FUTURE 50 INVENTION
PRODUCT MAKER
BRIAN KURSAR
CTO
Toyota Connected North America Kursar oversees all cloud, AI practice, mobility, and big data products being developed on behalf of Toyota Connected North America. He’s tasked with leading the roughly 85 percent of software engineers, designers, and data scientists in trying to define the future of mobility for the next generation and Toyota. “They, like myself, are builders,” he says. “We don’t need to rely on vendors to build out solutions that will change the game for Toyota. This is something I’m very proud of.” To that end, Kursar is an inventor who has filed more than a dozen patents
FIELD MASTER
JAMES MACLEAN Founder, President & CEO
for Toyota and had many granted. He’s passionate about using tech for social good and has designed an invention allowing Toyota to partner with hospitals and caregivers to make the world safer for people who suffer from Alzheimer’s and dementia. He was also able to reduce overall spend on the cloud, and he and his team have released a number of new products. Ultimately, Kursar wants to question the status quo of mobility and “go where others have not,” he says. “To be brave, bold, inspired, and to deliver memorable customer mobility experiences.”
ROCKSTAR INVENTOR
MADHUKAR TRIVEDI, M.D.
BRAD STAMPS
Founding Director
Engineer
Center for Depression Research and Clinical UT Southwestern Medical Center
Bell Helicopter
Trivedi made news last year for his study that found that seeing a psychiatrist may not be the most practical solution to diagnosing and treating depression. His research involved 25,000 patients and concluded that primary care doctors can successfully treat the condition. “It’s difficult to do proper screening for depression in a busy clinical practice,” he says. “This study shows that primary care physicians can do this, and do it well, with the right tools.” An internationally recognized translational researcher, Trivedi focuses on developing and validating biosignatures of depression and he also conducts research on pharmacological, psychosocial, and nonpharmacological treatments for the condition.
MacLean formed his company in 2007 with one mission: to address the challenges associated with managing field equipment and field operations in the oil and gas industry. Chaos and inefficiency was the norm for many within the field, and that was what MacLean experienced early on in his career as a field engineer at Schlumberger. Plano-based Geoforce, which recently took on a majority investment with private equity firm LLR Partners, has clearly reaped the rewards of MacLean’s assettracking patent. Following the investment, MacLean says Geoforce is now primed to grow into new markets and continue enhancing its innovative solutions for field asset tracking.
Geoforce
40
MOOD LIFTER
D A L L A S I N N O VAT E S | 2 0 2 0 E D I T I O N
It took Stamps 15 years to land his first patent. He found his next a year later. “And now, every month, I hit one,” he says. The Bell Helicopter exec, who has been an engineer there for 41-plus years, is a rockstar—not an opinion, but a fact within the company and industry-wide. His focus is on tiltrotor hub design and vibrationreduction systems, and the innovation team he’s on is involved in electric vertical lift aircrafts. But it wasn’t always that way. “I’m an oddball,” he says. Stamps has half an engineering degree; he had to switch to business in college due to a chronic eye problem. While working his first job in accounting at Bell, he solved a $10 million problem for a rotor design engineer on a napkin during lunch. A few days later, Stamps was moved. “That napkin changed my life,” he says. “That was 38 years ago and it changed my path back to engineering.” Now he oversees research projects—predesign on new products, mostly— and has been issued 166 patents, “the most at Bell and Textron by a wide margin,” he says. He finds new concepts that in the future will be valuable to Bell and patents them. Currently, he’s at work on his 204th patent application.