Corante

About this Author
Gwen Smith Ishmael, Sr. Vice President of Insights and Innovation at Decision Analyst in Arlington, TX, has led marketing and new product development activities in the CPG and technology industries since 1986. She also conceived and developed ground-breaking Web-based promotional vehicles, two of which are patent pending. Gwen holds an MBA in Marketing and is a featured speaker on insights and innovation around the world. Her writings have been featured in international text books, most recently in Managing 4 Ps of Marketing FMCG Sector, and Product Innovation: A Strategic Tool for Growth, by ICFAI Publications, 2006 and 2007, respectively.

Founding Author

Renee Hopkins Callahan Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is Director of Innovation Services at Decision Analyst in Arlington, Texas, is a former journalist who worked as an editor and reporter for The Dallas Morning News and the Nashville Tennessean, and was managing editor of D, the Dallas city magazine. She has a master's degree in rhetoric and has also taught college-level English and informal logic.
In the Pipeline: Don't miss Derek Lowe's excellent commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry in general at In the Pipeline

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March 25, 2003

Portrait of an Inventor

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Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan

Thanks Hylton! for sending me the link to this terrific profile (from NYT mag; reg reqd) of inventor Woody Norris, whose HyperSonic Sound (HSS) technology won Popular Science’s grand prize for best new invention of 2002:

    His first invention was a medical product, simply because he was approached by a few friends who wanted to form a company but had nothing to sell -- and the man with the most money to invest was a doctor. So Norris went and bought a flashlight at Radio Shack (evidently his spiritual home), then picked up a piezoelectric crystal and fine-tuned his knowledge of the Doppler effect until he puzzled out a way to detect clots in blood vessels. This entire process took a Friday night and most of a Saturday. ''It was called 'Transcutaneous Doppler,' '' he recalls wistfully -- before adding, as a throwaway, ''Eventually, it evolved into the sonogram.''

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