The goal is to start on a common page, with everyone in agreement that there is room for improvement in the current systems.

I’ve learned over the years that a quick introspective look at the organization’s systems is more effective at getting to the right starting point than any introductory lecture I can give to the team. So now I always start with a “Ten Questions About You” approach that works wonders.

The list of questions I’m currently using appears below. An open discussion of these questions has never failed to get folks thinking about improving the systems and tools an organization uses to capture and manage ideas.

1. If one of your organization’s inventive personnel had a “great idea”* this morning, how long would it take before you knew about it?

2. How confident are you that your current systems would actually capture that “great idea?”

3. If you had a “great idea” this morning, what tool(s) would you use to capture it for the organization?

4. After you capture your “great idea,” what do you do with it next?

5. How many purpose-specific idea capture tools does your organization provide to inventive personnel?

6. Does your organization provide any specialized idea capture tools that are specifically designed for key inventive personnel?

7. What inputs does your organization provide to foster an idea rich environment?

8. Which department and/or employee(s) is/are responsible for processing captured ideas?

9. Are captured ideas indexed in a manner that allows inventive personnel to review the current and past ideas of others?

10. How many patent applications did your organization file last year?

* Note – for this exercise, I usually define a “great idea” as one that has the potential to impact a defined business objective or to create a new opportunity for the organization.

When you first read the list, you might think the last question doesn’t fit with the rest. While it does have a distinctly different flavor than questions 1 through 9, I assure you it serves the common purpose of the list – assessing an organization’s idea environment to get folks thinking about improvement.

I added #10 after spotting a trend from the “ten questions” exercise. After answering the questions from an earlier version of the list and acknowledging that their idea capture and management systems were ineffective, business leaders were quick to proudly point to random statistics about their patent portfolio. Number of patent applications filed and patents issued in the previous year were most common.

“We filed 300 patent applications last year, we must be capturing a lot of ideas.”

To this I’d respond with questions like

“But did you file the right 300 applications?”

or

“Are you confident that those applications include all of the ‘great ideas’ from last year?”

This provided a natural transition to one of my takeaway lessons for the audits – many organizations confuse patent metrics for idea metrics, and doing so provides a false sense of security that all is well in the organization’s idea environment.

So I revised the list to include question #10 to prompt that discussion. It also gives the business leaders an easy question to answer after struggling with the stumpers of 1 through 9. Most show relief when they get to #10 -

“That’s easy…300! I just reviewed the report last week…..Next year we’re going to file 400!”

So much work to do…..

Recently, a client reminded me of an old post I wrote on Promote the Progress about Thoughts on techniques to increase invention disclosures. The client is struggling with the exact problem I described in that post – their current administrative process associated with completing an invention disclosure is intimidating and appears to be censoring the inventors. The end result – inventions are going undocumented.

This, of course, is tragic!

While the client was intrigued by the tech-centric solution I offered way back in 2004, he asked if I’d be willing to help them with a no-tech solution – a new invention disclosure form – that would make it easier for the inventors to document their work. The client even challenged me to make the inventors enjoy the process.

Now that was something I couldn’t pass up.

These were my marching orders: “I want you to think out of the box. I want you to abandon all convention here and create a form that gives us (meaning the patent group) the information we need but that the engineers don’t hate and avoid.”

A few weeks went by and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had a few silly ideas like “just get everything on one page” and “add some fun design elements that ease the pain a bit.” Finally I told myself I was thinking way too small. The client had instructed me to “abandon all convention.”

So I did.

I looked at my standard from and immediately understood “the pain.” An inventor ready and willing to disclose his invention wants to do exactly that – a brief note about what it is that he invented. Maybe a sketch or two. That’s it….that’s all he wants to do. But the form asks for all sorts of painful legal information (”list the closest prior art of which you are aware…list all dates on which the idea has been disclosed to persons outside the company, and the names of the people receiving the information”). Sure, this is important and critical information for the patent attorney to have, but couldn’t it be collected at a later point in the process? Maybe while interviewing the inventor during preparation of the application?

Hmmm…now I was getting somewhere. I thought that if I did two things, I might be able to create a form that achieves the stated goals. First, I would strip out all of the information that doesn’t relate directly to the inventor’s idea. The ‘painful legal information’ could be collected later. Second, I would design a form that collects the remaining, essential information in a fun, easy-to-use manner.

And that’s how The Pocket Invention Record was born.

Check it out:

The PIR is printed on heavy, non-coated 3 x 5 cards – perfect for carrying around and keeping ‘at the ready’. The design provides copious space for a sketch (on the front) and a brief description (on the back). There is space for the absolutely necessary legal information – date, inventors, and a signature. A title can be added, but is purely optional (some inventors tell me they hate assigning titles to their ideas…they feel it blocks them from thinking about it in different ways later).

I even added two organizational hacks on the side – those white boxes you see are for a ‘category’ and ‘priority’ system that the inventor and/or legal department might implement. They’re simple to use – darken the box that corresponds to the category and priority of the invention being disclosed. For example, the first box in the category series might correspond to “snow-making machines,” the second “ice melt spray,” and so on.

To appreciate the beauty of this hack, you’ve got to see a series of the cards lined up in a box or drawer. I’ve reproduced the effect digitally below, but it really doesn’t do it justice. You can immediately get a sense of what you (or they) have worked on recently. You can even quickly retrieve the inventions relating to a particular category.

I can’t take credit for this hack – the idea comes from the Pile of Index Cards organization system. Check out the PoIC wiki for a great picture of this system in use.

The inventors have worked with the cards for some time now. They took some getting used to, but the use rate is, so far, higher than we expected. The card has not replaced the tried and true (and scary) Invention Disclosure Form for this client, but the client remains hopeful that it will. I tend to think that the best approach – the one that will ensure the highest documentation rate – is to provide a toolbox full of several documentation options and to let each inventor choose the one that works best for him or her.

The best part of this story is this – I worked with the client to ensure that the card can be used by others. So, now I’m able to provide these to anyone that would like them. I’m sending them to several of my key inventors this holiday season (thus explaining the timing of this post). If you’d like to give them a try, or if you know of someone who would, contact me at matt@bipo.us and I’ll send some out.

Everything changed with the opening of the new BIPO office in downtown Perrysburg, though. Suddenly, I’ve got tons of wall space to work with and a father-in-law looking for some post-retirement handyman projects to keep him busy. Bingo! Time to bring it to life.

I debated buying official whiteboard material (a ceramic coated metal) for a grand total of about 10 seconds. The stuff is incredibly expensive, particularly when building for size, so I quickly decided to go for the cheaper showerboard option that Kevin mentioned in his original post. Home Depot sells the stuff for about $12 per 4′ x 8′ sheet. It does have a potential downside – ghosting over time due to an inability to completely remove the marker residue, but I figured we would live with that (hopefully) minor inconvenience by either replacing the boards every so often (at $12/per….) and/or using a little Google-fu to find a better way to erase the boards after use. More on this later.

Construction was actually quite simple. First we picked a spot – we’re lucky to have a space in the back of the main floor (the 2nd floor of our building) that would accommodate three full sheets, side-by-side. Next, to smooth out the surface of our wavy walls (the building dates to the mid- to late- 1800’s), we attached a plywood backing surface directly to the studs. Once that was in place, we glued up the backsides of the showerboards, clamped them in place, and let the glue dry overnight. We added a bit of trim around the outer perimeter and between the showerboards, and viola! A giant whiteboard.

We identified a couple of tricky spots along the way:

1. The adhesive is key. Buy the best – if it doesn’t grab, you’ll end up with squishy air pockets behind parts of your whiteboard…which can be annoying and might eventually send the whole thing horizontal.

2. Related to #1, clamping the boards in place while the glue is drying is a challenging task. Have a plan ahead of time. We were winging it a bit and, luckily, came up with the idea of the diagonal braces below. A few handy FedEx boxes provided critical shim material.

3. The white surface of the showerboard we used seemed to chip relatively easily when moving the sheets around. Luckily, all of our chips were eventually hidden by the trim. Looking back, a bit of masking tape around the edges of the sheets would have prevented it in the first place.

We’ve lived with the board for nearly three months now, and it’s already become a key tool in the new firm. We use it daily to jot down tasks and notes for each other and it’s an invaluable resource in training efforts (I like to talk and draw!). I’ve already used it three times in brainstorming sessions with friends from other parts of the country, and it gives the kids a place to doodle when they come to the office.

Ghosting is a bit of an issue when the marker residue is left on the board for an extended period of time (say, more than three days). At that point, standard dry erase erasers don’t get the job done, but we’ve had luck with dryer sheets (seriously) and glass cleaner. A little Googling pointed me to this Transtronics article which has some tips that might be useful (I’ll try them soon).

We struggled with naming the beast for awhile (you can’t build something this big without giving it a name) until a client, who will remain anonymous, was in one day and said something to the effect of “wow…that’s a big ass whiteboard.” A bit crude, I know, but it captures the spirit of the thing. It stuck, and the board will now forever be known by that moniker. We’re using the acronym BAW to protect the ears of the innocent.

One final tip – we’ve started the habit of taking pictures of the BAW before erasing it. A simple and effective way to document things we’ve captured on the board.

I’m collecting some web resources related big whiteboard installations, and showerboard based installs in particular, under the tag baw_resources in the BIPO delicious account. Visit it here. I’ll update the collection as I find things.

The pictures below catalog the project from start to finish. My father-in-law Denny did all of the work, other than the heavy lifting that resulted in the chipping I mentioned above. That’s on me.