Word: inventors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Tomorrow, the winners will travel to MIT to explain their work. Past winner Hyuk-Ho Kwon, inventor of the self-perfuming business suit, will join them...
...while Bush pulled a few punches, making digs at Gore's inventor of the Internet claims and his statistics, Gore was not caught off-guard...
DIED. EDWARD CRAVEN WALKER, 82, unabashed nudist and inventor of the oozing 1960s groovy-soothing lava lamp; in Ringwood, England. After the lamp buyer at Harrod's found Walker's display of sculptural, sinuous paraffin-and-oil globs "disgusting," Walker took it elsewhere and hit big. "You can avoid going on drugs," he once said. "If you have a lava lamp, you won't need them...
...Research and development is somewhat of a misnomer in Japan," says Robert Lewis, former associate director of the Tsukuba Research Consortium, a hub of high-tech companies in central Japan. "Most of the money goes to improving an existing product, not to basic research." Even when an inventor comes up with a hot product, the country's strong ethic of subordination of individuals to groups holds sway. Take the case of Aki Komikado, an unassuming sales-and-marketing employee who invented the Tamagotchi digital pet in 1996. The toy craze earned her employer, Bandai, $350 million, but Komikado didn...
Even Japan's legal system is tilted against the inventor. Although Japanese patent law requires firms to compensate employees for ideas that pay off, it doesn't specify how much. "There's nothing to stop a company from giving a researcher only a few hundred dollars for a major invention," says Yoshikazu Takaishi, a computer and telecommunications attorney in Tokyo. Furthermore, while U.S. law operates under the "first-invention rule"--awarding the patent to whoever comes up with the idea, regardless of when that person files an application--Japan uses the "first-application rule." So if an inventor's firm...