Welcome to the personal pages of Jeff Lindsay, a guy in Wisconsin suffering from Multiple Webpage Disorder. Doctors are working for a cure, but so far, the condition appears terminal—I may have only 60 years or so left.
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices." — William James
Terrain of the Cracked Planet of Jeff Lindsay:
Continents, Islands, Rifts and Faults
Conquering Innovation Fatigue - our book!
Conquering Innovation Fatigue by Jeffrey Dean Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins, and Mukund Karanjikar is published by John Wiley & Sons. It just came out in late June 2009 (now shipping via Amazon) and will soon be on the shelves of major outlets.
After years of working with innovators and pursuing innovation myself, I felt a need to share a different perspective on the challenges to innovation success. This perspective involves the personal side of innovation, exploring the barriers--including nine major "innovation fatigue factors"--that individual innovators face. We show how to recognize and overcome them. The book considers three different levels of fatigue factors: those involving problems at the individual level (including innovators and those they turn to or work with), at the organizational or corporate level (strategy, culture, incentives, and decision making) and also the external level that includes national policies, regulations, and taxation, with special consideration of university-industry relationships, where especially severe lost opportunity occurs.
Preparing the book Conquering Innovation Fatigue has been an extremely exciting process. This book draws upon many experiences and interviews that I have had, along with those of my co-authors, Cheryl Perkins (the President of Innovationedge, where I have my dream job) and Mukund Karanjikar, a fellow chemical engineer. Our book is aimed at helping anyone who cares about innovation to understand innovation at a personal level.
So who's it for? Anyone who seeks to innovate, drive innovation, or influence innovation. Also, it's the perfect gift for Father's Day, Christmas, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, divorces, you name it. For more information, see the supporting blog, Innovation Fatigue.
I Used to Talk to Myself:
Now I've Got Twitter.
Abbreviated Professional Bio
Before starting my dream job at Innovationedge, I was Corporate Patent Strategist at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, a terrific consumer products company. I was in the research community there. My activities at K-C included:
- Developing and driving strategies to protect new technologies for tissue making and tissue products, absorbent products, RFID technologies, and many new product concepts,
- Founding a thriving community of practice called the Intellectual Property Chapter,
- Leading a couple of patent review committees,
- Launching efforts to pursue business method patents,
- Introducing and implementing an aggressive defensive publication effort,
- Pursuing numerous patents (also assisted in drafting many of them) and drafted many publications,
- Helping groups around the company build their intellectual asset strategies and estates, and
- Providing technical assistance in many areas to support new product development.
I'm a registered US Patent Agent with a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University, where I was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. After BYU I was an Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology (originally the Institute of Paper Chemistry). I joined that private graduate school as a faculty member in 1987 when they were in Appleton, Wisconsin. After a tumultuous $43 million move, the whole Institute relocated to the Georgia Tech campus. I made the move (loved Atlanta!) and became an Associate Professor in 1992, was named IPST Teacher of the Year in 1993, and then joined Kimberly-Clark's R&D group in 1994, which brought me back to Appleton. Had 13 great years with that terrific company. When our Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Vice President, Cheryl Perkins, left to form a start-up company centered around innovation, I would soon recognize an opportunity too exciting to ignore. In August 2007 I joined Innovationedge as Director of Solution Development. What do I do there? Read on.
About That Day Job
At Innovationedge, working with a terrific team of sharp people, I help companies, organizations, and individuals find exciting ways to be more cost-effective with their intellectual assets and their approach to innovation. I help people find ways to strengthen innovation and develop "just in-tune" innovation that is less wasteful and more effective than traditional approaches. I help organizations find the right partners to drive successful innovation, and I help innovators find the right partners. While we do a lot for major companies, we take on some carefully selected projects for lone inventors and start-ups to help them license or sell their technology. We do this on a contingency basis, meaning we don't charge for our marketing and licensing efforts unless make money for the client. Great deal for them, high risk for us, but always fascinating.
Innovation isn't all about scientific advances and new gadgets. Some of the most exciting innovation I'm working on at the moment includes innovation in business models and strategy, such as helping one of the world's most successful companies improve their approach to developing low-cost retail products. Far more interesting and challenging than I imagined!
Some thought I was a bit crazy to leave a great position in Corporate America for the uncertainties of consulting, but it's been a thrilling adventure that I savor. We have incredible clients and valuable experiences in helping them. Feels like earning an MBA every few months with all the experiences we have. Plus I regularly get to use both my technical background and intellectual property expertise, while developing new skills along the way. Love it! Also really enjoy the team of people at Innovationedge. I learn so much from them. Our highly experienced, connected, and energetic CEO, for example, Cheryl Perkins, was recognized by BusinessWeek in 2006 as one of the world's top 25 champions of innovation. That's really cool! But there is much I learn from all our crew. Yeah, it's really been my dream job--so far, anyway.
One thing I really enjoy about my job is the freedom to stay involved in a variety of organizations - a benefit I also had at Kimberly-Clark. I'm the Chair of the Forest Bioproducts Division of AIChE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers), Program Chair for the Paper Industry Management Association (PIMA) for the 2010 Papercon Conference, and Chair of the BYU Chemical Engineering Alumni Society. Am also an active member of the Licensing Executives Society (LES), AIChE, TAPPI (Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry), and recently joined Engineers Without Borders.
My Most Important Honor: "The Smartest Husband Ever Award"
While I've won a few awards during my life, the most important one by far is the "Smartest Husband Ever" (S.H.E.) award granted by the World Federation of Exceptional Women, a monumental honor based on my incredibly wise selection of a spouse. With all due humility, I can only say WOW! When I married Kendra Larson (now Kendra Lindsay), I felt pretty smart, it's true, but it would take years before I fully appreciated what a stroke of genius that was. To be honest, I didn't fully foresee that my incredible young wife would continue blossoming into the breath-taking woman that she is today. I didn't guess that she would organize an entire community and tackle massive barriers to create a successful charter school in Appleton, Wisconsin based on academic excellence (now the Classical School, a public school with over 450 students K-8). I didn't know what a terrific mother she would be, raising four amazing sons whom she would imbue with a passion for excellence and love for life and learning. And how could I possibly have guessed that after four children and almost 30 years of marriage, she would keep getting even more beautiful? The world may call me a genius, but I just think of myself as incredibly lucky. Nevertheless, I'm very proud to be the recipient of the S.H.E. Award. Many thanks to the terrific people of the World Federation of Exceptional Women, and thanks also for allowing me to be the Awards Chairperson for that esteemed organization.
Photography and Other Hobbies
I've got many collections of photos throughout this site, such as the recent "Memories of Winter" gallery (winter scenes from the Fox Valley, Wisconsin, 2008). They are copyright 2003-2008 Jeff Lindsay. Please don't use them without permission. Here are a few recent thumbnails, with links to various pages of photos:
"I'm Confused. What is JeffLindsay.com about?"
This eclectic little site contains my collection of writings on various topics over the last decade or so. It sprouts off in dozens of directions - photography, education, religion, RFID, investment ideas, politics, and my town of Appleton, Wisconsin.
This site began in 1994 (though it took a couple years before I switched to my own domain name) as a repository for satire and spoofs as well as serious writings on topics I care about, especially some of my religious writings. I've also added samples from my hobby of photography. It's out of control now (see the Site Index - some links are just iceberg tips), but I'm working on improving it over time. It's meant to be family-friendly and helpful, though my oddball sense of humor is likely to grate some people the wrong way. Sorry about that.
Everything here was produced using 100% free-range Webmasters. And only organic electrons and photons are used with this site. Yes, JeffLindsay.com is 100% ORGANIC and completely free of preservatives, meaning that some things are stale, out of date, and full of bugs. If something does look broken, please let me know. It's getting a bit unwieldy, and though I'm overwhelmed with email, I try to listen and respond. Sometimes.
My Other Views
From where I perch on the great tree of life, I see a lot of things that I need to squawk about. Things that I think will help you, things you might enjoy, or things that might make you chuckle. I'm a bit shy in person, but not in writing. I love to write, and to blog a bit.
What, another blogger? Yes, sorry, I'm one of those people. Some of my views are shared on my blog, Sanity Defense. Many of my views on religion and social issues are shared at Mormanity. The latter is my most developed blogging effort with fairly food traffic, and where I have the most fun - just a few minutes here and there, of course. I still have a life!
Some of the issues that I take on at JeffLindsay.com include education, religion, social issues, politics, trends in Corporate America, and the most important issue of all, food (in the form of my restaurant reviews for my fabulous little town, Appleton, Wisconsin).
Regarding education, I hope parents will demand excellence and refuse fads. If kids aren't learning, they probably aren't being taught - at least not with proven methods. One fad in particular that I take on here is Block Scheduling, where I have provided resources used by many parents, teachers, and even students in resisting a popular but potentially harmful restructuring of schedules in schools. Sounds like an esoteric issue to most people, but it's a hot topic in education. The controversy illustrates quite a lot about some of the problems we face in public schools.
That Religion Thing
Now here's a topic that really spooks people. I should warn you that a portion of this site deals with religion. "Mormon? No, please, tell me you're anything but a Mormon!" - to quote one woman I met in Switzerland. Mormons? Latter-day Saints? What's up with that? Yes, I'm an active but highly imperfect member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (see LDS.org) and have written quite a lot about the Church and it's beliefs. I take on a lot of common questions and attacks in the section I call Mormon Answers (LDS FAQ) and even have a Mormon blog, Mormanity. While I am an amateur "LDS apologist" whose work is heavily used to defend the Church, I am not saying that the Church is perfect or has a monopoly on truth. In fact, I have tremendous respect for many religions and recognize that we can learn much from most of them. I also recognize that the Church has plenty of those pesky mortals in it, even running much of it, and that means errors and problems and embarrassments from time to time. OK, I can't give my full endorsement to every historical event and statement and practice over the years, neither in modern Church history or the Biblical record, for that matter. But I do think we have some amazing things that the world should know about, especially The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Got one? It's a major reason why I am proud to be a member of this Church. My experience with that book has greatly added to my conviction that Jesus Christ is real, that God lives, and that there is a way for men and women to find joy, peace, and meaning in this life and beyond. Oops, there I go, preaching again....
News
The Washington Post mentioned my "activist" work on block scheduling: "Class Schedulers Think Outside the Blocks" by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, Monday, March 10, 2008, p. B01, available online.
Our book, Conquering Innovation Fatigue, has been mentioned in several interesting places, such as being a BusinessWeek pick for summer reading. Stay tuned....
Webmaster: Jeff Lindsay of JeffLindsay.com Contact:
Last updated: June 24, 2009
URL: "http://www.JeffLindsay.com/index.html"
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In spite of any claims I may have made during my delusional episodes, this site is not necessarily endorsed by the National Institute for the Prevention of Mental Health—or is it?