Hello, welcome to the IP at the Core awareness series today as we discuss intellectual property. We're honored to host a true icon of innovation, Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple.
Don't go out and say things because they sound good. Say because you know them. Disruption is a word for, you know, if somebody comes along something else than you have and disrupts you, that means like putting you out of business. My goal was to help the world and obviously your goal at Technip is obviously to help the world.
Hosting today's conversation is Liz Flannry, our external IP attorney.
Well, Steve, thank you for chatting with us today. I want to start with a little bit of a sort of a perspective on your career.
When I graduated high school, I knew I'd be an engineer, but I did not think engineers designed computers. I wanted to have my own computer someday. But I didn't think engineers did it. I was so advanced in my abilities. Told my dad in high school I'd have my own computer someday. A 4K computer so I could type programs on it. I'd have my own computer. My goal was to help the world. And obviously your goal at Technip is obviously to help the world in a very important way, but I wanted to help people have more ability than they had before.
Technip Energies has R&D centers across the globe that innovate together. What advice would you have for teams of engineers trying to innovate together in that kind of particularly in that sort of global environment?
Well, to me working together was always very important rather than that means cooperating instead of conflicts. You know, somebody's not like you. They're from a different place in the world. The end user was always so important to me. Make it understandable to the user. That puts the human more important than the technology. And I believe that to this day.
And that's interesting. You know, I'm sure that there were instances of this, but can you explain an example either when you were at Apple or at HP or in any of your experience where you had a team that through that teamwork, you all had a breakthrough that really couldn't have happened if you were just kind of working in your own little silos?
Yeah. I mean, first of all, I was building a computer that was going to be the only successful product of Apple Computer for the first 10 years of the company. I had a great product, but how would I get it to the world? And Steve Jobs had no money. So about once a year, he came into town, saw my latest invention, turned it into money for both of us. He was the business side. He wanted some sort of success out of these things and saw this one product. I developed a couple products that were worth a company and he said, 'Hey, we should start a company.' Because the motivation to have a company, to sell it, to make some money that brings my product to the world. And would Steve Jobs have been successful without the great product I had? Probably not. But the two of us together added up to a big solution. And there was a third person. By the way, Steve Jobs, one time I was designing Pong games. I designed Breakout for Atari. But Steve came in and he said, 'No one at Bushnell of Atari wants this one-player Pong game.' So sometimes it's not necessarily a team that starts, but it's a team that finishes.
And you know, you talk about taking technology and bringing it into a product, bringing it to other people. You know, there's a strong push in probably most industries today, you know, to monetize innovation and show results quickly. But of course there's also, you know, some projects have a longer timeline necessarily and are going to need more R&D time. How do you in your experience, how do you balance that? How do you balance the need for, you know, showing results and getting people excited, but then also, you know, following through on those things that need more time to percolate?
Yeah. In a lot of places, it's common for engineers to feel that, oh, they're working on things that could go long term. Long-term is represented in the capital value of a company, but they're complaining, oh, business side and marketing side, they want to do this and this and this, just get it done quickly and have schedules and it sort of seems like one side's in it for the quick term. Well, the most important job in the company is CEO. And the CEO's most important job, keep the money going. If we had high profit margins, we could continue forever as a business. That's the role of business. Don't die. And we wouldn't need to keep borrowing money and giving away more and more of our business to people that came in with money. So I like to look at it as a product leading to success and users owning products. But the long term, when you think about long-term, it's better to find, you know, when you work on a product as an engineer try to be the best engineer in the world, think of ways that you can be a little more efficient, get a little more out for a little less in, do a better job and it's going to pay off for your company and for yourself especially your own motivation. So that gets back to that engineer versus inventor idea. Again, companies should be aware that in the long term things could come along that you can't plan on if you keep the money wheel going and just concentrate on the near-term. Well, disruption is a word for, you know, if somebody comes along something else than you have and disrupts you, that means like putting you out of business. That's a horrible thought. So I'm all for a chief disruption officer. Chief disruption officer should analyze little trends going on. Things are being discovered in physics and chemistry and science and space and everything and should be aware of wow those could someday add up to influence our business to affect us or not.
So, you know, I think one thing that I think companies are constantly looking at, you know, even with regard to that long-term R&D, is ROI, return on investment, and, you know, they use that to sort of value the innovations that are coming to them. You know, do you think that that's the appropriate measure of the value of innovation? And if not, you know, what other types of things do you think are appropriate to sort of set the value of IP, set the value of innovation?
Well, a lot of times there's real great inventors that innovate well, good innovation, and it doesn't necessarily succeed in the marketplace. If you're going to influence a lot of people's lives, you kind of have to wind up eventually having a good-sized company that's profitable. And return on investment is almost the important way to think about any, you know, here's our company. So you got to try that. You got to take some chances. The CEO. Look at Hewlett-Packard. We were in a recession. Every division of Hewlett-Packard was losing money. 1973 and our little calculator division was making so much the whole company was profitable. And it was really because Bill Hewlett wanted to build this little handheld device that fit in a pocket and it replaced slide rules. Now, we had a little incident with copying because you're talking about monetizing with IP. Well, when we started with the Apple II and Mike Markkula put his money in, he said I had to go down and talk to a guy named Ed Taylor. He was an attorney, a patent attorney in Beverly Hills. I tried to describe and I was just a raw engineer then transcribed in engineering terms and he put it into the patents and a couple of those patents were so incredibly valuable that wouldn't come to almost anybody so far out of the book, almost violated books on how color television was supposed to be done and that was very important and soon thereafter one day I saw a copy of our computer the Apple II and it was a PC board with all the same chips in the same order so we had a lawsuit. But we didn't fight it on patents. It was simpler to fight it on copyright because there was a huge amount of that code like, you know, 100 pages worth of my handwriting that was in there that made the Apple II work and they just copied it. So, it was easier to fight it as a copyright case. Whatever you do, it should be creative, new, your own, and you should always build in a role of having fun.
You know, it's interesting that, you know, that story about Franklin Computers and you're also telling the story about the Homebrew, how you sort of, you know, gave away, you know, that you showed them all the design and how you did it. It's interesting. How do you think a company, I mean, those are both great ways, you know, it's good to get your technology out, but on the other hand, you want to prevent somebody from copying it that way. What do you think is the best way to sort of balance those things? What can companies do a better job at balancing, you know, deterring copying, but also getting their technology out and getting people to adopt it?
So, you need some vision from the top that's actually looking for those sort of things. Maybe the CEO, the chief disruption officer could have a role in that and spotting the little guys in the company that seem to be working on something not worth money.
Thinking about it from kind of the opposite side, you know, I think there's sometimes an instance where engineers are working on their problems that they're having to solve for customers and they think that what they've developed isn't a big deal. You know, they think of it as just sort of routine, you know, throw away anybody who would come up with that. Here at Technip Energies, we're really trying to get engineers to not think that way. We're trying to get them to realize they should engage with IP early and help protect things even that may seem routine may turn out to be a deal. What advice would you have for encouraging engineers to look at it that way even if they think they're working on something routine to really see the value in it?
You should protect, you know, everything you have because there's a million people out there looking for like an easy route to follow or ideas. And ideas, general ideas are, you know, you get a lot of, see a lot of patents sort of written that way. Those specifics should be patented because other people come along would just like to sniff the wind and copy them. So almost everything you do, little tiny things you don't think are worth that much could wind up being so valuable to your company.
Can you think of an example that you could share with us again, whether it was at Apple or HP, anytime in your experience where there was an invention that maybe somebody thought wasn't a big deal at one point, but they really should have realized that it would have been a big deal?
