Introduction to Issue

My father, Jerome Lemelson, founded the Lemelson Foundation in the early 1990s with a few simple ideas. The first is that inventors and innovation are the drivers of economic prosperity in the United States. The second is that inventors are losing their place in the U.S. popular imagination and culture as heroes and exemplars of society. He understood both these points from personal experience. As an independent inventor he struggled economically for many years trying to market or license his patents, only gaining economic success during the early 1990s. At the same time, he witnessed a decline in Americans' understanding of how important a role inventors played and continued to play in society. Overarching both of these issues was a lifelong concern with strengthening the patent system and promoting the intellectual-property rights of independent inventors.

To address these concerns, he envisioned a comprehensive program on invention and innovation and its relation to U.S. society. One of the first programs the nascent Lemelson Foundation funded was the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. The Lemelson Center helped organize the "Cultures of Innovation" conference in which the essays in this issue had their origins.

During the preceding years the Lemelson Foundation established national awareness and recognition programs, such as the Lemelson-MIT prize program, which award a number of prizes recognizing aspiring or prominent inventors whose ideas have contributed positively to U.S. society. It has also funded numerous educational initiatives on innovation and invention and provided seed capital for college inventors—organized into multidisciplinary "e-teams" (electronic teams) of student inventors, designers, and business majors—to help develop their ideas and bring them to market.

In more recent years the foundation has expanded globally, initiating a program on invention, basic human needs, and sustainable development in the developing world. This program evolved from a series of internal discussions and invited symposia with experts from various fields related to issues of Third World development, technology transfer, innovation, and sustainable development. The impetus was to utilize what we had learned in promoting innovation and invention in the United States and apply it to real problems in the developing world. We understood that, in order to maximally utilize the relatively small amounts (at least in relation to the issues facing the developing world) of money we had available, we would need to design a program addressing specific problems though at the same time attempting to influence cultural values and attitudes regarding innovation and inventors. The Lemelson Foundation established the "Invention for Sustainable Development" program in 2002. Since then, it has funded a number of projects in the developing world, providing direct grants to groups applying new technologies to address the UN basic human needs categories of water, energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity (the so-called WEHAB priorities).

What has all this to do with technology transfer? A great deal. Take, for example, one of the foundation's key initiatives in encouraging and supporting innovation and technology to address basic human needs and economic development in the developing world: the "Recognition and Mentoring" program (RAMP). This program, currently implemented in India, Indonesia, and Peru, provides local inventors with a wide range of assistance such as business mentoring, technology development, and training in design that helps enable the innovator from the basic concept, through design and modification stages, to marketing and distribution of the product or products. This is combined with additional program-components training concerning relevant intellectual-property rights and business development. Local innovators and inventors are therefore linked with university engineers and scientists—a rare collaboration in the developing world. The purpose is, as RAMP's program in India states, to "take the innovation and establish viable, replicable, scalable enterprises—this is the only way that innovations will reach consumers in need." Some of the businesses the Indian program has helped launch are an improved solar oven, a device to help prevent mastitis in cattle, an improved and locally manufacturable asthma inhaler, and an innovative brick design for brick kilns. As can be seen, all of these are...