[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given it heart, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I have my own startups and podcasts.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Welcome to Passage to Profit the Road to Entrepreneurship, where we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities who tell their stories about their business journey and also share helpful insights about the successes that they've had.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Did you know that 2 in 5Americans want to start a new business or are business owners? Well, we have lots of information to help them too.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: And we also talk a little about the intellectual property that helps them flourish.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: We have two amazing guests left to interview. Kim Casey, Esq. Is the executive director of the Research and Development Council of New Jersey and also the President of CN Communications. And you can find her
[email protected] Kim, you have a lot of great stories and a lot of good information about what's going on. So please tell us your story.
[00:01:14] Speaker C: Yeah. So we are in the month of celebration. We do the Thomas Edison Patton Awards program every year and it's really exciting for us. It's a way for us to honor New Jersey inventors from across the state, the inventors and their organizations, and obviously the unique work that they're creating. We will be at Bell Works. We'll have about 300 attendees who will be there celebrating 14 interesting and exciting patents. And then we have five individual award winners who are very, very amazing. I think something that's really cool. We started to dig in some data. Over the last 10 years, we've honored 650 inventors. Exactly. So that's pretty cool. And then we also have raised almost $2 million in funds to support education and workforce development initiatives.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: A celebration of patents. What could be better than that?
[00:02:03] Speaker B: So how many patents did Thomas Edison have?
[00:02:05] Speaker C: Was over 1,093 is like the number that I'm seeing when you ask that.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Question is that I would have loved to been his patent person. Right. That was a gold mine there.
[00:02:14] Speaker C: You know, I think he would have nickel and dimed you though, so really efficiently. Yeah.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Yes. So he did most of his work in New Jersey or did he do all of it there?
[00:02:21] Speaker C: I mean, he did almost all of his work in New Jersey. The lab in West Orange actually is incredible. If you ever chance to go there, it's A national park. Park. It's really a point of inspiration. And that's actually where we film tribute films for all of our inventors annually. So it's very exciting.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: It's interesting because of all of those patents. Thomas Edison had a lot of significant inventions, but I don't think he had like a thousand. Right. So the patents don't always protect something that actually makes it to the marketplace. But obviously a great inventor and the patents that protected the good stuff I think ended up being pretty valuable.
[00:02:58] Speaker C: Yeah. And I mean, it dates back so far in New Jersey history. Like there's so much research and development that has gone on here. Like, we really are the innovation state. I know people like to highlight Silicon Valley, but the transistor was invented in New Jersey at Bell Labs. And that's. The silicon part was also here. William Shockley's lab moved out there afterwards. But it really started here in New Jersey.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: Right. And I know Richard does work with Rutgers and the medical research going on at Rutgers is groundbreaking.
[00:03:25] Speaker C: It's incredible. I mean, really, when kids are thinking about where they want to pursue higher education, I mean, Rutgers really has to be top on their list. I say that as a two time graduate though, also of Rutgers, but we're actually honoring two patents from Rutgers this year at our patent awards program. And one of them is about a diagnostic for tuberculosis. And it really is an easy way to help diagnose tuberculosis in areas that are challenged in terms of their medical diagnostic capabilities.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: Does it use AI?
[00:03:51] Speaker C: It doesn't. I don't know if it uses AI.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: Yes, they'll work it in there somehow.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: You know, they'll get work.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: You have an event coming up. What is the date of the event?
[00:04:00] Speaker C: So it's November 21st at Bell Works in Holmdel, which is the former Bell Labs.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Okay, tell us a little bit about some of the other people that you're going to be honoring and some of the other inventions.
[00:04:10] Speaker C: Of the five individual award winners, I really want to highlight the Visionary award, which is going to Chris Palladino, who's the president of Devco in New Brunswick, and you mentioned Rutgers. And I think what's going on at the Helix and really that life sciences corridor that's happening there is pretty incredible. We're also honoring with the Science and Technology Medal Brian Kern, who's a professor at Princeton University and also was a former bellworks person. And he really is a computer science entrepreneur, innovator, researcher. Really incredible story from him. Judith Sheff is the executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Science Innovation and technology. She's going to be honored as our Catalyst Award, which is the first year we're giving this award. And I don't think anybody could find somebody better than Judith in the state of New Jersey. So we have a lot of different inventors that we're honoring. We have a lot of different companies. Exxon Mobil, Bristol Myers Squibb, Rutgers, Princeton. There's a whole bunch of them. A lot of them are repeaters. And we really don't struggle to find patents to be nominated every year. And we're excited to see everybody again.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: That's great. So how long have you been doing this award ceremony and how did it get started?
[00:05:19] Speaker C: So not me myself, but this is the 45th Thomas Alva Edison Patent Awards ceremony. I myself have been doing this. This will be my 13th ceremony that we're doing. It really got started because of the Research and Development Council wanting to highlight what's going going on in the state of New Jersey and really try to brand the state and really expose not only to the public about what's going on in innovation, but to the research industry amongst each other. Right. What is going on in industry, what is going on in academia, what is going on in government? Are they really talking to one another? And that's really the essence of why the Research and Development Council started. And this annual celebration really brings all of that to light.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: That's excellent. And I do want to just interject here a little bit. Even though this is all about New Jersey, which is a very innovative place, patents are federal, so the work being done in New Jersey has an impact really around the world, honestly, with the new medicines, with the new technologies. But they do get a federal patent, so it's pretty good honor. How many do you start with? Like you have to call it down to 300, right?
[00:06:20] Speaker C: Yeah, so. So every year we do an open nomination process. We have a group of researchers who get together. We have a couple of areas that we look at. We look at the significance of the problem, the socioeconomic, the utility, the novelty, the commercial impact. And they take it very, very seriously. Looking at all of these different patent nominations and then do a grading system and then come up with the top runners. There usually is a clear line of who are the haves and sort of the have nots. It's really an incredible process. But to your point about New Jersey really being global when it comes to innovation, so our vision is growing stem advancing innovation, impacting the world. And really when you think about dating back to when all of this innovation Started companies like Johnson and Johnson. Right. How far reach is like the bandaid. Right. Everybody knows that. So it's so incredible. Right? And it's so incredible that we have that here in New Jersey and really have to treasure it and amplify that message.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: When we talked before the show, you were talking about some of your favorite inventors.
[00:07:21] Speaker C: The one story that I had mentioned was John Mooney, who is the inventor of the three Way catalytic converter. So he is really a great Jersey story. Born in Patterson, lived in Wyckoff, worked at pseg, went to Seton hall, then went to njit. Right. These are all New Jersey places. And then went to Engelhard, which is now basf, to work in the admissions space. And he invented the three Way catalytic converter. And I was very young in my career when we first honored him, and so I was really just doing my best to get as much information on our winners as possible. So when I called him up and told him he was going to be honored, he asked me to come to his house to look through his pictures, to pull things for a tribute film that we were doing. So I said, okay. I went to his house and I sat at the table with him, his wife, and one of his daughters. And so we go there, we pull these pictures out. But then they. The daughters are telling me of the story about how they used to be driving the car around the block so they could log enough miles so that they could have, like, a good product at the end of the day. Like, is this device working? Right? Is this invention working? Is it really capturing, you know, the bad things that are coming out of cars? And I thought that was just so incredible. But he also came to the ceremony with his whole family flanked around him, and they just adored him and his work. And we're so honored to have him as their father and doing this work in New Jersey. And he didn't stop there. I mean, he went. He worked with the U.N. he went all across the globe because he had to convince car dealers to use this device. Right. That it was good for them.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: So it removes toxins from the exhaustive vehicles, basically.
[00:08:49] Speaker C: Right.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: And there was a lot of pushback on that. I remember, like, why do we need these? It reduces gas mileage and all this other stuff. But you think about how much junk would be put into the air if somebody hadn't come up with something like that solved a real problem.
[00:09:05] Speaker C: And he actually perfected it so it improved gas mileage ultimately. So even though that was a problem to start, he actually resolved that he also won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, so that was also very exciting.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Well, that's a very inspiring story and obviously a very smart person, but kind of maybe an ordinary person, too, in the sense that, you know, he used his engineering skills to make a big.
[00:09:26] Speaker C: Impact and I would say just passionate and finding the right platform and place for himself to really drive what he was interested in. That's what I would say about him, for sure.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: The whole idea of the patent is that people do get rewarded for doing something that benefits society, and they get to support themselves and do more of that. Because if you couldn't protect your work and your ideas with a patent to block everybody from copying you and just selling it for, you know, a couple bucks cheaper, then you wouldn't have the money to go do the next project.
[00:09:56] Speaker C: Right, right. And you're saying that almost from an individual perspective. Right. But it's the corporate perspective, too, is right. To protect that work so that you can continue to invest in research and development.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: Right. And the other part of it, too, is that as part of your patent, you're writing up the invention and you're telling people how to do it. And so people can read this and they can learn from it and they can make the next iteration. Whereas in the past, the concern was that people would keep the technology to themselves and that would slow the pace of innovation.
[00:10:29] Speaker C: So the system is working well, it seems to.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: The US has one of the most innovative economies in the world, and it also has one of the strongest patent systems. So there could absolutely be a connection there.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Kim Case, executive director of the Research and Development Council of New Jersey and also the president of CN Communications.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: Where can people find you, Kim?
[00:10:51] Speaker C: So you can go to rdnj.org, which is the Research and Development Council of New Jersey's website. We're also on Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: Well, thank you very much for joining us. Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer, Noah Fleischman, and our program coordinator, Alicia Morrissey, and our studio assistant, Risacat Busari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcast. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X, and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
