The scientists of Invent Resources have an odd and enviable dilemma - they have more solutions than problems.

Reprinted with permission from
RESPONSE Magazine
February 2000, Page 11

Richard Pavelle of Winchester couldn't sell his idea for thin, flexible calculators when he obtained the patent in 1978. Years later, three electronics giants - Casio, Canon and Sharp - discovered they had to pay him royalties for their devices.

Pavelle estimates they have sold at least $60 million worth of the calculators in the United States.

The mathematician of the Invent Resources group, Pavelle says his contributions tend to be "very theoretical." With a special fondness for inventing puzzles and games, he is coauthor of MACSYMA, a system that enables computers to solve math problems for scientists, engineers, financiers and gaming specialists.

George Freedman, who works from his Wayland home, cut his inventor's teeth at Raytheon Co., following the discovery of microwave cooking technology in the 1940s. He helped patent a host of improvements, utensils and appliances such as the microwave corn popper, which together earned Raytheon $400 million a year, he says.

Robert Bowen, the current director of Raytheon's new products group, says Freedman possesses an unusually high energy level and another - even more important - quality.

"We have 10,000 engineers, scientists and technical people here in the Boston area," Bowen says, "and innovators are a very small segment" of that population. Most fall into the categories of plodders, theorists or practitioners, he says - but Freedman, who authored the 1988 book, "The Pursuit of Innovation," ranks among those rare and valuable innovators.

A materials specialist, he learned metallurgy as a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering student and added a master's degree in physics. He then spent 40 years with Raytheon, from which he is now retired, half of it in the company's new products center.

He broke once with Raytheon, in 1960, to launch his own company, Tyco Semiconductor Corp. It failed and he returned to Raytheon, but he says he earned valuable experience in the challenges confronting new ventures.

Because of his abundant practical engineering experience, "I'm usually the one that says, 'this is going to be difficult to make' or, 'this is an expensive component,' " he said.

Sol Aisenberg of Natick is determined to make a science of the art of selecting inventions that will become financial successes. He says his role in the inventors' group is to "act as a brake on things I don't think are feasible."

With a doctorate in physics, Aisenberg is also the president of Cell Control Inc. in Newton, which develops and licenses biochemicals and drug-delivery systems for viruses and cancer treatments. He has pioneered the development of thin-film applications of artificial diamonds.

He is often called upon to "break" patents to see if others will be able to find a way around the protection that a patent offers. It's the inventor's equivalent of hiring someone to try to break into your home to see if it is secure.

A physicist by education, A. Ze'ev Hed has spent much of his life working on high- temperature superconductor materials. Lately, he has branched out into medical devices and remote-controlled diffuse lighting used, for example, to help night-shift workers adjust their Circadian cycles.

But he's no snob when it comes to applications. He'd be pleased to patent a device to illuminate the interior of pocketbooks or to light the heels of rollerbladers.

Now living in Nashua, Hed says he was born in Belgium of German and Polish parents and was "picked up and dumped" on an Israeli kibbutz when he was 10.

He first earned a degree in nuclear physics, then another in solid state physics. He began working on concepts related to superconductivity in Ohio in 1967, then veered from academics to business in the 1970s. Since then, he has spent 15 years developing and managing new companies.

Hed calls himself the "maverick" of the group, the one who comes up with "a lot of crazy ideas - nine out of 10 don't work." Even so, he owns 17 patents, with more pending.

Hed is "a prolific guy," says Joseph Lovell, general partner at Medical Science Partners in Brookline, who hired Hed to help devise a specialized catheter to destroy heart cells responsible for fatal arrhythmias. "He tends not to go by conventional rules. He's not a conventional thinker."