IDiyas Q&A: Meet James Jorasch, Founder of Science House and Model Meetings with 780+ Granted Patents!

Meet James Jorasch, Founder of Science House and Model Meetings. With over 780 patents, his innovations are owned or licensed by companies such as eBay, Priceline, and Facebook. He incubated several businesses and co-founded HealthPrize. He has been involved in every phase of startup companies – creating the vision and business plan, raising capital, building the team, managing risk, developing strategy and products, cultivating partnerships, and driving growth.

Patents cover a broad range of industries including telecommunications, peripheral devices, financial services, health care, electronic commerce, casino gaming, retail, and vending. Experience in all aspects of the innovation process including problem identification, brainstorming sessions, patent filing, IP portfolio analysis, strategy, licensing and commercialization.

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Learn about James’s patents here.

Where did your inspiration to become an inventor come from?

When I was in elementary school, every math book had questions with correct answers – some were right there at the back of the book. But then one day Mr. Hodis showed up.

He asked us to try to create a map of topological territories such that no two territories of the same color shared a border and that required more than four colors. He knew it was impossible, but he didn’t tell us that. I struggled with the problem. Then Mr. Hodis came back the next week and explained that there was no solution that required more than four colors, and that people had been trying to prove that for more than a hundred years.

It really opened my eyes to the difference between the neat and tidy problems with answers that we got in our textbooks, and the complexity and unknowns of the real world. And it got me excited about the possibility of finding answers to questions that had not even been asked yet.

Out of your many inventions, which invention are you most proud of?

I’m quite proud of my recent innovation work creating an advanced ecosystem of computer keyboards, mice, headsets, presentation remote controls, cameras, sensors and the like. Letting people better engage each other, whether that is in a workplace or at home.

But perhaps the innovation that I am most proud of is the system that I created to build out a team of inventors, developing all of the aspects of a culture of innovation: interviewing, training, mentoring, brainstorming, tracking, etc.

These inventors filed hundreds of patents and went on to start up their own companies, did innovation for other companies, became patent attorneys, and generally did great things. I am proud of the process that I built, and proud of everything that these inventors have now achieved.

What does your typical day look like, and how do you make it productive?

One of the most powerful ways to make my day more productive is to tie it to my purpose. That takes some real thought and hard work, but it is intensely motivating. Purpose is not a bumper sticker – it is your guide to sorting through the demands on your time.

Over the last couple months I have been assembling a detailed map of the best practices of productivity, drawing from masters like Cal Newport, Anders Ericsson, Brian Tracy, Benjamin Franklin, and all the way back to Stoic philosophers. I’ve tried to distill my own path to productivity, using it each day and seeing what works and doesn’t work – ultimately inventing my own system that has 87 key tactics that I draw from.

How do you bring your ideas to life?

Rapid prototyping is my favorite way to give a new idea some shape on the path to make it real. Prototyping does not have to be expensive or complicated, for me it is about seeing the idea take form and getting everyone on the same page – often a powerful way to supercharge innovation and creativity.

I have been pushing the large companies I have worked with to start experimenting with AI in order to get a better feel for what it can do for a company, and AI supported prototyping can provide quick results while building a culture of AI. Companies need to do more than talk about ‘Generative AI.’ They need to roll up their sleeves and try it out to see how it can benefit them and their customers.

What’s the one trend that excites you?

This is the Golden Age of Optimization. Every process on the planet is simultaneously being upgraded. For example, everyone knows that AI is quickly growing in capability. But it isn’t a single element that is improving, it is dozens of them. Computing power is growing as chips get larger, denser, less power hungry, and more efficient. Algorithms for matrix multiplication are getting more efficient as mathematicians are now aided by AI. Large language models themselves are now evolving well beyond the transformer model that resulted in Chat GPT 3.5 bursting with power. Countless academic papers push model innovation further. Venture capital for hiring more software engineers and buying more compute power is more readily available. Open source software now puts unprecedented capability into the hands of anyone, and an ecosystem of software startups are producing key elements to make everything faster and cheaper.

It is breathtaking.

What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an inventor?

I formed an improv comedy team so that I could relax a bit when not inventing, but it turned out to be a perfect mental exercise for facilitating brainstorming sessions with clients. Improv comedy builds on a ‘yes, and’ mindset to create scenes and characters never before imagined.

It takes fast thinking, creative ideas, and a willingness to do foolish things in front of an audience. Exactly the kind of skills needed to invent. Kids love improv games – and you can even have them improvise new ideas that may lead to inventions!

Performing improv comedy also made me more aware of laughter during brainstorming sessions. When I hear laughter I always stop the session and reflect on what was just said. Inevitably there is a nugget of something that generated the laughter, and I think it is a sign from our brains that we just heard something truly novel. Embrace what you learned from the laughter before moving on with the session!

What advice would you give to your younger self?

I would tell my younger self to spend more time studying human emotions.

While innovation may involve technical solutions, it ultimately starts from an understanding of human problems and emotions that drive the desire for the solutions.

I developed Periodic Tables of Emotions in a number of industries to help guide my inventing over the last several decades, and they have served me and my inventors well. For example, the solutions that we created to improve large company meetings sprang from years of studying the varied emotions that employees feel while in meetings.

Tell us something true that almost nobody agrees with you on.

I’m not sure it is true, but my intuition is that the goal of a superintelligent AI will simply be to understand the universe. And every superintelligent AI that arises on other planets will converge on the same goal. Alien AI’s won’t come to visit us because they will know exactly what our AIs are thinking.

As an inventor, what is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?

Get a lot of sleep! Inventing requires continuous learning and a lot of difficult mental work – including focus, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. Social skills such as communication and deep listening are also critical. Guard your sleep carefully, brainstorming with only a few hours of sleep is like trying to run in quicksand. Sleep is critical for being sharp and productive.

What strategy has helped you grow as an inventor? Please explain how.

Never hesitate to go after something that others consider ‘boring.’ Everything can be improved. You just have to dig deep and find a new way to do it.

Gene Rendino, another member of my inventing team, gave me a book on bricklaying. You might think that after 6,000 years there would be very little left to invent – but not for Frank Gilbreth, who in the early 1900s began to optimize bricklaying, reducing “the usual 18 motions of a bricklayer to five” and developing an “adjustable scaffold so the bricklayers do not have to bend so much.” He changed “the way bricks are stacked and passed” and invented new hand tools. He ended up increasing productivity by 300%.

What is one failure you had as an inventor, and how did you overcome it?

I will let you in on an innovation technique that I have never written about before. Inventing is all about platforms. Great innovation comes from leveling up several times, reaching a platform that allows you to see things that you couldn’t see from the first platform. My experience is that people can rarely jump to a higher platform without going through all of the other platforms first. You need to invent from the first platform and kick around a bunch of ideas. From those ideas you find patterns and insights that get you to the next level. You again generate a lot of ideas and find more patterns and insights. That ultimately gets you to the platform that enables truly powerful innovation.

Strangely, there does not seem to be a way to accelerate the jumping of platforms. And you really can’t look up to the next platform and know what you need to get there. But when you get to a higher platform it is easy to look down at the lower platforms and realize that you didn’t ‘get it’ back then.

I’ve failed hundreds of times. But all of those failures helped me up to a new platform where I was successful.

What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why? (personal or professional)

Math books can be powerful in the right hands, especially when the reader is five years old. I’ve created a database of the best math and science books for kids as young as three and as old as ten – the kind of books that are probably a stretch for them, but ignite a passion for math that lasts a lifetime. Happy to share some of the titles if you would like to reach out via LinkedIn.

I met a friend with a five year old daughter and handed over a selection of math books and a quick lesson on the concept of zero. The girl went to a New York City dance performance several days later and watched from the audience as the dancers danced off stage one by one. When the last dancer exited the stage, the girl stood up and yelled “ZERO!!!” at the top of her lungs. That was a great return on an investment of $100 in math books.

What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive? How do you use it?

During the early days of Covid I reconnected with Geoff Gelman, one of the inventors that I hired two decades earlier. We assembled a few more team members and set off on an adventure: inventing via video calls. No in-person sessions! Most people probably figured that was going to be nearly impossible, but we decided to give it a try.

We scheduled Zoom calls, and used Google Sheets to track ideas, Google Docs to write the patent specifications, and Lucid Chart for drawings. We invented while simultaneously editing the Google Doc, frequently sharing our screens with key docs during the calls. It felt clumsy at first, but we were soon inventing at a pace I had never experienced before. For some inventions, I think this may be better than having the team brainstorming in the same physical space.

What is the one book that you recommend that our inventor community should read and why?

Read any book. But really read it. Chew through it. Underline sentences, write notes in the margins, pull thoughts from the book and create a document or spreadsheet to capture the most interesting ideas. Read it like you are having a conversation with the author. Compare the book to other books. Think about how you would make the book better. Employ the ideas from the book in your everyday life and see if they help you.

Then read another book in the same way.

What is your favorite quote?

“You should never share your problems with others because 80 percent of people don’t care about them anyway, and the other 20 percent are kind of glad that you’ve got them in the first place.”
–Ed Foreman, humorist and writer