Innovator Interviews - The Hunt - An Innovator's Perspective - Fred Thomas

Innovator Interviews - The Hunt - An Innovator's Perspective - Fred Thomas, updated 9/20/22, 12:18 AM

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The Hunt – An Innovator's Perspective

IdeaConnection Interview with Fred Thomas, Engineer and Inventor

By Vern Burkhardt

"It is not uncommon that the most strategic inventions evolve based on the entrance of a new material or technology being available that, if combined with an existing product, improves the utility." Fred Thomas

About Fred C Thomas III

Fred Charles Thomas III - Engineer and Inventor

Fred Thomas received a BS in Mechanical Engineering with a Minor in Physics from Bucknell University in 1982. In 1990 he received a MS in Mechanical Engineering specializing in Control Systems and Non-linear Dynamics.

His awards include the International Design Excellence Award in 2009, Industrial Forum Product Design Award in 2008, "Nano50 Award" for "Subwavelength Optical Data Storage" in 2005, Lemelson-MIT "Inventor of the Week" Award in 2004, Iomega "Exceptional Invention Award" in 1999, and Laser Focus World "Electro-Optic Application of the Year Award" in 1994. 

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« Innovator Interviews
The Hunt – An Innovator's
Perspective
IdeaConnection Interview with Fred Thomas, Engineer and Inventor
By Vern Burkhardt
"It is not uncommon that the most strategic inventions evolve based on the
entrance of a new material or technology being available that, if combined with
an existing product, improves the utility." Fred Thomas

Vern Burkhardt (VB): As the son of diplomatic parents you have lived in a number
of countries other than the U.S. including Pakistan, South Vietnam, India, Taiwan,
Germany and the Philippines. What were some of your experiences in these
countries that are especially memorable for you?

Fred Thomas: When friends ask about some of my most
memorable experiences while growing up overseas I
invariably tell them about one of three, which could be
categorized, I'd say, as being more out of the ordinary.
The first, chronologically at least, involves my being
kidnapped for a couple of days from in front of my
home in Karachi, Pakistan. Funny how, as a four-year-
old, not much fazes you. My parents had a scare,
though.

Another experience I like to share is about my extended
weekend adventure to an Ifugao village in the highlands
of Northern Luzon, Philippines. I was a boarding student
at Brent School in Baguio City at the time, and had
accepted an invitation to visit the home village of one of
the school's employees with whom I had become friends. I shall say simply here
that I came to learn in quite a startling manner that the Ifugao tribe was
traditionally headhunters. I remember, while staring at a couple of human heads
hanging from a village hut, the quasi-comforting reassurance from my host,
"Don't worry, my clan has not done that kind of stuff in a few years."

The outing that really did shake me up a bit, though, occurred when I was living in
Saigon, Vietnam, just prior to the end of the war in 1975. Our family was one of
the few US government families allowed back into Vietnam after the Tet
offensive. I was 15 at the time, most of my adult height of 6'2", and a big
basketball enthusiast. In order to facilitate my playing some basketball, my Dad, a
fluent Mandarin speaker, arranged for me to visit a Chinese secondary school in
Cholon, the Chinese part of Saigon, to practice with and play on their team a few
times a week.

On Saturday mornings the team would load onto a bus and visit other schools in
the provinces around Saigon for games. It was on one of these Saturday trips I
got quite the scare. We were headed to a school northwest of Saigon, near a
town called Cu Chi. I was seated near the back of the bus with a few of the
team's players that knew a bit of English, and we were going on about how high
the great NBA Connie Hawkins could jump or some such banter. I had brought a
US basketball magazine for the ride to use its pictures as a foil for conversation
with my limited English speaking teammates as I spoke very little Chinese. We
were having a good time.

While we drove along, the bus would cross open landscapes of rice patties and
then move into and through groves of rubber trees. As we approached Cu Chi and
were engulfed within one of these rubber groves, a band of four Viet Cong
soldiers appeared in the middle of the road about 50 yards in the distance with
their AK-47s pointed at the bus. As the bus started to slow to a stop, my
teammates seated both in front and behind me pushed my Anglo head down and
cautioned me to be quiet and hide simultaneously. As I ducked into the floor
space in front of my seat, they threw the equipment bag, which was at the back
of the bus, on top of the seat I had been sitting in moments before.

When the bus stopped, I could hear the yelling of the Viet Cong soldiers at the
driver. He opened the bus door and got off. More yelling. In the meantime I felt as
if my heart had stopped. I knew that if they found me I would be toast. I was
scared, and really ready to panic. Then I heard and saw at foot level, where my
head rested at this point, two of the VC walking down the aisle of the bus. The
first hollered to the second, who was approaching the seat in which I was
hunkered down and covered with the bag of basketballs. He had found the ice
chests with the team's lunch for the day behind the driver's seat. Both quickly
removed the ice chests from the bus. Well, the story continues, but for here let it
be known I did not become a 15-year-old POW that Saturday. I did have the fright
of my life, though.

I learned many years later that the Cu Chi area had about a 75-mile network of
tunnels riddled through sub terrain out of which the VC would emerge from small
camouflaged holes. Our bus hijackers and my potential captors that Saturday
undoubtedly emerged from this now post-war famous labyrinth. Scary then,
interesting now.

VB: What led you to become so prolific as an innovator with so many patents in
the U.S. and other countries?

Fred Thomas: I enjoy the hunt. The process of cross-pollinating new knowledge
about enabling technologies and materials with problems that need to be solved
and with my own insights is intoxicating. This mix makes for a challenging and
fulfilling cocktail.

On the more pragmatic side of an answer to this question, I would have to say I
have had the luxury of working for employers such as Texas Instruments, Iomega,
and Hewlett-Packard in technology areas ripe with new problems worth
addressing. It would be fair to say this contributed materially, as well, to my 50 or
so US patents to date.

VB: Would you describe the process for filing a patent?

Fred Thomas: The patent filing process can be described simply as documenting
your invention via the statutory requirements of the US Patent and Trademark
Office – USPTO. In other words, it entails filing a conforming patent application
for a novel and unobvious creation that has utility – an invention.

In practice, this is done within a corporation by submitting a patent disclosure
which supports this criteria, having it approved for filing by that corporation's
patent-filing-approval committee based typically on these criteria as well as
business efficacy considerations. Next, one works with a patent attorney or agent
to draft and file the application. Anywhere from two to five years later you will
have an issued US patent. That is the case if the assigned USPTO examiner does
not find a flaw in your case for the described statutory criteria.

Remember that business efficacy for the filing is not one of the USPTO invention
criteria. Hence, many patents are issued for inventions that have little or limited
economic value.

VB: On balance, is it worth filing for patents? Can an inventor make money
through this mechanism?

Fred Thomas: Absolutely, yes and yes.

Depending on the entity, there are different objectives for filing a patent and
making this more than an inconsequential investment. Corporations understand
that a patent is the only legal form of a monopoly allowed in the United States
and most of the industrialized world. The duration is approximately a 20-year
monopoly in the US if enforced.

Individual inventors, when working to bring an idea to market and capitalize
financially on it, really have no asset other than a claim to intellectual property
when looking for financing or a licensor of their creation. The patent or patent
pending is the asset that drives the opportunity for future commerce.

I have a friend and prior colleague that is a brilliant innovator. He had plenty of
patents at the corporation for which we worked, but he was very reticent about
whether patents really were a good return on investment. Outside of his
employment he invented a simple device, had it manufactured, and then
negotiated with a national catalogue sales company to list it in its publication. He
did quite well with it for about two years until the catalogue sales company
figured out there were no patents filed. This company shortly had the product
manufactured for itself, and what was a good situation built on an innovative idea
evaporated. The moral of this story is if you have a good idea, which is an
invention, and you are going to put the effort into working to sell it commercially,
then do yourself a favor and file for a patent.

VB: Are you more like Einstein who engaged mostly in theoretical innovation
through thought experiments, or like Edison who innovated practical or business
solutions in his laboratory?

Fred Thomas: I am definitely the type of guy who builds and refines his ideas with
physical prototypes – if that is possible.

For many years I had an extensive machine shop in my garage to work on my
inventions. The best way to get to a working solution, in my opinion, is to do
some first order analysis with Mathcad or a spreadsheet to see if the idea has a
chance of working based on the basic governing physical properties involved. This
simple exercise has killed a lot of my concepts. If you convince yourself it might
actually work, then prototype, prototype, prototype.

VB: Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur as well as an engineer and
inventor?

Fred Thomas: I would like to think of myself as an entrepreneur as well. I did
have my own small product development business for a few years, but I think my
heart is more into making new solutions or inventions work, and then moving on
to the next technical challenge, rather than doing the business due diligence and
business directed innovation required to be a truly successful entrepreneur.

I learned a great deal from that experience of having my own business. I like to
believe that if I were to do it again, I would be a much better entrepreneur based
on the lessons I learned. For right now, though, my corporate R&D employment
with Hewlett-Packard is directed at innovation, which I am passionate about.

VB: You have been recognized with many awards for your inventions. Are there
one or a few awards that are most memorable for you, or for which you are the
proudest to have won?

Fred Thomas: The top three would have to be the Iomega Exceptional Invention
Award, the NASA TechBriefs Nano50 Award, and The Electro-Optic Application of
the Year Award from Laser Focus World.

The Iomega Exceptional Invention Award has only been awarded a few times in
the 30 plus year history of the company. It was awarded for my invention that
contributed to the success of the Zip Drive. This single product, the Zip Drive,
grew Iomega from a $100 million revenue company to close to a $2 billion
revenue company in less than two years. Arguably, the Zip Drive was the most
successful single technology product of the past few decades. I am proud to have
been recognized by Iomega as one of the key innovators behind that product.

The Nano50 Award recognized my invention of "Subwavelength Optical Data
Storage" as one of the top nanotechnology-based inventions for the year
awarded. I am particularly proud of this invention because it was based on my
discovery, in conjunction with researchers at the University of Arizona's Optical
Data Storage Center, of a new optical physical phenomenon. This new
phenomenon was that optically reflective surfaces smaller than the wavelength
of light can do more than scatter light randomly, but rather deterministically
reflect light into patterns by which massively multi-level information can be
encoded.

Any award that recognizes your work as the "Electro-Optic Application of the
Year" is pretty neat. I started my engineering career as an electro-optic systems
engineer at Texas Instruments; hence, a particular satisfaction was obtained in
receiving this award. This was for the design and invention of a laser servo-writer
that our team dubbed the "LightSaber." It used an acousto-optically pointed and
modulated argon-ion laser to ablate about 1.5 million high precision servo control
marks in a concentric ring pattern on the Floptical disk. The Floptical drive and
media were the first data storage super floppy solution. It had a storage capacity
of 21 MB.

VB: What led to your career interest in data storage, sensors, actuators, electro-
optics, machine vision, nano-technology, data security, Auto-ID solutions, and
network attached storage?

Fred Thomas: I think the nature of this question about the multi-disciplinary
nature of my work can best be addressed with some comment on my education
and its influence on my technical interests and work.

In engineering school I pursued both mechanical engineering and physics degrees.
Mechanical engineering covers quite an expanse of the physical sciences, and via
the physics study I filled in some other gaps with courses in electro-magnetic
theory, optics and electronic design. Actually, one of the things that broadened
my perspective and interests the most, due to studying physics, was the simple
introduction to Richard Feynman's three-volume classic Feynman's Lectures on
Physics. I still reach for them whenever I am starting work in a new area or need
a refresher on a topic I have not explored in a while. I would in large part
attribute these books to opening my eyes to a myriad of new technical topics. In
many cases my eventual work-directed exploration of new technologies, such as
those listed in your question, was based, at least initially, on the understandings
and exposure Feynman's lectures provided.

A story I like to tell that puts the breadth of Feynman's lectures in perspective to
those not initiated is this. As part of my job I was visiting the MIT Media Lab on a
corporate sponsorship visit. The Media Lab employs faculty from all sorts of
different disciplines, and some of the best researchers in the world work there. I
was at an evening mixer at a local Cambridge watering hole with the other
corporate sponsors and the Media Lab's staff. During the evening I had an
interesting discussion with a tenured Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Physics Professor working at the Lab. Within the mix of our conversation the
topic of what the definition of the science of physics covered came up. He looked
at me squarely and said, "The answer is not as protracted as you might think; if
Feynman wrote about it, it is physics; if he did not, it is not."

VB: Would you talk about your work related to removable data storage products?

Fred Thomas: I spent nearly 15 years working on removable data storage
innovations and products at Iomega. I enjoyed my work there, and in particular
the high caliber of engineers with whom I had the pleasure of working. Some of
the Iomega products for which I contributed innovations include the Zip Drive,
Floptical Drive, JAZ Drive, Peerless Drive, Clik! Drive, and Bernoulli Box Drives.
These were all Iomega invented and developed products, all with many innovative
components.

To limit the scope of my comments I will talk about only one of the many critical
areas of concern related to removable magnetic data storage drive design –
ameliorating the effects of airborne contamination. These sorts of contaminates
impact the drive's magnetic head, which flies very close to the media, from being
able to reliably read and write data. For example, in the REV drive the magnetic
head flies about 1.5 nanometers above the recording media. To put this in
perspective, that is about 1/50,000th the diameter of a hair on one's head. Lots of
dust flying around the air is boulders, comparatively speaking. This is not a trivial
problem. Numerous creative techniques are employed to protect against this
issue. A couple examples to which I was a primary innovation contributor in this
domain include two high tech scrub pads.

With the REV drive, a high capacity hard platter-based cartridge drive, the
ceramic magnetic recording heads that fly over the media would at times get
contaminated from airborne debris. A method was needed to clean the heads'
air-bearing surface to restore their flyability, if you will. These heads could be
removed from the media via a ramp loading mechanism in the drive and rubbed
against a textured scrubbing pad. A particular challenge was what would be the
most effective surface against which to scrub a contaminated magnetic recording
head. The solution was to use a structured surface sol-gel optical diffractive
hologram as the tuned abrasive surface for this application. Sol-gel is liquid
molded glass. I like to point to this as being a fairly out-of-the-box innovation –
light homogenizing refractive hologram as a magnetic thin-film head scrub pad.

Another debris-mitigating invention, which was also based on the innovative use
of a new enabling material, was a flexible disk cartridge liner material made of
Teflon fibers – Gore-Tex®, if you will. The advantage versus a more traditional
liner material was three-fold. The Teflon fiber has a low coefficient of friction
rubbing against the flexible disk, hence lowering motor power requirements for
spinning the disk. Second, the Teflon did not absorb critical lubricant from the
disk surface. Finally, the stiffness of the Teflon fibers was sufficient to effectively
transfer kinetic energy to dust particles and cleanse the disk surface.

VB: Has the "Articulated Optical-DVD" technology, which you developed, been
commercialized?

Fred Thomas: No, it has not. The most recent patent in this technology area was
issued not too long ago – in late 2010 – to EMC Corporation, which purchased
Iomega in 2008. Iomega is where I invented Subwavelength Optical Data Storage
and filed some patents on this work. This most recent patent, "Massively Multi-
level Optical Data Storage Using Subwavelength Sized Nano-grating Structures,"
covers the use of nano-grating structures to encode information in a multi-level
format via reflected amplitude, polarization, phase, wavelength, and spatial
orientation state changes imparted by these nano-structures on a focused spot
of light.

I am not privy to what EMC intends to do with this IP, and whether there are
plans to pursue the R&D and product development work required to bring it to
market. I believe there is great promise in these inventions.

Let me provide some perspective here. The time lapse between the time when
James Russell at Battelle Labs invented the CD technology and when Sony and
Phillips first commercialized it in 1982 was about 15 years.

VB: Do you anticipate there will be future breakthrough discoveries related to
digital storage?

Fred Thomas: Yes, I do.

One in particular, which I believe shows great promise, is the discovery or
invention of the memristor at HP Labs about three years ago. A memristor is a
unique fourth class of fundamental electronic device, the others being the
resistor, capacitor and inductor. The remarkable property of the memristor is that
the electrical resistance of the material can be increased or decreased dependent
on the direction of current flow through this two-terminal device. The resistance
remains at the level it is driven to after current is removed. Hence, one can see
how this device, based on a newly discovered physical property, has the potential
to provide the basis for revolutionary new data storage technologies.

What I find most interesting is that the material in which the memristor
properties was discovered, titanium dioxide, only appears to exhibit these
memristor-type properties, on an appreciable scale, when the material is
fabricated with nano-scale wire dimensions. In this manner it correlates with my
work on subwavelength optical data storage in that the secret to storing lots of
bits in both cases lies in the discovery of the hidden nature of physical
interactions at the nano-scale. This is where the future of data storage, I believe,
will emerge, in the new frontiers of nanotechnology.

VB: You have also demonstrated creativity in the area of intellectual property
strategy. Would you talk about this?

Fred Thomas: Vern, this is one of my favorite topics. Here are two examples of
how strategic intellectual property considerations manifest themselves in the
actual product development cycle.

If you have a high margin product that has the potential for others to want to
copy and bring it to market to cut into your market ownership, then you must be
very selective in how even the simplest problems are to be solved for that
product. Strategically, you should choose methods to solve those problems that
are inventions, and in particular, inventions where the utility is hard to replace
without significant added expense to the product. The razor or razorblades-like
business of removable data storage cartridges and drives presents a case for
such consideration.

In the furtherance of this type of strategy, I was responsible for the invention of
an array of different cartridge authentication tags which were incorporated into
almost all of Iomega's removable data storage cartridge products. These tags
patented the use of phosphorescence, retro-reflection, and magnetic media
laser-ablation for different removable data storage system-enhancing utilities.
Actually, there was an article written and published in IEEE Computer Magazine a
few years ago titled "Penny Tag Technologies for Removable Data Storage" that
details the considerations that go into this type of strategic IP planning.

Another strategic IP decision that faces companies is the interpretation of the
thin gray line of what constitutes obviousness or unobviousness relative to an
inventive new combination of elements creating a product. There are three
statutory requirements that define if a creation is an invention in the US. The first
being, if the creation is novel; meaning, that it never has been produced or
described in the public domain before. The second is that the creation has utility,
which in reality is quite a low hurdle. Amusement is even a utility. A favorite
illustration here is the invention of a fly swatter that makes an "ouch" sound
when you strike with it. It meets the utility requirement. The final requirement is
that the creation be unobvious to one skilled in the art of the creation. If all three
criteria are met, then the creation can be considered an invention and is
patentable. It is this third criterion of unobviousness that is many times the thin
gray line facing most scrutiny when evaluating with one's patent counsel as to
whether to file for a patent.

It is not uncommon that the most strategic inventions evolve based on the
entrance of a new material or technology being available that, if combined with
an existing product, improves the utility. Many times whether this is obvious or
not relates to this thin gray line. Proactive strategic patent pursuit would ensure
that one files in cases where the value of a potential patent in this category is
significant. This is the case with a patent filed and issued to a colleague of mine
and myself at Iomega. "Removable Cartridge Recording Device Incorporating
Antiferromagnetically Coupled Rigid Magnetic Media," I would venture to say, was
the most strategically important patent to Iomega in most recent years. It
basically precluded any other company from entering the removable hard platter-
based data storage cartridge business.

VB: Would you talk about your educational website?

Fred Thomas: I would call this a hobby site. It started with my interest in learning
how to put a simple website on line. I had a spreadsheet within which I compiled
various magnitudes of things, for a variety of units of measure, which were of
interest to me and useful in allowing me to gain perspective on topics I was
working on. I thought this would be a neat thing to be able to access on-line, and
maybe have others contribute too. From this initial exercise, the units of measure
website was born.

It turned out to be a useful website from a content and educational perspective
in that it provides a database of information on a variety of units of measure and
the relative magnitude of things within their domain. The idea and goal is to
provide perspective-based metrics on the magnitude of most any physical
quantity.

VB: Why do you focus on units of measure on your website?

Fred Thomas: When I was a freshman mechanical engineering student at Bucknell
University, we were required to take a single semester course called "Introduction
to Engineering." This course was taught by one of the most affable professors in
the college of engineering, a gentleman named Charlie Coder. Each day he would
show up in class with a smile and twinkle in his bright blue eyes. He would
lecture about obscure units of measure like the slug, the finger, the jerk, and
countless others. His message was that engineering and science revolved around
understanding the interplay of different physical quantities or units within the
governing equations we would spend the next four years learning and exploring.
"You need to make sure that your units cancel appropriately such that your
equation remains balanced," was Professor Coder's continual refrain.

From that time forward I have had a fascination with units, their variety, their
history, and the relative magnitude of items within each of their domains.

VB: I understand you teach an "Invention for Kids" course at local elementary
schools. Would you talk about this?

Fred Thomas: Sure. Over the years I have been invited to give invention talks at
my kids', nieces, and nephews' elementary and middle schools. I have two
favorite and seemingly well received activities during these talks.

One is having the students go to a local store to find a product with a patent
number on it, write it down, and then find it on the USPTO website. They are then
asked to come to class and tell what they have learned about this invention.

A second activity is based on a simplified invention disclosure form I provide to
the kids. They are then asked to invent something and describe it on the form.
Optionally, the kids can build a prototype. They are given about two weeks. You
would be surprised at the number of kids who actually build something.

Over the years, I have had a few parents tell me their children still scour products
for a patent number while shopping. I'm thinking there will be a few inventors in
the mix when they become adults.

VB: Do you think the U.S. will continue to be a leader in technological
developments?

Fred Thomas: That's a tough question. What I see in corporate America is a
foreshortening of the window of time by which the performance of a company is
targeted, and hence its technology investment horizon. Publically traded
companies are more and more driven to obtain the greatest short-term returns.
The market wants this, and the frameworks upon which senior executives are
compensated promote this end. Whether this is in the best interest of the U.S.
maintaining its technological leadership role in the world is debatable.

It's easy to surmise that long-term basic research has and will become scarcer at
American corporations. I have to wonder whether basic innovations, which can
take visionary investments in time and money, will continue to be developed in
such an environment. This environment is paralleled by an increasingly lack of
support for publicly financed visionary efforts by government directed at science
and engineering innovation, such as the space program.

On the flip side, I am a believer in entropy, and these developments I have raised
as concerns will most probably elicit fundamental entropic changes in the U.S.
economy. That is, they will elicit new seemingly spontaneous creations of
productive order from which new technological development models will emerge.
For example, there has been an emergence of a U.S. innovation economy driven
by small start-up firms fueled by venture capital. These firms operate in a
Darwinistic environment where they either produce viable innovation quickly or
die. Those that succeed and produce innovative technologies demanded by the
economy reap the rewards of their success, a large publically held corporation
buyout. Large corporations hence can adopt a shop-for-innovation model via this
mechanism and continue to serve the master of maximized short-term returns.

These types of evolutions of the U.S. technology economy will either provide a
new model for the world and the U.S. will continue to be the leader in
technological development or the converse will present itself. The turtle will
emerge ahead of the hare, and countries with corporate and governance
environments more attuned to long-term approaches for funding and developing
technology will emerge as tomorrow's champions. I'm not smart enough to make
any bets here, but it will make for an interesting ride. Rough in parts is my guess.

VB: What message do you have for today's youth?

Fred Thomas: Get an education. Embrace how fun it is to learn. Develop a taste
for it. Like coffee, learning will go from a bitter, wretched drink of your parents to
something you look forward to each morning. Then never stop learning.

Take your education and channel it with discipline, hard work and a passion for
what it enables you to do.

Then, most importantly, come to understand that perseverance is the secret to
overcoming life's failures in your pursuits. Remember, there will be plenty of
failures and it is all right to fail, but it is not okay to quit persevering.

Finally, value others' time, perspective, and their dignity as you value your own.

Life is short, so be kind, share love, and be mindful of the common good, not just
your own.

Smile and laugh as often as possible.

VB: Are you optimistic about the future?

Fred Thomas: I have two great kids, as do many of IdeaConnection's readers. The
future is theirs to make. Hence, with a new generation of minds with a
heightened sense of the importance of a mindfulness directed toward the
common good, I am optimistic about the future. I see this in my children and
their friends.

It will be a more global future, full of need and opportunity to improve the future
of our planet. I see optimistically a future where we understand the imperative
for technology to be more focused not just on the needs of humanity, but on
humanity's needs in the context of a healthy planet.

VB: What books would you recommend to our readers who are interested in the
topics of creativity, inventions, and innovation?

Fred Thomas: Well, as I said earlier in our conversation, a great start would be
the three-volume Feynman Lectures on Physics. If it is physics, it is covered here
and covered with much insight. Remember, invention is all about bringing insight
into the mix.
The Art of Electronics by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill is a great pragmatically-
directed text on circuit design. I highly recommend it. On the manufacturing front,
I particularly like Handbook of Product Design for Manufacturing: A Practical Guide
to Low-Cost Production edited by James Bralia, because it explicitly details the
mechanical tolerances that can be held for different fabrication processes. Too
many books in this genre are fluid with descriptions of fabrication processes, but
very thin on capabilities expressed as hard tolerance numbers.
A good start for those who want to understand inventions and patents better is
the cartoon enunciated Patent it Yourself: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Filing at the
US Patent Office by David Pressman. This is the book I recommend to those with
the general comment and question to me, "I have this great idea and I want to
patent it, what should I do first?" Go get and read this book.

On the topic of better understanding how to more wisely and selectively direct
your innovation focus is a great book titled The Innovator's Dilemma: The
Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton
Christensen. An understanding of what is "disruptive technology and innovation"
should be well internalized by all who want their inventive insights well
targeted. Fast Innovation: Achieving Superior Differentiation, Speed to Market, and
Increased Profitability by Michael George, James Works, Kimberly Watson-
Hemphill, and Clayton Christensen builds on Christensen's work and prescribes a
model for execution with appropriate focus on the need for new product
differentiation. It's a tactical innovation delivery gem.

Finally, I would throw into this mix the book Getting Things Done: The Art of
Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. It offers lots of practical techniques for
innovators to refine their process of getting from point "A" to point "B" quickly,
efficiently, and without as much procrastination. I'm a big "GTD" fan.

VB: What are you currently working on?

Fred Thomas: I am a relatively recent employee of HP. I have been here about six
years now. Initially, for the first few years, I worked on hardware engineering and
design for the HP MediaSmart Home Server products. The hardware design
incorporates many innovative and unique-to-the-marketplace features. These
designs won several international industrial design awards for their striking iconic
appearance. It is fair to say I was a principal contributor on both of these fronts,
engineering and industrial design. About a dozen of these digital managed home
innovations merited US patent issuances for my directed efforts. It was a very
creative and differentiated product for HP in the personal computing space.
Hence, I found significant reward from my work on this product family.

I can't discuss the specifics of what I am working on presently, but I can say this
– I work in a group within the Hewlett-Packard Desktop Computer R&D Division
called the Innovation and Incubation Group, focused on bringing differentiation
and innovation to the next generation of HP PCs. I manage and contribute to a
variety of efforts, about a dozen or so, directed at migrating new technologies
with innovative user experience models associated with them.

The team I work with is distributed all over the country, and the world for that
matter. It is comprised of engineers, business savvy professionals, and scientists
of exceptional talent. It is a fun, growth- filled, and challenging job. We have
some real compelling stuff coming down the pipe. Stay tuned.

VB: Do you have any advice for someone who wants to learn the skills required by
inventors?

Fred Thomas: The one thing that I have learned over the years, something I find
many innovative engineers blissfully ignore, is the basics of patent law, and in
particular what a patent claim is and how it is structured to legally describe an
invention. At the end of the day, this is how one's inventive ideas will be captured
and linguistically distilled.

It really is a simple idea that inventions, in patent claim form, are described as
merely a new combination of elements. This has provided me with a crystal clear
understanding of whether or not I have an opportunity to move past pure
engineering and to invent.

VB: Are there any other topics you would like to discuss?

Fred Thomas: I think we have covered quite a bit here today. I just want to thank
you, Vern, for having an interest in what I have to say about innovation and
related, as well as some unrelated, topics. I have really enjoyed our discussion.

Conclusion:
It is great to hear the perspective of a brilliant inventor who has been responsible
for breakthrough discoveries. One of the many take aways is Fred Thomas' advice
about what is a patentable invention: "inventions, in patent claim form, are
described as merely a new combination of elements."

Fred Thomas' Bio:
Fred Thomas received a BS in Mechanical Engineering with a Minor in Physics
from Bucknell University in 1982. In 1990 he received a MS in Mechanical
Engineering specializing in Control Systems and Non-linear Dynamics.

He has been employed at Hewlett-Packard for the past 6 years, initially as the
Principal Technologist, Personal Storage Group; then as the Principal Hardware
Architect, MediaSmart Home Servers; and, since December 2010, as Champion for
Innovation Intent, PC Ecosystem and Responsiveness. All of these positions
resided within HP's Personal Systems Group. Previously Fred Thomas was Chief
Technologist, Advanced R&D, at Iomega Corporation, where he was employed
from 1991 to 2005. Fred was Owner/Engineer at ProtoType Devices from 1988 to
1991, and an Electro-Optic Systems Engineer at Texas Instruments from 1983 to
1988.

Fred Thomas' technical interest is in the fusion of new technologies for the
enhancement or creation of new products. With 48 issued and 20 pending US
patents, Fred has demonstrated his creativity in several fields, including data
storage, sensors, actuators, electro-optics, machine vision, nano-technology, data
security, network attached storage and intellectual property. His work at Iomega
Corporation was essential to the Zip, Jaz, Clik!, Floptical, Peerless and REV
removable storage products. His work on subwavelength optical data storage,
which allows for multiple 10s of fold increase in the capacity of DVDs, is
embodied in two issued and one pending patent.

His work at HP within the Personal Systems Group (PSG) to date is directed at
innovation in both the personal home server and desktop PC product lines. These
efforts are manifest in the issuance of 10 US patents directed at product resident
HP inventions. He has numerous other patents pending, directed at future HP
product differentiating innovations.

His awards include the International Design Excellence Award in 2009, Industrial
Forum Product Design Award in 2008, "Nano50 Award" for "Subwavelength
Optical Data Storage" in 2005, Lemelson-MIT "Inventor of the Week" Award in
2004, Iomega "Exceptional Invention Award" in 1999, and Laser Focus World
"Electro-Optic Application of the Year Award" in 1994

Link as of September 2022: https://www.ideaconnection.com/interviews/00261-The-Hunt-An-
Innovator's-Perspective.html