3

HATTIE: OK. Do you think there's a connection between faith, and I mean faith in something bigger than yourself, faith in God, and innovation?

MICHAEL: There certainly is in the sense that -- and economic historians who are not religious have observed this, that what gave Jewish and Christian civilizations over thousands of years, the confidence to take risks and invent new things, because they felt they weren't violating taboo. Nothing terrible is going to happen to them -- if they went outside the known patterns of nature to discover new patterns. The reason they did that is because they had belief in a creator who created the world at a certain time with a purpose and that the world was going somewhere.

GLENN WALSER: While I was driving, this vision came through my head of how mechanically I could do this at a much faster rate using less employees. And I said, 'Thank you Lord, give me some money,' and he did through this friend of mine and we started. And what we really did is we did something that no one else could do or had done before.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Today Glenn Walser's invention serves 95% of his industry's global market.

MICHAEL: The idea of progress is Jewish and Christian's. It's not Greek. It's not Roman. It's not Hindu ...Buddhist. It's not animist. It's specific. And having this faith in God has had this impact, even among people who don't now share that faith in God, they still have learned the faith in progress that is a gift of that faith.

LUPE FRAGA: We are in a place that really means very much to me.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Lupe Fraga, owner of Tejas Office took us to the neighborhood he grew up in and spoke about the power of faith in his life. He's not unusual.

LUPE: And I'm really grateful for the faith that I have been given. I think it's a gift. I try to live my life everyday in that way and so this is why this church is so important to me because I think this is where the foundation was laid.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Jose and Louis Navarro have built the productive pharmacy chain in the U.S. Working seven days a week never kept Jose from church.

JOSE NAVARRO: You had to go to church every Sunday. There is no doubt of us skipping church -- church was something that you had to make time for. It was -- maybe it was at night after we finished with the deliveries. But everybody went to church on Sunday. It was something that my mother was adamant about and she's still adamant about it now.

MICHAEL: A great many people in business have become more religious because of business activity. Why? Because they are aware of how many things can go wrong. How easy it is to lose your shirt. And they find that the belief in God they have gives them a certain objectivity. It's as if they lift themselves outside of time to see things as God might, or they try to. And therefore see things with a greater objectivity. And when chance and contingency break in their favor, when things work out right, they know they didn't control all that. That's due to something else.

4

HATTIE: So are we as business people called to courage?

MICHAEL: Of course. And people who have the wit and even the desire, but not the courage, can't do it. But if you don't have the courage, nothing ventured, nothing gained. So courage is a very important component of business.

HATTIE: We all know plenty of entrepreneurs who ventured and gained. By inventing new products, these brave souls created a new niche. Forced an old product to take a back seat. Raised the bar or startled the world with something brand new.

KEN DUNCAN: (Voiceover) But for me, life's an adventure, not creating little comfort, you know, ponds, because I don't believe they stay comfortable. They just sort of -- they lock you. One thousand, two thousand.

HATTIE: It took three years for Ken Duncan to take the panoramic photographs found in his book 'America Wide'.

KEN: When I grow old, I don't want to say, `If only I had've.' I want to say, `Well, I gave it a go and, man, that was a real adventure, I've got to tell you.' If I fail or succeed, it doesn't matter, because at least I gave it a go.

MICHAEL: There's a notion of Judaism and Christianity that there's progress and decline and it's the vocation of Jews and Christians to build up the Kingdom of God. To be ready for the coming of the Messiah for Jews and for Christians, believing that the Messiah has come, to make ready for the second coming and to make a world of greater justice, of love and truth to the best of our ability.

HATTIE: Which requires action and doing and getting up every day and trying.

MICHAEL: And millions of people doing that. Millions of people getting up everyday and trying to change the world, at least a little bit, in their little part. That's not universal among religions, but you do find it wherever there are Jews and Christians. And so, as our founders thought, this is the work of providence. Providence is on the side of liberty. God made men and women to make them free. Jefferson said, he was not so much of a believer, but Jefferson said, the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.

5

HATTIE: (Voiceover) It took Steve Hoffman over 20 years of trying to achieve what we see at his company today. 200 employees and 40 million in revenue, but that only after years of working to perfect the printing techniques. Joe Dannis, the creator of teaching tools for American sign language, spent seven years alone struggling to perfect his ideas. Diversified Chemicals broke through with a new product only after it invested heavily in research, which always includes paying for the cost of failure. So you hit a homerun with this?

DR. RAJAN EADARA: Yes, this is all conceived here in this laboratory, through the discussion of people. So that is where open mindedness helps. People come up with ideas -- which we can implement into practice very, very easily.

6

MICHAEL: If you want to develop the Iowa territory where my wife is from -- if you want to develop that, don't pick the five most brilliant men in America and have them draw up the plans for it. No. Give 200,000 families 70 acres each and let them develop it. Using their heads and their particular soil, let them decide. And using their own practical intelligence, because their life depends on it. You can bet your bottom dollar they'll use it well.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) It's harvest time on one of Bob Sakata's fields in Colorado. The big machines do the work now, but Bob shows me the pleasure of picking and tasting his specially developed fresh ear of corn.

BOB SAKATA: Here it is.

HATTIE: Now why does it taste so good?

BOB: Put all the nutrients that this corn needs so it would have everything the corn needs.

HATTIE: ...to be perfect.

BOB: Yes, to be perfect.

7

BOB SAKATA: Well, about 30 years ago -- 35 years ago, I was asked to speak at a sweet corn breeders meeting and there were really outstanding, large operators there. I was just a young kid listening to their wisdom. And they wanted three ears per stalk that looked green and a higher yield per acre. But I thought that I wanted a corn plant that only produced one ear per stalk mainly because I could see the day that we had to mechanically harvest our corn.

HATTIE: You invested your time, your energy, your money to test it and develop this and work with this genetic engineer, but you don't own the seed?

BOB: No, I think anything that would be an advantage to my colleagues in the business, why they can have it, too.

MICHAEL: You can invest your whole life's savings in developing a new product in the hope that if you do it right, other people will want it. You'll help other people, they would gladly give you their money in exchange for the benefits they will get from this product and you will benefit. So it becomes a beneficent circle. You help other people and you benefit by it.

8

HATTIE: Bob Sakata not only works on his product, he like most of us, works hard on processes with incremental innovation we discover faster, better ways to get things done. At the state of the art plant of Coating Sciences, Inc., they make specialty products that are sticky on both sides. Cross Timbers oil geologists use technology to pinpoint reserves others leave behind. Investing in a million dollar freezer opened the Japanese market to Petrofsky's bagels.

9

MICHAEL: Almost every business, almost every industry in America is based on patents, on discoveries. That's a source of wealth, and that's what I call capitalism, the mind centered system. It's a system which sees the wealth that there is in creation and invention and discovery. So all over America there are people trying to earn patents.

HATTIE: This is the new look of light and what you see represents a technology breakthrough.

JACK MILLER: (Voiceover) It really is a quantum jump to go from lightbulbs to fiber optics and I see fiber optics as the lighting product of the future. We got this photon approaching a lens surface at an angle.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Jack and Ruth Ellen Miller hold over 100 patents. They launched their company, NoUVIR, in 1990 and today its systems are found lighting Thomas Jefferson's handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence. Marilyn Monroe's white subway dress from the 'Seven Year Itch', Faberge Eggs and great art in dozens of museums around the country. NoUVIR builds highly specialized lighting products specifically developed for museums and it has succeeded at a establishing a new standard for lighting. The light has no ultraviolet energy and no infrared energy. Thus, the source of the company's name, no UV, and no IR.

JACK: And now I've got so many patents, the patent lawyers started hiring us as expert consultants in patent litigation. In the NoUVIR product line, which comprises the projector, and it is really a system itself, and all of the different luminaries that go on the ends of the fibers. We have 16 issued US patents.

10 The LightBulb

In the Studio: Michael Novak was smitten by Abraham Lincoln's 1850 lecture on discoveries and inventions. He called for the establishment of the patent office. He was the only President to be awarded a patent and his words should be cherished by all Americans, and yes, by all people.

Let me recite just a few and encourage you to come to the Web to read the entire document.

Lincoln said, 'All creation is a mind and every man a miner. The whole earth, and all within it, upon it and round about it, including himself in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature and his susceptibilities are the infinitely various leads from which man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny. In the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miner stood naked, and knowledgeless upon it.

At the very end of the document Abraham Lincoln going well beyond the paraphrasing of the Genesis writer concludes, 'Next came the Patent laws. These began in England in 1624; and, in this country, with the adoption of our constitution. Before then, any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage for his own invention.

The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.'

(Voiceover) At smallbusinessschool.org there is self-help study for people who want to start a business and for those who want to grow the business they have. To learn more about this episode, choose the overview. You can read every word you're hearing today when you choose the transcript. And go deeper with the case study. There's streaming video, and access to interactive study guides throughout the site.

11

TODD DICKINSON: Every single piece of cutting edge technology is probably resident here in our office right now.

HATTIE: And if you told us you'd have to kill us. (Laughter)

TODD: Well it's not that bad. But we're talking about things all the way from gene sequences to new software that's being developed to improved mousetraps.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) This is Todd Dickinson, a former US commissioner of patents and trademarks.

TODD: The original system came to us from Great Britain, but we incorporated it in our Constitution which I think firmly fixed it in the American system. That has been one ...of the key parts of the Constitution in terms of the economic development of our country and the world.

HATTIE: Why is the patent and trademark concept so important to democratic capitalism?

TODD: Well what's interesting I think is that the invention system, which the patent system supports, is probably democracy at its purest. If somebody with one idea, which they come to on their own or in collaboration with just a couple of other folks, can take that idea that has never existed before. Because to be patentable, an invention has to be brand new. And to take that invention and basically run with it and to build something from it -- build a business from it, unfettered by anybody else, that I think is the essence of capitalism.

SOHRAB VOSSOUGHI: Design is a continuum. It never ends, you know, once you do something, you know it can be done better.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Sorhab Vossoughi is the founder of Ziba Design.

SOHRAB: This product, the Cleret Squeegee, is actually the product that really launched us. It got a lot of publicity. We found that the T-handle on the squeegee is actually created for reach -- to be able to extend your hand above your height to clean the windows. And also, for the inside enclosure of the shower it is very tight, and you can't use that -- it is very cumbersome.

HATTIE: So in one year you sold how many?

SOHRAB: He sold 16 million dollars worth of these, in one year -- in the second year. And he had two people, himself and one other salesman. So you can imagine -- 8 million dollars per employee. This is in a permanent collection in the Smithsonian Museum. So it has been a very famous product and really people connect us and relate us to 'Oh, these are the people who did the Squeegee.'

HATTIE: You are the Squeegee guy.

SOHRAB: Yeah, the Squeegee guys. (pause)

12

HATTIE: (Voiceover) While Ziba Design launches new products, many others launch innovative services. Today, build postcards online at Modern Postcard. Get a hot stone massage at Gadabout. Have your office supplies delivered to the desk rather than the dock. Take a tour of Boston on a World War II amphibious vehicle. Have your offices designed for beauty and efficiency. Find the love of your life at eHarmony.com. Or, live in a smart house kept smart by the builder.

MICHAEL: I thought what's really new about the world Lincoln caught better in an address. He gave a wonderful talk on the six great moments in the history of liberty, starting with Adam and Eve. And one of the moments, which really surprised me, was the Patent and Copyright Act. And he says that was so brilliant and I'm going to say it in my own words; his words are eloquent. But in my words it was that for the first time in history the main form of wealth will not be land as it had been, even in the Homestead Act -- 70 acres for the claim. But the intelligence, the ideas, the insights that led people to treat their land or anything else in a new way. The main cause of wealth would be the head. I'd like to say caput. The root term for capital, that's what capitalism is. It's the first system organized around the mind. Around invention and discovery.

Ideas matter more than ever before and it's astonishing how many things are born in someone's mind and something comes to be that was never there. And ideas are really very, very powerful because God gave us minds to improve. God invited human beings to take part in his own creation. To be co-creators with God and bring out of the earth things that lie fallow and hidden there.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) And many believe that their ideas come from their maker.

Glenn: I prayed to the Lord. I said, `Lord, you know my situation.'

HATTIE: And many practice giving thanks.

LUPE: I've been blessed. God really ...I mean I've gotten so much out of this life that sometimes I'm embarrassed.

KEN: Well our vision statement is to show the beauty of God's creation. That's it. I just want to open people up to the potential of bigger pictures. All I'm trying to say is, `Hey, look, there's something out there that may be bigger than us.' When you're out in these wonderful places, the less of you, the more you can sense God's awesome creation.

HATTIE: And for so many faith strengthens.

BOB: The first thing I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of the bed and pound my fist and thank God for giving me another day and all the blessings that he's bestowed upon me. And the way you could really believe that truly is to just look out there, look out there and see that beauty.

ALBERT: Whatever character that I may be able to have, was formed by my grandmother. To treat people with passion, Christian passion; to always look out, as she would say, for the other fella; to do what you say you're gonna do; to take care of others before you take care of yourself; to tell the truth; to love and expect to be loved; to put God first, your family second and everything else somewhere after that.

In the Studio

HATTIE: So what have we learned from Michael Novak? Innovation is rooted in interiority, which is understanding something profoundly within, whether it be within the heart of people, of functions of a product or the processes within a service. You have to go deep. Spend some time within that inspired moment; within that 'ah-ha,' within that awakening from dogmatic slumber. And what will emerge just might be the next big thing. And you can be sure of one thing, we'll be here cheering you on.