What happens next is the strange, incomprehensible part: finding the answer. Yamazaki says he gets his best ideas after dozing. “Oftentimes, I’ll fall asleep while taking the train home at the end of the day,” he says. “I wake up, and I have an inspiration.”
Mark Gardner, who stopped working for the chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices in 2005, also cogitates while snoozing. “I wake up every day thinking of inventions,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s a curse or a blessing.”
Other innovators don’t close their eyelids to find inspiration but know that their brains function best when they’re not trying to work on a problem. “A lot of times, you don’t come up with solutions right away,” says Akram. “I keep a problem in the back of my mind, thinking about it in different settings, adding a little here and there. Some of this thinking occurs when I’m on a plane or driving my car.” Hearing this, Akram’s colleague Warren Farnworth pipes in, “I hate to say it, but there’s something about standing in the shower, rubbing my head with shampoo, and I’ll go, Wow, why didn’t I think of that before?”
Also important is an environment that encourages experimentation. All the men say they have to feel free to propose any idea, no matter how outrageous. “When chasing an invention, you have to not be very critical of suggestions,” Weder says. “You have to try not to snicker.” Even when the wildest solutions don’t work, they can spark discussion that might lead to other ideas. “There are two kinds of supervisors,” says Akram. “One says, ‘Why are you wasting our time?’ The other says, ‘This is so cool!’ ” Micron’s researchers have thrived under the latter.
Then there is another, less romantic reason why these men have so many patents. All work for firms that value patents, systematically and aggressively apply for them, and reward those who win them. At Micron, the patent lawyers’ offices are next to the R&D lab, so engineers can stop by and quickly find out if an idea is patentable. Yamazaki and Silverbrook now run companies that essentially produce nothing but patentable technology—and they make money licensing it to manufacturers. In his 24 years at A.M.D., which relies on patentable inventions to compete with archrival Intel, Gardner figures he made more than $1 million in bonuses from his patents.
Which brings up the subject of wealth. It’s tempting to think that owning hundreds of patents must be the key to riches, but it’s not necessarily true. Inventions created while working for a company usually belong to that company. The leading inventors are all well paid—their firms understand their value—but none is cruising the Aegean on his yacht or lining up to buy the Yankees. Silverbrook has the best shot at great wealth, if his printer technology takes flight.
Silverbrook, Yamazaki, and Weder will continue to chase one another at the top of the list. They each have nearly twice as many patents as the fifth-ranked inventor, Micron’s Gurtej Sandhu. They are the reticent megastars of invention, each eclipsing Edison just as Barry Bonds roared past Babe Ruth. These three, especially, deserve a place not just in the popular imagination, but also in history.
