innovation.
But I think to your point, and this is where I would love to, you
Know, work with you, on and because I think to your point,
invention can go on anywhere and innovation can happen
anywhere if people realize that that's what
they're capable of doing and I, I think, I don't think they lack for the
creativity. I think they think of ideas but they don't know what to do with them.
You know, they don't have that big corporation behind them supporting them.
I think if people had more education about the patent process or about
Invention, and had some way of
connecting, you know, what they're thinking in their heads
with that process, it would be a wonderful thing.
I'll come back to education in a second, but what about the corporations?
(Yes) And what about, do, what about the corporate,
creating a culture of innovation? You used to work at the Bell labs,
(Yes) which no longer exists as is it used to, you know,
quite a few of the inventors on our inventor cards come from bell labs
not just yourself now, but Jim West and
and some others. What was it about entities like that, what, what was it in
their culture that created so much Innovation?
And it wasn't just Bell labs, there were a number of those.
(Yes) And ,and what can the modern corporations
in today's world learn from them and maybe
reinstate somehow? Yeah, so thank you that's a great question and I,
you know, I did work at Bell Labs and then that evolved and then slowly died
off. But now being in the Silicon Valley with,
with Google, I kind of see many of the same things.
Where it's embedded within the culture and there's certain things that are
Important. One is that, you're taught that, your job
is to challenge things, you know, to ask the ìwhyî
like I just said. You're also taught to collaborate with each other,
because it's very atypical that you're going to have
an invention all by yourself, but it usually comes as a result
of some cross-functional teaming that you do, you know,we need to
partner with each other. Some, some companies like Google,
they're very intentional about creating spaces where
people, physical spaces where people can come
together and collaborate. And then most importantly I think, and
this even goes into schools, there's this
concept of as you were talking about failure before, like, a blameless culture
so that you're not punished for failure, you don't feel like
everything has to be perfect or that you have to fit in.
You're allowed to be different and you're allowed to
fail as long as you understand what the failure was and then you can
either build something or conceive of something
so that others don't fail in the same way.
I think you know that you need to have that kind of safe
environment and structure in place to encourage
Invention. Yeah it's such an interesting issue and
such an important topic. We're studying this issue as I mentioned
in the USPTO. We've created just recently the National Council for
Expanding American Innovation. If you go to our website at uspto.gov
you can see it and take a look at our activities and
also send suggestions along these lines with what we can do to
improve the culture of innovation across the demographics of the United
States and across the geography.
But it all starts with education and, in my mind,
obviously we need to educate folks in science, technology,
math, and so on. STEM subjects. Yes. Well what about, do you see a difference
between that and then separate innovation or invention
slash entrepreneurship education? A few of the schools that
we got questions from right now seem to have entrepreneurship programs going
down to third grade. Do you see a role of that separate
curriculum of innovation on top of STEM subjects?
I do. I think that's a really insightful question because you can
learn Science. You can learn math and just
think I have to learn what exists now, you know?
Or you can approach it with a sense of Creativity. Well this is what we know now,
but what else is there? You know, what else can we do
with it? And it's more of a mindset that you have.
So I do think that there's a distinction between just going into STEM where you
could just do it in more of a like a robotic way almost,
versus going into STEM with the notion of using it in an applied way to bring
change. And. So there is,
I have a question from an educator from South St. Paul
High School in Minnesota Mike Gilson
who asks along these lines - I guess he's teaching in this area.
He says, ìHow can I best support invention teams especially female teams
as they invent solutions to community Problems?î
And again he's in high school. Oh, I love that
question because. I love that question Because,
you know, what we're experiencing today in the world is very much like the world
that I grew up in. You know I grew up mostly
in the 60s and the 70s and the world was quite
Chaotic. You know, there was there was a lot of
change happening and it was very clear that no one wanted the
the world to stay the way it was. Everyone either said I want to go
back to where it was or we need to progress forward. Almost exactly what you
have Today. So in some sense
it can be a very difficult world right now to live in but it can also
be very exciting because people are open to change
and I love the fact that that person is asking the question,
ìHow can you bring technology to help with
things that need to change in society?î I think that will be
the next application. I was thinking how
your examiners probably have a window into the future
that no one else has because they can look and see what's coming.
Patents are usually years ahead of when the actual
invention will be ubiquitous but it gives you an inkling of how people
are thinking and to think that we can bring
technology to improve society, I love that thought.
Yeah, as I say to examiners here: it's through our doors here at the USPTO,
through our doors walks the future for the reasons that you've
mentioned. So with the time winding down, let me
ask you from a USPTO examiner perspective,
given that you're an inventor and you continue
such important work, what is the role that you see
for invention and innovation in your own life of
patents and the IP system? I have benefited a great deal
from the patents that I've received. It's helped me
just in terms of my own validation that what I was doing was,
you know, a good thing to do. It's helped me in my career;
it's opened doors for me that wouldn't have been opened.
I deeply appreciate the whole patenting process and what it's done for me
and it's just been a tremendous benefit to me.
More importantly, I'm glad that the innovations serve the world
but then, personally, I feel like I've benefited a great deal from the patents
and I can't thank the patent office enough for awarding
them to me. Well, obviously, they're all fully
merited and you have done and continue to do
amazing work, Dr. Croak. It's been an honor to have you
with us on this programóyour stories and
Inspiration, you are an inspiration to so many
folks of all agesó Inventors, entrepreneurs, and everybody
else including myself. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Well thank you so much for having me, I appreciate this.
Bye everybody. Goodbye.