MONEY

Innovation drives Rochester

Sean Lahman
@seanlahman

The golden age is over.

For decades, the local economy was driven by three big companies whose gargantuan manufacturing facilities employed generations of Rochesterians, making products we were proud to send across the world.

Now that we’re no longer cranking out rolls of 35mm film by the truckload or building a photocopier for every office in the developed world, some folks think it’s over, that Rochester is no longer a major player in the business world. They say our fortunes are sinking, bound to get even worse due to the downsizing of those cornerstone employers.

Those pessimists among us are missing what’s really going on, I think. What we’re witnessing is not the end but the beginning. It’s the transformation from a manufacturing economy to an intellectual economy, where a company’s main output comes not from the assembly line but from their research labs.

One way to measure the number of new innovations and new technologies is through patents, and in that respect, the companies in the Rochester region are thriving. The number of patents issued to inventors in Monroe County has almost doubled in the last five years, from 916 utility patents in 2009 to 1,634 in 2014.

While the big names — Kodak and Xerox in particular — are still home to prolific and productive research facilities, what’s most encouraging is the number of small and mid-sized companies who have been building their patent portfolios. That’s a direct result of their investment in local research and development efforts.

“Stakeholders are focused on producing something valuable from their research and development spending,” says Dominic Ciminello, an intellectual property lawyer with the law firm of Lee & Hayes and president of the Rochester Intellectual Property Law Association.

“Rochester is full of companies with a ton of smart people doing really cutting-edge work,” he says. “Intellectual property is a way for a company to capitalize on that knowledge base, to generate an asset that memorializes that brain power.”

Ciminello says that when you look at the biggest companies, like those listed on the S&P 500, you’ll see that intellectual property is becoming an increasingly larger percentage of their assets. Buildings and lands and equipment, which 50 years ago might constitute the majority of what a company owned, are in some cases as little as 20 percent of their holdings today. The real value, for companies like IBM and General Electric and Apple, lies in their patent portfolio.

It’s a lesson not lost on the rest of the business community.

“We see a lot of small to mid-size companies following the model of larger companies to the extent that their budgets allow,” Ciminello says.

To encourage those efforts, and to recognize some of the great work being done locally, RIPLA has presented the Distinguished Inventor of the Year Award annually since 1976.

The list of previous winners is a who’s who of local innovation. It includes Steve Sasson, inventor of the digital camera; Ernest Wildhaber, a leading authority on gearing mechanisms; and the trio of local doctors who developed the HPV vaccine: Robert Rose, William Bonnez and Richard Reichman.

This year’s crop of nominees is very diverse, with inventors from small companies and large. Some are relatively young folks being honored for a single invention, others nominated for a body of work compiled over many years.

“It speaks to the fact that there has been a lot of great R&D going on locally,” Ciminello says. “There are a lot of quality ideas being generated by the local technology community.”

The Rochester business landscape is very different than it was in 1980, not because we’ve failed but because we’ve adapted. It’s the beginning of our new golden age.

SLAHMAN@Gannett.com

The nominees

Here’s a brief look at each of this year’s nominees:

Ruola Ning, Ph.D.

University of Rochester

Ning developed a system that gives a more precise view of breast tissue using cone-beam computed technology. He launched a startup company, Koning Corp., to help take the technology through clinical trials and bring it to the market.

Herman Stadtfeld, Ph.D.

Gleason Corp.

Among his many innovations, Stadtfeld developed a process for manufacturing gears without the use of oil to cut the metal, which saves energy and materials as well as making a safer work environment. He is vice president of bevel gear technology and R&D for Gleason.

Harris Gelbard, M.D., Ph.D

University of Rochester Medical Center

Gelbard’s research on HIV-associated dementia led to the development of a new class of drugs, mixed lineage kinase inhibitors, which have significant potential for the treatment of a variety of neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. He is the director of URMC’s Center for Neural Development and Disease.

William Furman and John Nieto

Harris Corp.

As individual researchers, Furman and Nieto each have an impressive body of work. Collectively, they’re responsible for many of the key advances made in radio communications technology over the last 25 years. Their work is at the heart of the incredibly complex tactical radios that Harris provides to military and police agencies around the world. Nieto is a senior scientist who has been with Harris since 1985. Furman, who leads the Advanced Signal Processing Group, joined Harris in 1982. They hold more than 50 patents.

David Viglione

Vincent Associates

Viglione has received a dozen patents for designs of electronic shutter systems used in microscopy, medical imaging and video applications. He is the engineering manager for Pittsford-based Vincent Associates, which sells shutter systems under the Uniblitz brand name.

Beilei Xu, Ph.D.

Xerox Corp.

Xu created image rendering and image processing technologies for Xerox’s iGen digital printing press. More recently, she has been working on developing new applications for video technologies, particular in the health care field.

Robert Loce, Ph.D.

Xerox Corp.

One of Rochester’s most prolific inventors, Loce holds more than 190 patents with another 65 currently pending. His recent work has focused on computer vision, teaching computers to understand what they see. These new video technologies are being used in variety of applications, including transportation, healthcare and education.

Zhimin Huo, Ph.D.

Carestream Health

Huo is a pioneer in the field of medical imaging, developing complex image processing technologies that can distinguish anatomical structures within a medical image. It can help a radiologist zero in on a area within an image — such as a patient’s lung, for example — while filtering out things like chest tubes or bones.

Patricia Joanne Donaldson, Ph.D.

Xerox Corp.

Donaldson has received patents in a wide variety of fields during her career at Xerox, including printhead calibration, toner reproduction and color quality. But it was her January 2015 patent application for a revolutionary new method of 3-D printing that created the most buzz. Instead of moving the printhead to create a 3-D object, Donaldson’s system rotates the printing surface to increase speed and reduce waste.

Alexander Loui, Ph.D.

Kodak Alaris

Loui has received more than 70 patents for image processing technologies. His machine vision algorithms enable computer systems to understand the content of scanned images, performing tasks like automatically sorting them into albums, recognizing people in a photo or video, or conducting data mining activities.

About the event

The 40th annual Distinguished Inventor of the Year Award will be presented at a dinner on Thursday, June 4, at the Monroe Golf Club. The award has been given by the Rochester Intellectual Property Law Association since 1976.

Robert Duffy, president and CEO of the Rochester Business Alliance, will deliver the keynote address, and Norma Holland, news anchor at WHAM-TV, will serve as master of ceremonies.

Tickets are $35 per person. For more information about the event, go to the Rochester Intellectual Property Law Association’s website at www.ripla.org.