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David Galenson, a tenured professor of economics at the University of Chicago has what may seem like a surprising specialty; the economics of innovation. But he doesn’t study how much innovators produce or earn, instead he developed a number-crunching way of determining when innovators are at their creative best.
Galenson’s breakthrough premise, laid out in his book “Old Masters and Young Geniuses,” is that there are two kinds of creative people; those who have early breakthroughs… “conceptual innovators”… and those who through trial and error achieve artistic greatness… “experimental innovators.” Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Alfred Hitchcock are examples of experimental innovators, and Vermeer, van Gogh, Picasso, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Orson Welles are examples of conceptual innovators.
To cite two other examples, Mark Twain tried many different writing styles before producing his magnum opus, the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in vernacular English at age 50. Albert Einstein had relativity whipped at half that age. Both men were rightly feted and honored as geniuses in their own time.
On Wednesday, April 26, at noon at the Salt Lake Sheraton UTAH GENIUS Awards, will recognize both kinds of genius, those who flower in the morning and those who bloom in the evening.
The UTAH GENIUS Awards were founded in 2009 by Rand Bateman, a local patent attorney now with Durham Jones and Pinegar, who had a breakthrough of his own when he realized that you get more of the things you recognize and honor. Bateman reasoned that if we as a society truly want more creative geniuses, conceptual and experimental, then we need to recognize them.
Bateman’s own innovation, like that of David Galenson, was in how to identify the most inventive and innovative people in a way that was completely neutral and unbiased. Anyone could nominate someone else for an award… PR agencies do it for their clients all the time… but nomination-style awards are inherently influenced by the fads and fashions of the day and judges in such contests are subject to the suasions of self-interested parties.
Instead, the UTAH GENIUS team finds its winners by crunching the numbers from a US Patent and Trademark Office dataset, which tells them which individuals and companies had the most patents issued and / or trademarks registered in the year prior. Individual patents and trademarks are an imperfect proxy for innovation, as Bateman knew very well when he developed the UTAH GENIUS Awards. But when an individual in the state the size of Utah turns out 15 or 20 patents in a year, or a company secures 25 trademarks in a year, plainly those are clear signs of innovation.
UTAH GENIUS still finds its award winners in this same way. It’s all completely impartial, there’s no nomination process, and no charge to the winners to attend. The UTAH GENIUS Awards recognize:
- Utah’s Top 20 inventors, by patents issued in the prior calendar year
- Utah’s Top 20 most inventive companies, by patents issued in the prior calendar year
- Utah’s Top 10 trademark registrants, by trademarks issued in the prior calendar year
The UTAH GENIUS Awards also give a Lifetime Achievement Award to someone whose career has been marked by invention, innovation, and creativity. In 2017 the Lifetime Achievement Award will go to Barry Mower the founder of Lifetime Products, who holds a number of patents and trademarks. In 2016 the award went to New York Times Best-Selling author Richard Paul Evans, a holder of numerous copyrights and trademarks.
Little wonder that Jack Brittain, Pierre Lassonde Presidential Chair in Entrepreneurship at the University of Utah says, “It is a great honor to be recognized by the UTAH GENIUS Awards… It is the premier recognition program for Utah inventors. We look forward to it every year.”
About UTAH GENIUS: UTAH GENIUS was founded in 2009 by Rand Bateman, a successful Utah patent attorney. Appreciating that much of Utah’s vibrant economy has to do with the innovative nature of Utah companies, Rand decided that he could give back to the community by honoring those who were driving Utah’s creative economy. Rather than focusing only on the companies, however, he decided to also honor the people behind the innovations – e.g. Utah’s Geniuses. The UTAH GENIUS Awards are the only effort in Utah associated with the World Intellectual Property Day, which takes place each April 26, and is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization, an agency of the United Nations.
About UTAH GENIUS
UTAH GENIUS Awards go annually to the most inventive and innovative Utahns in three categories, based on objective data direct from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
•Top 20 inventors, by patents issued in the prior calendar year
•Top 20 most inventive companies, by patents issued in the prior calendar year
•Top 10 trademark registrants, by trademarks issued in the prior calendar year
The Genius Awards also give a Lifetime Achievement Award to someone whose career has been marked by invention, innovation, and creativity. In 2016 the Lifetime Achievement Award will go to New York Times Best-Selling Author Richard Paul Evans who, naturally, holds a number of copyrights.
