Innovating for the Future | Julie Strickland

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Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Cleveland, Ohio. Those are rookie numbers, Cleveland. You've got way more people than that. I need more effort out of you. Never been to Cleveland. I don't know. I've never been to Ohio. So maybe that needs to be on my list. And maybe there'll be more listeners. Anyway, joining me today, Julie Strickland of Strawberry Innovation. Julie, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. I was just in Chicago last weekend, which is pretty near Cleveland.

I've been to Chicago many times. Yeah, I don't, I don't know, Ohio, I think got a bad rap. And I'm one to talk being from Oklahoma. Nobody ever thought anything about Oklahoma, but Cleveland and Cincinnati just didn't have, uh, I mean, maybe Columbus. I don't know. Have you been to Ohio?

No, but my stepmother is from there and she says good things.

Yeah, no, I mean, the people I've met from Ohio are lovely, but I've just never been. So I'll put it on the list. I'm still trying to get through the western United States. It's so vast. You know, but there's, I mean, this country is huge. Honestly, it's kind of crazy.

And a lot of cool places too.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of cool places. Yeah. I mean, anyway, Julie, why don't you give us your CV, you know, your history, and then tell us a little bit about Strawberry Innovation.

Absolutely. I'm going to start with the fact that I'm a prolific innovator. I hold about 20 patents. Nice. And then I'm going to tell you about my education, career path, and lead into Strawberry Innovation. How does that sound?

Okay. Yes. As an engineer, I see that you laid that out very well.

Thank you.

I'm assuming you have copious notes.

I do. And I am a project manager in my day job, a research and development project manager. So I get paid to be organized.

Yes. Well, you did it, you did it swimmingly.

Thank you. So my education was non-traditional. I actually chose to get married and have children before getting a divorce and returning to school.

Okay.

And if one is returning to school, why not pick the most difficult profession there is? So I chose engineering and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a mechanical engineering degree.

Pause, pause, pause, pause, pause. Uh, yeah, that is nuts because I, I remember when I did my high school tour and they said, well, what do you, what do you like? And, uh, I'm like, well, I'm good at math. And they said, well, let's go over to the engineering department. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, these people are working way too hard. I do not want, uh, that level of academic rigor. So, well, why don't you go over to the school of business? Uh, you know, that's where they throw all of the, uh, I don't want to work hard, folks. All right. Sorry. And I am a proud OU Sooner. So I, you know, you got two strikes. So go ahead. Hopefully you won't get three.

I'll redeem myself. I promise.

Are you from Texas?

I am. I was born in Texas, lived most of my life here, although dad was in the Air Force. So we lived around the United States.

Whereabouts in Texas?

I've lived in Abilene up in the Panhandle, Austin, all over Dallas-Fort Worth area, and now I reside in Houston.

Wonderful.

Okay. I just claimed that.

I'm sorry. I interrupted you.

Oh, that's okay. I can get back on track. So I graduated late, late being age 32. I've since found out that Plenty of people have already—

That's not that late.

For taking breaks and going back to school. So I felt like I needed to make up for lost time. That's the reason that that's important.

Okay.

I went to work for Raytheon Company up near Dallas, Texas, and promptly focused on innovation. That's where I received a few of my patents from looking around and innovating there. And then subsequently, I worked in oil and gas. I worked in cutting-edge radar for Department of Defense projects. I went out to California for North— to work for Northrop Grumman to get into the space industry, learned a lot about designing for space, and then returned home to Texas, to Houston, and worked on the next generation spacesuit for 4 years. And then the spacewalk—

Was that directly with NASA or a contractor?

A subcontractor. So Collins Aerospace is the original spacesuit manufacturer. They, as you know, in their former life as Hamilton Standard and Hamilton Sunstrand and, and, and, they created all of the spacewalk spacesuits spacesuits from Apollo to the ISS. Okay. All right, nice. So at Collins, uh, which is part of RTX— fun fact, so now they're a sister to Raytheon— at RTX, I was asked as a prolific innovator to teach the next generation of innovators.

Mhm.

But it's interesting, within large companies like that, they like to ask you to do things on your own time Because there's not a charge number for that.

Can't bill it.

These were non-billable hours. So I did, I developed a curriculum for junior engineers and taught them how to get patents, was very successful. The Technical Accelerators Program, as it was called, was actually able to increase the number of patent applications by 10%. Within our business unit.

When you develop that curriculum, what, what, what did you learn in creating that? Like, so what, what are the core elements that are necessary for innovation?

Well, first you've got to find a problem worth solving. Some people think that they can sit under an apple tree and apples will bonk them on the head, and they don't realize that Isaac was actually doing a bunch of research and thinking about gravity and working on equations before he sat down to take a rest. And that's why the apple falling gave him the idea to think about gravity. Mm-hmm. So I use the strawberry as a metaphor because the stem reminds us that ideas don't come in a vacuum. That they are grown in the rich soil of all of our experiences and research. Mm-hmm. The flecks represent— they look like flaws, but they represent the seeds. The seeds of innovation are all around us.

Mm-hmm.

The curve lets you know that innovation is not a straight line. You're going to learn something, you're going to pivot, and that's okay.

Yes.

And last but not least is timing. If you pick a strawberry too soon, it's green. Nobody wants it. If you pick it too late, it's rotten. Nobody wants it. You gotta get it at the right time for peak juiciness.

So, analogy.

Thank you. So, um, developing this curriculum, you asked me what I learned. I learned you've got to find a problem worth solving. You've got to perform that research to prepare the soil so that you can grow your idea. And you've actually got to develop an idea. You've got to think about it. You've got to work on it. Part of that may be putting a team together because diversity of thought actually creates better ideas.

Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that Full Commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. Are you familiar with a book called Greatness Cannot Be Planned?

I am not. I'm writing that one down.

So I'm going to say it was written in the late '80s, early '90s, uh, by a computer scientist and it was, you know, the precursor to artificial intelligence. Not that we have artificial intelligence. I hate that they call it AI. But he was working with learning machine learning models. Right. Which, which, you know, we have all over the place now. But what he, what he basically found was that in the computer paradigm that the, the more you had a, a focus on the outcome, the less efficient the learning models were. That when you basically just opened it up to whatever, that it actually was more efficient. And he brought it into this, um, into history and saying like, well, the invention of the computer Uh, if you had set out 50 years before they invented it and said, okay, build a computer, it would never have happened because foundational to the, the first computer was the vacuum tube. And the vacuum tube was created for sci— uh, lab experiments. Like, it was not, it was not created to create a a computer. And so his, his statement— and I, I find this to be true, but I want, I want your experience share on this— that like, you, you can't necessarily say this is where I want to go with a lot of certainty. Like, you, you can have a general idea of like the problem you're solving, but the, the path, to your point, being curved. It's never direct, like, because there are these other factors that may come into play and things that you don't know yet.

Absolutely. There have been a number of times when somebody's told me a problem and I jump to a solution. And I've taught myself, write down those solutions and then learn more about the problem. Because exactly to your point, whenever you learn more about the problem, you might realize that's not the right solution. That there's a better way of doing things. It's, it's so true. And what's difficult in brainstorming is to not say, I've got it, I know the answer. Because whenever you do that, then you poison the well and everyone else in the room is concentrating on that solution and not coming up with their own.

Something. And I would think that in larger corporations like you've worked in, that, that people dynamic plays a huge role, like personalities, communication. So like you have somebody that is very domineering in the conversation and people defer to them. And, you know, like how the human element affects the process of innovation as well.

Absolutely. And groups. I always call on the quiet person and say, what do you think about this? And you might be thinking, well, that person's quiet because they don't have a thought. But whenever you actually ask them, they may come up with something brilliant that they've been noodling and they've just been waiting for the right time to bring it up.

Yeah. And I like the way you framed it. Maybe this is just the way I heard it, that you create the field for the ideas to grow. And I think that Having a, you know, I think first of all, your own personal mindset around that, but then building that team and culture where innovation is encouraged and failure. However, you know, I don't like necessarily using that term in this context, but ideas that don't end up working out to an effective solution. Are not negative and they're not punished.

Right.

Yeah.

That Google actually rewards people for failing early. And I talk about failing fast in the book. There's also Kintsugi, the art of when there's broken pottery, you put it back together with molten gold and you create something more beautiful than the original.

Object.

And I love to talk about those because even some of my failed experiments, my failed ideas taught me something and gave me information that I can use going forward.

Yes, I think in a business context, you know, failure, failure is just data. It's like, well, this, this did not work. What, what did we learn? And it may, you know, in my case, I've noticed that, you know, it may not be strictly what you learn from the business scenario. Like, okay, well, that wasn't what people wanted. Okay. It also can reveal like how you, it can reveal something about yourself, your thought processes, your, beliefs, your habits. You know, I, yeah, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, is that failure is, is always a very valuable teacher.

Absolutely. Can I tell you about one of my favorite failures?

I'd love to hear about one of your failures.

Excellent. So it's an innovation called Ionic Shower, and it came out of the fact that moon dust is negatively charged. All right, so when a lot of people hear this, they're like, oh, well, you just use a positive charge to get the moon dust off the spacesuit, we're done. And so there have been a lot of people, smart people, have designed things like an ionic curtain that the astronauts could walk through, and that the curtain would have a charge and, and blah blah blah, blah, blah. So I came up with a shower and I thought, well, if you have some positively charged plates, then they will create that field to pull the dirt off the spacesuit. And then I worked with an intern who misunderstood me and came up with something different. And together the idea just made that ionic shower even better. In the interest of time, I won't go into all of that. But whenever we went into the lab, I was trying really hard to charge the lunar dust. I had a simulant to charge that so that we could then test the charged plates theory. And the dust actually cooked instead of charging. And I went back to my notes and I went back to the research papers and it finally hit me. There was a line in the papers that said the charge dissipates in atmosphere.

Hmm. That makes sense.

It makes sense, but there's no time period involved. And what I learned was the word instantaneous should have been in that sentence. The charges dissipate instantaneously in atmosphere. So what that means is when an astronaut walks into the airlock, all dusty and dirty, and she turns on the pressurization and air starts flowing into that airlock, the moon dust will lose its charge. So any of those charged plates around it aren't going to affect the moon dust because there's no charge left. Well, finding that out and realizing that meant that we could walk away from the ionic shower. Okay, we've already got the patent for it, we already, already filed for it whenever we went to the lab to make all these tests happen. But we did not invest the money to send that experiment to the International Space Station as we had planned. We did not further develop that idea. We did not make a project around it. And we did not push for that to be added to the airlock. All of these things that we did not do freed us up to concentrate on ideas that do work.

And how do you— how do you get moon dust off spacesuits then?

Well, I've got Renegade—

Has that problem been solved yet?

No, not, not really. In the Apollo days, Gene Cernan and the other astronauts were using a handheld vacuum cleaner. But now imagine, my friend, if you can, a vacuum cleaner nozzle, 3 to 4 inches in diameter, and then imagine how large a spacesuit is. Mm-hmm. And a spacesuit's larger than a person because it has to encapsulate a bunch of life support equipment and structure, infrastructure, and cooling, all sorts of things. So it's, instead of picturing a person size, picture a football person size, football player size. Mm-hmm. And then imagine taking that 3-inch nozzle and having to clean an entire suit with that 3-inch nozzle. That's time-consuming. Yes. Not to mention an astronaut cannot do that herself. She's going to have to have a crew member help her get her back clean and get into all the crevices. So that's one possible solution because a smart person such as yourself might point out that vacuum cleaners have improved since the Apollo days. So a vacuum cleaner today would—

Some would argue they haven't, like, but yeah.

Yeah. So another solution that has been explored, it's been a brush to brush off the suit. But my co-inventors and I came up with Renegade Regolith. Now picture a car wash at the car wash. Yes. And an astronaut walking through a car wash in order to get clean at the end of her shift after being out on the lunar surface.

Yes.

And then that water, like at a car wash here on Earth, can be filtered and reused. So it's a closed-loop system, so you don't waste any water.

Mm-hmm.

And also, RitD-A-Gate Regolith has the added benefit of when that astronaut is going out the door, we coat her with wax so that the dust will actually embed in the wax and not in the fabric of the suit.

You know, it's funny, I, as you were saying that, I was going to ask if there was an optional wax and, uh, you actually do have an optional wax. It's not optional, but yeah, absolutely.

Well, it's going to have to be different formulations. I might be going down the nerd rabbit hole now, but different formulations for different missions because there are actually different formulations of dust on different places on the moon, just as there are different types of soil, different places on Earth, and there's different temperatures in different locations.

So what's— what, what is the problem you're trying to solve with getting rid of the moon dust in the first place? Like, is this toxic?

Oh yeah, yes, it's hazardous to human health and equipment. So it's small, jagged, it's like talcum powder. Okay. And so it's so small that it actually embeds in the fabric. It is charged on the lunar surface. So it's static electricity. It crawls up the suit. Not biological. It's not actually moving on its own, but the charges are mobile. I just want to make it clear. I'm not trying to imply sentience of any kind.

I'm thinking alien Earth is what I'm thinking.

Yeah, no, no aliens, no. And so just to say this in layman's terms, on the Apollo mission, the Velcro was actually defeated by this. The ball bearings were worn down and abraded. And I say jagged because there's no wind, there's no water to make— to smooth down these particles to make them smooth like the sand and dust in Florida that feels nice on your feet. This would not feel nice on your feet. This is more like pumice stone, volcanic ash type of thing, jagged. So also breathing it in is a human health hazard. Okay.

All right. Well, okay. Let me pivot here for a second. And you mentioned Patents. I think creatives in general, and usually we've been talking about copyrights and trademarks on this show, but, you know, patents is another part of intellectual property. And intellectual property with creatives is generally not a topic they think about until they run into a problem and it's like, oh shit, someone has already trademarked my name or, you know, and I can't use it anymore. So what are the criteria in your mind that rise to the level of investing in a patent? Because I assume they're not cheap to obtain.

Right. Well, first you've got to decide whether or not a patent is relevant. And I always go back to the example of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola chose to keep the recipe a trade secret for a couple of reasons. One, when you file a patent, you file the recipe, the way to make the thing. And do you really want to put that out there? And number two, patents have an expiration date, right? So if you keep a trade secret, you don't have to worry about that expiring. Now, if you decide that, yes, yeah, it's a thing that I can tell if somebody's knocking it off and I want to be able to sue them if they're knocking it off, so I want to file this patent to protect my idea. You have a couple of different routes you can take. One is a provisional patent and That is a 1-year patent. It's very low bar to get this. It's basically just a cover sheet and a brief description of your idea. You can file it for relatively low amount of money. It was something like $400 the last time I did this some years ago. And then you've got a year to explore that and find out whether or not the thing works and whether or not you need to make modifications to your patent application. That year is important because we are in a first-to-file country. That means if I have an idea and I'm working on it in the lab trying to figure out if it works and you come and visit me and you decide to go file on that, file that idea and get the patent, then there's nothing I can do about it. According to the US government, you own that idea.

Doesn't matter. Because I filed first, not because I came up with it first.

Exactly. Because there are design— it doesn't matter if I have design notebooks that are dated, if I have video, none of that matters. The US government does not care. The first person to sign their name to that idea gets it.

So, okay, what kind of things are patentable?

Usually mechanical devices. And a lot— or electromechanical devices. And I say that because as much as I love software and use it daily, it's difficult to patent. It's— there's been so much litigation between Microsoft and Google and all these others that, you know, if you change one little thing, is it a different code? Did you come up with the code independently of me? And even though they do the same thing. They're different code. Ergo, my patent is for my code, not to do the thing.

So, but theoretically, and I know you're not an IP lawyer, so we may be going out of your expertise, but I mean, theoretically, any, any idea is patentable, whether it's a recipe, like you said, Coca-Cola, or like a code or a process to obtain a certain result, like, I don't know, how Arby's makes roast beef. I don't know. I mean, all of those things are, you can file a patent on or not?

Well, I hesitate because there was a time back in the, '80s and '90s where there were a bunch of patent trolls and they had the foresight to file a bunch of patents on like wireless technology. And they foresaw the rise of wireless phones. And so they made a bunch of general patent applications and the US government accepted them. And then years later, engineers came up with the details of actually how to make that happen. Patent troll sued them, got money for that, and then the US government felt used. Okay, this is the Julie interpretation of what happened. Yes. You're getting my version. And so the US government said, we don't like being used, so we're going to make a higher bar for getting a patent and we're going to do more detailed patent searches and you're going to have to work harder Mr. and Ms. Inventor in order to get your application past us.

Yeah. And my understanding is that patent attorneys are very expensive. And I guess that's what they do is help you meet that bar and, and or defend the claim if someone says, well, I had that idea and I filed this patent. So, yeah, because my understanding is the patent, I mean, like a lot of things in life are iterative. Right? So like you're, you're not inventing the spacesuit, but you could definitely invent a modification to the spacesuit. So, you know, I guess there's some legal bar that you have to say that you've improved it enough or distinctly enough that it's, it's, it's actually novel as opposed to just a continuation of the original idea.

Oh, right. Somebody skilled in the art would find it non-obvious. Those are the words my patent lawyer has used with me. Somebody skilled in the art would find it non-obvious. So for example, there was an existing patent that was a zipper connector and electro— it was electromechanical. So it wasn't just holding things together mechanically, but there were electrical signals going across those teeth, those metal binding it together. Well, there was the mechanical Think of like a zipper on your jacket, right? So it mechanically holds two pieces of fabric, right?

But, but there's electrical forces creating a magnetic—

no, that's not what I mean. I mean like, uh, the, the wires, the wires in a cable, right, conduct an electrical signal, right? So these teeth were conducting an electrical signal.

So it's just conducting it. Okay.

All right. Yes. So the wires could be hooked up to the zipper so that each half could communicate with the other half. Okay. Well, I had filed a patent on that and turns out it already existed. Philips over in England called it a zip instead of a zipper. So I didn't find it during my searches. So I was glad that I hadn't quit my day job to go make a zipper connector factory. And invested in the lawyers and all of that. However, I had, as part of the patent application, I had put an EMI protection, electromagnetic interference protection, in the form of a flap that went over that zipper connector and connected with conductive Velcro on the other side. And that EMI flap became the patent because we had to delete all these other things that were already covered in the Philips patent. Mm-hmm. This EMI cover was not. So therefore that became the meat of the patent, if you will.

So these, these patents that you've, you have were developed while you were working for someone else, correct?

Absolutely. And there's a lot of goodness in that.

So how does that work? Work as far as, are you co-owner of the patent, or you, is the patent solely yours? Like, how does that employer relationship affect that?

When I went to work for the big company, I signed an IP contract, intellectual property contract, stating that they owned all my ideas that I came up with while under their employ working on their programs. Mm-hmm. So theoretically, if I came up with a new sewing machine in my garage, they didn't care about that because, you know, Raytheon is a big defense company. They can't sell sewing— they won't sell sewing machines to the government, to their customers, right? Theoretically, um, there we could get into a longer conversation about that. But if I was working on, say, my day job is making spacesuits, and I came up with an improvement to the spacesuit, they own that information because it was a direct result of me working on my day job. Right. And then whenever we file those patents, it's, uh, the inventor name is my name, plus any of my co-inventors, but the company's name is on there as well. And because I signed that contract, the company owns the patent. So they're the ones that get to license it to somebody else or get any direct benefit. I like that because they are also owning all the risk. Hey, let's talk about what a patent is. A patent's a piece of paper, right? It's only as good as the enforcement, right? So if, if you go and make a spacesuit and infringe upon my patent, I have to sue you to get you to stop. I can't just walk up to you and throw a patent in your face. Right. What's that going to do?

Right. Temporarily blind me.

Yeah. Yeah. But I've got to get the lawyers involved in actual— in order to actually affect a change. So by working for the big company, the big company owns that patent. The big company is responsible for hiring the lawyers to sue you.

Do you have any patents that you own?

No, sir, I do not.

Do you, do you foresee that ever happening?

Yes, I, I'm actually working on a program right now, and I talked to my patent attorney about it and said, hey, this is what the program does. It's for a workshop, and it's to support a workshop so that, um, and I'm going to talk about this in very general terms so that I don't negate the patent. Yes. So you're at the workshop and something happens and you get a message saying, hey, this happens, what are you going to do? And the answer is A, B, or C, right? And you respond to that and then you get the answer. Well, there's a lot more that the software does behind the scenes. And because of that, we believe that we can sell that software in the software store, Google Play Store, whatever, Apple Store, and get other people to use it and write their own modules to go on that framework, that software framework.

So, so to clarify, is the patent— would the patent be for the process itself or for the software?

For the software.

Can you patent a process?

Yes, you can. Yes, you can. But, but let's talk about what we just said a few minutes ago about patent being a piece of paper. Right. So if, if I'm patenting a process and how am I going to know whether or not you're in your garage infringing upon my patent?

Yeah, it's much more general, broader in scope if you just do a process. Whereas like if I'm, I'm patenting the software and the actual code, then it's much more specific and it's therefore more enforceable.

Is that— yeah, exactly. You got to think about enforcement because you don't want to throw your money away.

I don't know if you know, uh, when, when you have a patent involving software, do you have to submit the underlying code as part of the patent process?

I believe— now you're getting outside my area of expertise, But my understanding is algorithms. So you don't actually submit 100 lines of code. You submit the 10 lines describing the algorithm.

Hmm. Okay.

All right.

So tell me a little bit more about your book. Why did you write that?

Oh, I love this topic. The Practical Guide for Innovators Navigating the Corporate Landscape.

I just want to point out that you had an agenda and I have completely not used it. So I apologize.

Go ahead. I'm loving this conversation and I want to circle back to patents and entrepreneurs because I've got some more thoughts on that to help your audience out, give a little advice. So I mentioned the Technical Accelerators Program, whereby I volunteered my time at a large company. And Chris, I keep coming back to that because I want to make sure that everyone understands, even though I signed that IP contract, the fact that I developed this curriculum on my own time means that I own that IP.

And because you weren't paid for it, it was outside of the scope of your work.

Exactly. And it is not directly related to work, ergo it is my intellectual property. I've got documents from Raytheon agreeing to that. So I want to make that distinction very clear. So since I came up with the curriculum on my own time, I was able to write the book describing the process of how to find a job— a job— how to find a problem worth solving, how to approach that with juicy questions to get your creative juices flowing and come up with an idea that the company or the customer cares about.

So this is, the book is, intended reader is the employee, not the entrepreneur, or?

Junior employee, junior engineers were the original targeted audience, but once I wrote it, I realized that any innovator could benefit from it. And even though it's written from the perspective of in a large company, The same steps apply. There are some that an entrepreneur can ignore. For example, they don't have to go in front of a patent review committee and ask for permission to file a patent. They can just do it. Right. However, knowing the criteria that a patent review committee uses to evaluate an idea can help that individual contributor evaluate their own idea and decide whether or not they want to move forward.

Yeah. Yes. Not go down a rabbit hole and waste a lot of time and money.

Exactly. And while we're talking about individual contributors or entrepreneurs, let's talk about the different approaches from a large company to an individual. So a large company might come up, you know, we talked about the spacesuit, might see the spacesuit as a system and want to you apply for one patent for that system. And that's appropriate. The US Patent and Trademark Office, aka the government, can come back and say you need to break this up into smaller chunks, smaller patents, or they might not. You know, there's a lot of reasons and variables there that, you know, we don't have time to go into. But a startup might see that system and want 100 different patents for the different systems because a startup can say, we're very innovative, we've got 100 patents, and that can help them get investors and seed money. So that is a tool and a strategic approach.

Interesting. Okay.

Now that does require more of an initial investment. As you pointed out, patent attorneys are not cheap, but it might be worth it because there might be a big return on investment, ROI, if the investors get their ears perk up whenever they hear 100 patents.

Is that what you said you wanted to go back to? And, and okay. All right. So do you want to check your notes and see if there's anything that you wanted to go over that we haven't yet discussed?

Checks notes. Yes. One of the things that your podcast is focused towards is making money.

Yes.

And right now, I just want to be honest and upfront, you know, I'm not making a lot of money off of Strawberry Innovation. Because I'm out there giving presentations for free to nonprofit groups, to children, to student groups and camps, and helping to get the word out there. Because part of my passion in life is to inspire and inform the next generation. I love it. Thank you. And so this is more of a passion project or a hobby. If you will, at the moment, with a potential to become a moneymaker in the future.

Oh, absolutely. I've, I've in the back of my mind while we've been talking, thinking about how you could monetize that. Uh, and I was curious if you had, like, you know, I could see consulting or workshops or coaches or, you know, lots of different ways you could do that.

Cohorts. Absolutely. So I have gotten paid for speeches. I've gotten paid for one-on-one coaching. I'm selling the books. I'm developing workbooks. So there'll be a workbook and book bundle that can be purchased in the future. For workshops, I've got the workshop that I'm developing with the software that I mentioned. And so then there's multiple different workshops that I'm working on. You said cohort. So yes, on October 3rd, I'll be teaching a workshop where I'll be leading a group of people through the innovation process, starting with a problem that NASA gave us that I, my team and I developed a solution. So I'm going to walk the workshop group through it and see if they arrive at the same solution. I suspect they won't.. But I'm gonna see what we can do and see if, you know, so at the end of the hour, hour and a half workshop, I can say, all right, let's look at your drawings and see the different solutions to the same problem with the same thought process that I led you through.

That would be interesting. Is your workbook going to have space for coloring?

Absolutely. Sketching is absolutely part of the the design process. And we talked about— you touched on the fact that attorneys are expensive. Part of the reason they're expensive is because of the knowledge they bring to the table. For example, coffee mug. If I were to file a patent for a coffee mug, I might write that it's ceramic, it's 3-inch diameter, it's 4 inches tall, it has a handle shape just so. Well, the patent attorney might look at me and say, does it have to be ceramic? And I might think about that and say, no, it can be made out of wood or metal or plastic. And that patent attorney might say, okay, well, let's put that in there, you know, that it can be made of a material which may be XYZ— ceramic, metal, wood. And then the patent attorney would say, does it have to be 4 inches tall? And I'd say, no, it doesn't have to necessarily. So that's what the patent attorney does is break it down into what is the idea really? Because we don't want somebody else coming back and changing one little thing and defeating the patent.

Yeah. And I could imagine that you, you could absolutely come up with solutions and not really grasp the idea that you have. Right? Like you just see the solution, but like distilling it down to like, all right, what did you actually come up with? What did you create? It's not necessarily obvious.

Absolutely. One of my mentees, one of the clients, I guess I should say clients that I coached, he had this idea and I don't mind telling you in general what he came up with. It was making bricks on the moon so that for construction materials, so you make bricks and then you can build a house or a factory or whatever, right? And I talked to him and I said, well, other people are making bricks. You know, NASA's working on CHAPEA, which is, you know, 3D printed making structures. So how is your idea different than what other people are doing? And we talked about it. And it came down to the process. Now we talked about patenting processes and how I, I don't, I tend to shy away from that because it's hard to enforce. However, when we were talking about his process, I realized that the machine that would use the process, that's the real patentable part. The machine and what that machine did. And once I identified that and told him, hey, that's your goodness. That's your gold nugget right there. You need to concentrate on that. Quit talking about bricks and construction. And, and, you know, he was ready to talk about sizes of bricks. No, no, that's not the goodness. The goodness is how you're making the bricks.

Yeah, I love that. So how do people find your book and purchase your book, learn more? More about Strawberry Innovation?

Oh, very simple. strawberryinnovation.org, strawberryinnovation.org. And you can find the button to go on to Amazon and find the book under either my name, Julie N. Strickland, or the Practical Guide for Innovators, or search for Strawberry Innovation.

I love it. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, subscribe to the podcast, share the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, uh, shoot us a message and, uh, I'll get rid of Julie. Until then, ta-ta for now.