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bqlive.co.uk
Fantastic Female Innovations and Where to Find Them Prominent IBM inventor Lisa Seacat DeLuca talks to Sandy McCallum and Ryan Diamond from Metis Partners about women, innovation and intellectual property (IP). THIS year, the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) has dedicated its 26 April World Intellectual Property Day to “Women in Innovation”, highlighting the brilliance, ingenuity and curiosity of the women who are driving change in our world. In celebration of this year’s WIPO theme, Metis Partners reached out to one of the world’s most eminent inventors, Lisa Seacat DeLuca of IBM, for her insight on women’s role in powering innovation and creating IP. DeLuca is a distinguished engineer for IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT), where she leads a team called the App Factory, focused on bringing IoT use cases to market. She is the most prolific female inventor in IBM history, and the only woman to ever achieve the 100th Invention Plateau Award, an IBM internal patent award system. In her spare time, Lisa is a TED speaker, and a self-published author of two children’s books titled A Robot Story and The Internet of Mysterious Things. Metis Partners spoke to her about her views on women and innovation. Q: Research conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) indicated that in 2010, women were cited as inventors on only 8% of the patent filings in the UK, and 9.7% in the US. Why do you think there is still a massive gender imbalance when it comes to patent filing? I think it’s important to take a closer look at this. Just because the statistics point to a lack of women inventors doesn’t mean there is a significant imbalance in the number of women innovators. The fact is there are so many great ideas that are never protected with a patent. One of the reasons I love the patent system so much is that it is an unbiased system. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what you look like, where you come from, or even whether or not you’re an expert on the topic: the idea has to stand on its own for a patent to be granted.
That being said, when it comes to the makeup of inventorship and the lack of diversity – such as women inventors – I think the problem is more due to one of three reasons that have nothing to do with women not innovating. These are: 1. The cost of filing a patent; 2. The inventor doesn’t realise the innovation could be patentable; and 3. The person lacks exposure to other inventors. In regard to my third point, there are great answers to help these people. For example, I am part of an excellent programme called
the AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassadors programme. They are helping to give a face to inventors by having real, regular people who happen to also be inventors share their stories. These stories are helping change the ingrained view that we hold as a society, specifically that inventions come from all different people from all over the world including women. Once you see a living-breathing example of someone who has done something truly amazing, it’s not only inspiring but it makes it easier to picture yourself doing it. Often these programmes also provide valuable network connections and mentors help solve