IP Expert Discusses: Who Owns Ideas? With JiNan Glasgow George
We’ve covered many topics since we started this podcast, but we haven’t ever had an episode dedicated to intellectual property.
Until now.
Today’s guest, JiNan Glasgow George, is an inventor, entrepreneur, patent attorney, and an author. She also happens to be a world-renowned expert on intellectual property with a history of advising startups and entrepreneurs on the subject.
She joins Henry and Rusty for a lively discussion about who owns ideas, the ethics of patent trolling, and the role entrepreneurs play in transforming ideas to assets that multiply their businesses.
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All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Rusty Rueff: Hey, everyone. You found us once again, Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Thanks for being back. We're always happy to be here with you. Our guest today is JiNan Glasgow George. JiNan is an innovator and entrepreneur, a patent attorney and author, a holder of a theology degree, which we're going to talk about. She is also a former United States Patent Trade Office, the USPTO Patent Examiner. She is a world renowned expert on intellectual property. She has spoken at the UN Economic Commission for Europe. She has been at IP conferences around the world and advised the Senate's Small Business Committee. She co-founded Magic Number, a software company that provides artificial intelligence driven interactive data, as well as neo IP, which provides legal services to help clients maximize their return on investment for their patent assets in 2022. JiNan published the IP Miracle. It's an essential book on how to capture business ideas and create assets that multiply the value of businesses. Today we talk with JiNan about how Christ following business leaders can practically and faithfully approach intellectual property. It's a great conversation. Let's listen in.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I'm here with Rusty Rusty. Good morning. Good afternoon.
Rusty Rueff: Good morning. You almost didn't make it today.
Henry Kaestner: I almost didn't make it today. And, yeah, it was reasonably stressful. So I came back yesterday, and our flight was scheduled to arrive at 8:09 in Charlotte. The next flight scheduled to leave at 8:15. And I did some hiking this summer and managed to tear my shin muscle. And that six minute sprint probably did not help my recuperation. But I'll tell you, we made it. We made it. And not only did we make it, but both my son and I, both through the glory of God, got upgraded so awesome. And my son was so unused to the whole process that when the woman came and asked what we wanted for dinner, you know, Pasta or Beef or something like that, Graham asked how much they how much the beef costs, which was this kind of really sweet thing. I love the fact that, you know, at age 16, he is going to be a steward of the money that God has entrusted him or in this case, his father. So, yes, I made it. I'm really glad to be here. I didn't think I'd be able to make it. But yes.
Rusty Rueff: I loved your text late last night. There's a 98% chance I don't make it. And then 10 minutes later, there's a 38% chance I do make it.
Henry Kaestner: That's right. So we have with us today, Rusty, a really special guest, somebody I've met recently in person, both her and her son. Speaking of teenage sons, at event where we brought together a bunch of philanthropist. People are interested in giving in to the broader space of supporting faith driven entrepreneurship ministries. And by that I don't mean fundraising for our own organization. That's not what I mean. I mean that there are gosh maybe. I think there are 58 members now of the Global CoLab, which is led by our director of international strategy here, Reuben Colter. These are 58 other ministries that all seek to support Faith driven entrepreneurs worldwide, their members from Brazil and Egypt and Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, and many of them are raising need to raise money for their budgets because they train high schoolers. As JiNan, our guest for today, has a teenage son as well. The thoughts of Faith Driven Entrepreneur entrepreneurship, all of them are part of this larger ecosystem that we have in this movement along the 12 Marks, which is identity in Christ, called to create, faithfulness versus willfulness and all these things. And so we've brought together a group of them this summer, JiNan included, to be able to learn about what's going on so that we might be able to increase the market share, the market size. So many people for a good reason. By the way, of course, thinking about giving the church plant or clean water or microfinance or youth discipleship, Bible translation, so many great things to give to. Not so many people are thinking about how do I give to ministries that support the work of Faith driven entrepreneurs in Africa and Asia, Latin America, etc.? So this was a mini conference. JiNan came and JiNan, we're going to talk about intellectual property on this podcast. So just to be clear, that's what you're an expert at, and that's one of the things that I want our audience to learn about. But that's where we met and I don't think we've talked since. What was your impression about this kind of what's going on in the global ecosystem, what God is doing? And what did you think.
JiNan Glasgow George: Really resonated with me? Because of work that I've done over the last 23 years a lot with entrepreneurs, early stage startups, not only in the United States, but also in Europe, in India, in Ghana, South Africa, Mexico. And one of the things that I've learned over the years is that the number one way to improve the quality of life and generate wealth for people, it's entrepreneurship. God gives us the ability to create wealth, and this is the way to do it, to solve a problem and then to scale it, to bring solutions in the market. And so I really do enjoy working with entrepreneurs and have for a couple of decades.
Henry Kaestner: Well, it was great to meet you. We got introduced from a friend of ours that's in Dubai, so it's fun for us. The guy from Dubai introduces two people have got a North Carolina connection. We get together, we have their conference and I was super encouraged by it. Okay, So we're going to be talking today about intellectual property. I don't know, Rusty, if we've ever tackled it. Do you / can you remember?
Rusty Rueff: No, no. But yet we have talked about any creation somebody has as intellectual property because it is intellectual property. But we've never talked about intellectual property and what it really means and how you should steward and and and take care of it.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah.
JiNan Glasgow George: This is going to be fun. All right.
Henry Kaestner: Exactly. And so, JiNan, I first of all, thank you for joining the podcast. Really glad that you're here with us. And you're what I'd call an expert when it comes to intellectual property. And we're going to get a little bit more into your story a bit later in conversation today. But before we do that, can you provide us with some of the basics to start? What is intellectual property and why is it important?
JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, I love it, your start that everybody maybe has some, instead we maybe don't always steward it very well. Right. Ideas are an unlimited resource. We know that God gives us this unlimited resource to solve problems, to be creative, to produce art or music or anything else. The way that we generate intellectual property, these are actually a transformation of ideas into something that is more tangible, if you will. So with inventions which are solutions to problems, you can file patterns with names and logos. You can brand those as trademarks or service marks with written content or music or artistic creations. You can generate copyright assets. And the reason that's important is because they then become literally business assets, things that have value that you can transfer to other people and use as a part of the business. So intellectual property is a way of making more of just an idea, if you will.
Henry Kaestner: Okay, so what advice would you have for any I'll tell you, maybe a third of our listeners are US tech startups. Just maybe be as Rusty. William and I are based in Silicon Valley. To be clear, our audience is global and includes lots of different industries. And yet my sense is that IP impacts not just the tech world, but just help us to understand what advice would you have for any U.S.? I think tech startup, but really any startup looking to secure its patent portfolio.
JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, I think even before we get to patterns specifically is think about what do you do when you have the ideas, You have to document them, write them down, you know, and even the word tells us this You get a vision, write it down, make it plain so you can communicate to other people. Because most people having intellectual property, they don't make the impact on their own. You need other people to connect with it, right? So documenting it, being able to articulate it, write it down. It may be that it's better to be a trade secret than to be a pattern. So you can't really manage the idea just in your head. The first way that we transform ideas into reality is to write them or speak them. I mean, just in the way that God created the world. He called it out and we know that we're creating God's image and likeness. So our words have power and authority to create here on Earth. And with intellectual property, you're creating assets. So a tech startup, a scientific based startup, even a consumer products startup needs to document what's the problem you're solving, What's your creative solution to the problem? And then contrast and compare with what's already out there. These are kind of early steps to take. Once you identify something's different. I always say, What's your unique value proposition? What's the thing that makes you so different that you're better, that it is an improvement? That's what you put at the heart of intellectual property and patterns in particular.
Henry Kaestner: So you wrote a book called The IP Miracle. Tell us about that and then and then show it later on the podcast. I want to get a little bit more into kind of the how to and what you're seeing some of the technical aspects of what you're seeing over the course, the last ten years, etc.. But before we get there, you've actually written on this, right? And it's not just that you're a patent expert, but you've written on this with a faith lens on it, and you've tried something called the IP miracle. What does that mean?
JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, great question. So I started writing the book of really advice that I give to clients or they've been giving to clients, especially to entrepreneurs over the last 23 years, as a patent attorney, intellectual property attorney. Because what I found is that there are a lot of myths and misconceptions. So the first motivation was really to get the word out, get the truth out what's true about patent trademark and copyright and what's false? What do you have to do to protect them? What causes a trade secret to be valuable and how do you protect it? So it originated just with kind of, if you will, the deadly sins and how to avoid them. But as I began to work on that and also work with a really extraordinary editor, I realized that considering my audience as entrepreneurs, I wanted it to be more what to do, not just mistakes to avoid because they can be fatal to your company if you mess up the IP or the security stuff, right? So that's how it started. But as I got into it, I also realized thinking about the use cases and so many clients, this is exciting and it's extraordinary that you can create probably the most valuable assets of your company as intellectual property. You're really making these valuable assets out of your ideas and your words. And so that's where the IP miracle came from. It is an unlimited resource. Literally God's power working in us, that we just transform into these specific types of very valuable assets in a company, something that goes beyond just the revenue and profit you make. They can have a multiplying effect. We know God multiplies the talents we invest, right? These are those talents. That gives you a multiplier effect on valuation for your business.
Rusty Rueff: It's very encouraging that you're talking about us being creators because we are right. I mean, God is a creator. We're created in his image. Therefore we are creators. And I think so many people, you know, miss the concept because they might be in a job or in a company where it doesn't feel like, Oh, I have tons of intellectual property because I think we kind of go down the path of intellectual property. Oh, that's music. That's something someone wrote. It's a video game software. Now we all have this intellectual creativity that turns into property. You mentioned a couple of different terms that I'd just like you to clarify for our audience, because not everybody probably understands. so you use the word trade secret. And then you also use the word patent. Can you just tell us the difference?
JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, there's a huge difference, right? So, first of all, trade secrets, they have to be something you can keep secret. You don't just wave a wand and they are trade secrets. You have to document them. You have to have protocols and and procedures in place to ensure that whoever is aware of them or connects them or connects them, they can be made secret. Also, no one can reverse engineer it. Right. So a lot of people think, oh, are software algorithms that those can just be trade secret. Not necessarily if there's another way to do it to get to the same solution, then maybe it's not a good fit for that type of IP. So you still have to make an assessment there. A lot of software and tech companies are a little anti padded. I have found maybe especially on the West Coast, even though the largest companies all create IP assets and especially patterns, patents are different in this way from trade secret they publish. The whole point of the patent system is that you have to disclose to teach, to educate and train someone of ordinary skill how to make or use your invention. You're actually teaching it to the world and it will publish. In exchange for that, the US Patent Office and in every other country you have to file patents if you want them there gives you the right to exclude others and keep them out of your space so they function very differently. Patents only last for a maximum of 20 years from your priority date. Trade secrets can last indefinitely. They're kind of the opposite ends of the intellectual property spectrum. Does that make sense?
Rusty Rueff: Sure. So the Colonel's recipe for KFC is a trade secret?
JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah. If they can keep it. Coca-Cola also well known. But, you know, a lot of times it can also trade secrets can include your backend protocols of customer onboarding, even these things that may not seem like they're very important. If you have a particular ability to deliver value into a market that can't be detected, can't be reverse engineered, and it brings return to you that may be trade secret, might be your pricing models, it might be the data that you generate from your app or from your tech company. A lot of times, even hardware companies, maybe everything has a little bit of software, right? But if you've got a platform company, it may be that the data that they generate from providing services has more value as trade secrets, intellectual property than the patents covering their platform alone. The combination is the big winner.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, right, right, right. And you mentioned the reticence sometimes of the West Coast tech companies to go after patents. And I understand that coming out of the music space and and entertainment software, because, you know, it's hard, it's expensive. It takes a long time, you know, And it wasn't until, well, probably in the last ten years that even in Silicon Valley we had a patent office. Right. You know, we didn't have that before. But talk to us about why we should patent maybe when we don't need to. And then you've seen a change over the last ten years. There's definitely a changing landscape. So many new technologies, whether it's AI or nanotech or, you know, NFTs, right. Just give us your perspective of the landscape and when should we and when shouldn't we?
JiNan Glasgow George: Sure. It's a fair question, and I give the lawyer answer. It depends. Right. It's that unique value proposition that you have and the context around you. So the big mistake that many entrepreneurs and companies make is just to file everything. Okay. This is important to us. We should file a patent rather than pulling data around it to see how does this compare to everything else that's out there. So we always want to have that sense of what came before us, what's in the past, the prior art, and how differentiated we are from it, and can we detect and enforce it. Right? So these are questions that go into making the decisions about what to file and what not to file. So in the IP miracle, I talk a little bit about the mistake of filing everything and filing nothing. It's really should be a conscious choice about what will we do with it in our business. Know how you will use the asset in your business to generate revenue, increase market share and add value to the business. If you don't know how you'll use it, don't just file. So context data gives you a sense for that. And then really thinking of it as will this be important in our business and in what way, which competitors will it keep out? Because that's usually the main return on investment in patterns is if you make use, sell the invention and enjoy that exclusively in the market, right then you are bringing the value, your value pricing to market without the competition in that space. So it's a it's a business decision about an asset that you create through these legal mechanisms of IP.
Rusty Rueff: And what about people who are out there who just like troll for patents, They want to buy patents and then they just take them and they hang on to them waiting for some day to go and, you know, defend that patent against somebody who might be abusing it. How do you work with those folks?
JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, So, you know, it's kind of an interesting thing that a friend of mine was one of the eight people in the room when the term patent troll came into existence. And it was really developed by a big tech company who was being sued by someone else and was told they weren't allowed to call the company a patent terrorist anymore. So they had a competition internally and came up with patent troll. And it's such a negative term, it sounds really bad, but all it means really is that someone has the patent and maybe they did R&D, maybe they prototype, maybe their company wasn't able to commercialize it and yet held on to the patent. And in the future, either they or someone else determined there were large companies perhaps who were infringing were in their exclusive space and didn't have the right to be there. That enforceable right is transferable to a piece of property. And in a specialization economy like we are in the U.S., you should be able to create an asset with your idea, your invention, and transfer it to someone else so you can have a return on that and someone else in a better position than you to enforce. It can do that. And often times, you know, while there's much to do about patent trolls, large companies don't care about small ones. They don't really care about the patent. They care about their large competition. Think about big patent litigation, Apple versus Samsung. Right. That was not insignificant settlement, over $1,000,000,000, many, many, many millions spent on enforcement. It's because the profit per quarter is in the hundreds of millions of dollars in the smartphone market. That's what they're after is exclusivity to that. So if I'm a small inventor or a small company and I invent a solution that's valuable to Apple or Samsung, I should be able to sell it to either one or to a third party who will help enforce it. Right. Patents actually stimulate invention and innovation because they're published. This was the point of Jefferson, setting up the patent system is to exchange this teaching document. And so using patent data or monitoring what's happening, everyone can be aware of what exists and choose to avoid infringement or not. So the only reason there's something for a patent owner to troll to enforce is because others are infringing, not caring about it. You have to care about what you own. You have a house. We talked about a mortgage at the beginning. You have to care for it. You have to see that your yard has a fence, you have to keep it up. And the same is true with your intellectual property assets. You have to observe, manage, maintain, determine what's working and what isn't, and sometimes pivot. This goes from the smallest company to the largest. It's not about how many patents you have. It's the quality of the assets you have.
Rusty Rueff: Entrepreneurs. We're problem solvers, right? So why do so many of us ignore the biggest problems we face? Most of us feel isolated and we feel alone. Our mental health suffers. Our relationships suffer. We get bogged down by the pressures of running a business. But say, hey, it's just part of the job. It doesn't have to be that way. You see, we're not meant to be siloed. God designed us to do good work alongside others, and you can experience that kind of community with other like minded entrepreneurs through our Foundation Group series. This eight week course helps connect you with people who understand your struggles because they've been through them too. There's no cause and no catch. You can meet online or in person. Find out more at Faith Driven Entrepreneur dot org backslash groups. Now back to the show.
Henry Kaestner: So, Rusty, is this all coming back and I'm getting this? I mean, because when I talk to an entrepreneur and talk to them about the different things that entrepreneur wrestles with, that talk about customer acquisition, I talk about lifetime value, talking about capitalization, I talk about human resources in recruiting. And it usually in the top six or seven things I mention about what an entrepreneur will wrestle with. I will mention intellectual property, but we're well beyond 200 episodes and we have talked about it yet. And now I know because just as we're talking about it, this feeling of conflict and just there's some things like are just very black and white about being a faith driven entrepreneur. And I'll tell you what I mean. Here is second, you both are touching at this nuance and I want to expand on and even bring just gosh the scripture, inform us somehow in all of this. But, you know, Rusty, we can talk about and have seven or eight episodes on how important it is to have the mental health of an entrepreneur set, or how important is to love on family or how important it is to delight our customers. Those are great things without controversy, but this topic has some controversy. Let me tell you what I mean. I remember being at church in North Carolina, gosh, maybe 12 years ago, and I met a guy and I'd known him from kind of like small group type of stuff. And he wasn't in our small group, but just kind of small group planning, stuff like that. And I asked this guy said, So tell me what you do. And he said, And I'll leave the name of the big company out of it. But I worked for a big company and we have an intellectual property portfolio, and I go around and find other upstart companies there are infringing on our patent portfolio and I tell them they need to stop. And I remember having this visceral reaction of wanting to hit him. I didn't. That would have been completely inappropriate. And I did. It wasn't that bad, but I never had that feeling before. Like actually, you know, just being really troubled by what somebody did and just intuitively just feeling that's just wrong. And yet I was only seeing one part of it. I was missing the bigger picture. So I want to look at it because the other side is gosh I'm an entrepreneur and together with some friends, some business partners are just by myself. God is giving me some specific revelation or some sort of an idea about how to solve a problem or a product in the marketplace. And I'm really good at coming up with ideas, documenting them, trying to figure out how to make them work. But you know what? I'm not great at bringing something to market. Does that mean that the economy doesn't value me at all? Am I left out.
JiNan Glasgow George: Not at all.
Henry Kaestner: If I do all these different things that I don't have access to capital? Well, the answer, of course, as you know, is JiNan would say, not at all. Right. Like you just did. Right. So there's two opposite sides, which is one is, you know, encouraging intellectual property, encouraging the creative element, and on the other side, quelling it, remember. But can you help us? So you get to some of that nuance. You talked about the Thomas Jefferson thing, which is helpful for me because it's like, no, no, no. It's not meant to decrease innovation. It's meant to go ahead and say, I want to teach everybody what's going on out there. And so instead of it being a trade secret, I'm going to put it all out there. You can study on it and come up with your own new invention off of that, maybe. But help us understand some more of this nuance over this thing that I'm probably still a little conflicted on.
JiNan Glasgow George: Sure. If you think about it, a lot of entrepreneurs and small companies, they're terrified of someone stealing their idea, Right. That's the thing that prevents them from raising capital or going into the market trying to get an early customer because they're afraid if they tell it, they reveal it, then someone else will just steal it. And that is true because ideas are free unless you create intellectual property with them. So by doing, say, a patent instead of a trade secret, if it's appropriate, then that inventor maybe before they start, a company can go out and tell people about it because they have protected their exclusive right to enjoy that space, to enjoy that solution to the problem, so then they can talk about it and not necessarily have to have an NDA, a nondisclosure agreement, or a confidentiality agreement for every conversation. It lets them see how their piece of the puzzle connects into the bigger picture of the economy to make commercial impact. I mean, that's one of the things that drives me as a patent attorney in my work and our team is that we help innovators transform ideas into assets to make commercial impact. And, you know, they have the choice of letting them be freely available. Right. So Ben Franklin did this with many of his inventions, patented it so he could decide it's going to be in the public domain. But it's your choice, right? The other side of it, this idea of it like it stifles innovation. It's not really true because most inventions, most patent are improvements to things that are known. So without a patent system, everyone is really holding things confidentially and privately. And then the small companies have no leverage in the market, Right? Because even if they are first to market, the large company is always going to beat them on marketing, distribution, supply chain, anything else. Right. So it's kind of that miraculous asset that gives the early stage, even the inventor, some opportunity to monetize the idea. And there's a lot of different ways to do it, just like you can buy up a lot of property and never develop it and you still own it and you can still sell it. You may build something, then you sell the property and someone else tears it down, right? You have the ability to move the asset, to move the property around. So by creating some type of intellectual property asset, you have the ability to be compensated for what you create to tell others about it, knowing that you still have rights that can be monetized. Does that make sense?
Henry Kaestner: So this unfair question may be too provocative and you can push back on this. All right. But is it fair for a very large company? Like when I think about this, when I think about Apple and Samsung, I think about legions of attorneys, and I get that. And, you know, Qualcomm is all built on intellectual property and they've got all these attorneys. But I think about this innovative entrepreneur that all of a sudden gets a cease and desist order. He's been working on something really hard. And you know what? He doesn't have the legal resources to hire six people and do this kind of like prior art search. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the prior art search, you can comment on that, too. But so I'm working on something. All of a sudden, I get the cease and desist order and I'm thinking, wow, that big company is not even using that technology. And they went ahead and they purchased that intellectual property, or maybe they came up with it, but more likely, maybe they bought it because they've been buying a bunch of different companies. They're sitting on it. They're not actually it's not being used. And this small company got a cease and desist order and they just don't they can't lawyer up.
JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah. So I guess first of all, I always say most of the time, most of the time, notwithstanding your encounter with this other person, but most of the time, large companies are not monitoring the market for small entities to enforce IP rights against them. You know why? They don't care. It's not making a big enough impact in the market for them to monitor at that. I'm going to say low level, low revenue, low market share level. It's too small. It's still a business decision for a company to do that. They have the choice to do it, but they're not typically going to monitor until it hits a level where it's on their business radar and then they'll go for it. If it ends up being, as you provided in this hypothetical, that it is a pattern as that maybe it came through a merger and acquisition and they've got a group of patents, maybe it's not even one, it's a small group of patents. They're not using it. What do entrepreneurs do? Solve problems. It looks bad, but actually that's an invitation to license. Wouldn't they rather monetize an asset than let it sit there and be a cost to maintain? Absolutely. I mean, Big Pharma does this occasionally. You could approach them and say, I want to work on this really small special disease area. You have patents on it. I'd like to license them. That's a deal that can be had. So I think turn it to the other side. If you got a C and D letter and you know that the other companies not using the IP offer to license and problem solved. Right. So I try to keep clients out of court. I do think litigation can be necessary at times, but it's a distraction from a core business.
Rusty Rueff: So I want to go one more time on this, but I'm going to go to another angle for you, because I've experienced this in real life sitting on a patent. You've got this patent. You're working really hard on the technology on top of this patent. And then all of a sudden big companies start infringing on your patent and they're starting to do what you're doing and you're a little startup. You don't have any legal resources and you look at it and you go, Whoa, whoa, whoa. I own the patent for that. And you write the letters, you make the calls, you know, whoever the guy is that's sitting there doing cease and desist letters, doesn't have a phone to answer, doesn't respond to emails, doesn't do any of that, because that's a gnat on my ankle and I don't care about them. But yet, for the young entrepreneur company, this young company, that's a big deal. That's my patent that you're infringing on.
JiNan Glasgow George: I think it's good news. Here's why that means that they have impacted revenue from your patent it. So again they might not care about you but they're going to care about each other. So if there's a group of companies that are all in this area because that solution resonates in the marketplace and they're making returns on that, they're doing product or service operating on it, then go to several of them. And suggest that they acquire your company or license from you. You don't have to be an enforcement campaign, but you can say, look at what you've done. If you've made traction in the market, you've got something else to offer them. This happens really pretty regularly. That innovation happens in the entrepreneurial venture, not the larger companies. A lot of great innovation happens small, and it's acquired here. We'll even think of a case that our company, we use our own patent forecast software to use data to map everything. And we were monitoring Fitbit and the activity of Google and Apple in the market. But Fitbit had invested in patterns, invested in patterns and developed a pretty overtime commanding position there. And neither Apple nor Google had it, but they're competing with each other. So we were calling that a year ahead of the acquisition by Google, because the patents can stimulate the urgency for the acquisition. They can stimulate the higher value because you can only build your portfolio over time. You can't ever go back in time if you're a big company and the small guys started first, you have to buy and build to get that footprint. The timestamp of your filing is really valuable. So this is why acting on it in a timely way to create a valuable asset, you actually want there to be large competitors who come into your zone. I always say, own your zone, right? They come into your zone and you get to decide who plays. If you have good business terms, you can have more monetization. It may even be the door opening to your exit.
Henry Kaestner: I think that's very helpful. Okay. Tell me as Christ follower being in this industry as you spent time on God's Word, what are some of the different things that you see in his word that do speak to the space that God has you in?
JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, well, one thing about creating is I find that people create from a place of joy, right? So you can't be in a dispute. We're fighting people and create valuable things. Most of the time the energy comes from joy, and so we actually really have a good time getting to know our clients and work with them in that creative space by stimulating what they have with the data that we put around it. So it's not then only what they have come up with, but we ask questions. What else could you change? How could you expand this? So we actually work with entrepreneurs and innovative companies to create more valuable IP assets than they would have done on their own. So that's part of what we do is co labor a collaborate and use our words for the building up for the encouragement. Right. And to add value in. So that's part of my point of view as a Christ follower being in this space. And then also to help people see the possibility, right, to realize that we are here to be a good steward of this and to see all of the potential, maybe not only that initial piece that we think I'm going to own this, what's the greater good? How do we use that asset to impact more broadly in the space? I find it delightful actually, to also be able to work from high tech to biotech. So we see all these invention solutions from the science areas, consumer products and, you know, even high tech blockchain A.I. like we work with all types of inventors. And the thing that I see is the joy they get from creating. So we're helping them with these core assets of their business. I really like that. I use it as an opportunity to minister again, to encourage and to help them see that it's really an unlimited resource. We do get the calls from our clients where they say we have a competitor, we have this thing, and I always try to encourage that. We look at what's the resolution, what's the solution? It looks like a competitor. It may be a greater opportunity to grow. We had actually a client recently in the tech space who's founder and CEO thought this other company is a big competitor. And I never saw at all of the data and things that we had. And after that person left and a new person came in, what we realized it wasn't true at all. Right? So sometimes people can have blinders on that prevent them from seeing a bigger picture, to see a bigger impact. And I see that as part of our role is to counsel, to guide and to help people see the whole picture, the possibility.
Rusty Rueff: Hey, JiNan, before we jump to we have a lot of fun when we get to the lightning round. And I know we're going to do that soon here. But you didn't just fall into this. You didn't wake up one day and become an IP expert. You've got a background. Why don't you run us through how you got into this business? You know what fascinate you about staying in it?
JiNan Glasgow George: Sure. Thanks. I always introduced myself as a recovered engineer. I had a first career in new product development and research and development with an industrial company creating new products, literally turning ideas into physical things and doing some patenting. And I enjoyed that in that industry. But I always was feeling like kind of called to do something else. And so I talked to a lot of people, you know, surround yourself by many wise advisors and, you know, pray for wisdom and vision. And I then realized patent law was the right thing. I wanted to help create new impact, but do it with words. And as I was going through that application to law school, I thought, all right, I'm going to take a break from my career, from working change career. What else is really important to me? And I had the opportunity to apply also to study theology at Duke Divinity School. So my engineering from NC State in the Triangle in Raleigh, North Carolina. My law from UNC in Chapel Hill. And then I did study theology at Duke, and it was one of the best things I ever did for myself to really understand more deeply the word spirituality. And I also focused on bioethics there. So it was a true get a gift to help launch what I'm doing everybody said, So how are you going to use that MTS in your law practice? And I thought, How am I not going to use it? Everything we're doing is spiritual here. It's just, you know, maybe that goes to my unique take on it. Another way that it kind of affected the route that I took was that as I was traveling, I think I told you the story. Henry, briefly on an entrepreneur organization trip in Japan, I took a week off. I had a lot of stress and things going on. I took a vacation and just meditate, pray, eat well, do yoga, walk, you know, just be in the world, not connected to things. My own things that I owned, my family, people that I was around. And I had kind of an epiphany then and it was go to Africa and help transform economies. And I thought, Oh, Lord, what am I going to do in Africa? I'm a patent attorney. Nobody files patents in Africa and like short circuit that I just started sharing it with people. This is I feel like I'm going to do this. I had a word and less than six months later I was boots on the ground in Ghana helping a fund who was investing in tech companies there. I'm like, I can do that. And I got another piece to the puzzle, if you will, like my own path putting together step by step. It's a progression, this epiphany of patent data, right? Every patent is an inventive solution to a problem, but it's country by country. If nobody files patents in Ghana or Mexico or whatever, it's a very small number every year. That means all of these solutions are freely available for entrepreneurs to use. It's like free R&D research and development free solutions. It can be for anything like packaging, food processing, water bottling, well drilling. It can also be it for Internet edge computing data centers. I mean, you literally can it can be for sewage drainage. Any problem has all of these great solutions, right? Great solutions that are freely available because of this? Disclose it, teach it. I think I could teach your heart. So maybe that's the other thing that affected by careers. I love teaching students. I volunteer at High Point University and NC State University and high schools too. I like to stimulate that next generation inventor.
Henry Kaestner: That's very cool. So I love that. I love that you've taken and I guess I would hope that a take away. I think there are a bunch of takeaways from here. I think we have a much more nuanced, textured look at intellectual property and how to look at things from kind of a glass half full perspective. And I spent some amount of my time looking at it from a glass half negative, which is big company, kind of, you know, hold back innovation from a smaller company. And I think that you've helped me understand that much differently. So I'm grateful for that. I also but one of the other things that I hope is a big takeaway from our guest is you have this background in intellectual property and patents, and yet you felt a call to go to the nations and it wasn't completely clear how God would use you, and yet God used you. And I think that that's an invitation that's open to all of us. And I love that you leaned into that. That's super encouraging. Okay, we're going to do Lightning Round. Rusty is going to finish this out. I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to throw a couple at you. Rusty is going to close out and then he's going to fill in for William here at the very, very end. Okay. You have degrees from Duke, Carolina and NC State. You teach at a high point. Your son goes to High Point, who I met at the conference?
JiNan Glasgow George: And my daughter. Yeah.
Henry Kaestner: And your daughter to. College basketball. Who you root for?.
JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah. Fair question. I always start with my alma mater. Start with state, and then if it's in the March Madness, you know, once they're out, I just move on through my list. There's always somebody at the end. Oh, man, I always have somebody. But NC State is my first.
Henry Kaestner: That makes sense. Undergraduate Okay, I'm with you. Okay. Is it your maiden name is Glasgow?
JiNan Glasgow George: It is.
Henry Kaestner: Have you been there?
JiNan Glasgow George: I have my husband and I have been golfing twice in Scotland and visited Glasgow. But I love the country of Scotland. It's just so beautiful. Yeah. Good people, Beautiful landscape, good golf.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. My ethnicity is Scottish as well. Okay. As a mom, tell us in your audience a time which you were able to be on mission and maybe just in the house, but what's a special God moment as a parent where you experience God's love for you and your family together as a family?
JiNan Glasgow George: Well, there's a lot for sure, but, you know, most of the times it's just the daily things that we do that are special moments that accumulate with our children. And I participate in a daily morning prayer call. Like Bonhoeffer says, the prayer of the morning determines the day. And I lead facilitate the intercessory prayer call on Mondays and my kids hear it. They listen. They know that I pray every day. I pray the word. They know that I read every day. And I think that that's probably the most important cumulative God moment that we have is that when we pray together and that they know that it's so important to me, I could be making money instead of doing that first thing every day. It's more important to start the day with the word and praying for other people because God perfects everything that concerns us. So we're free to pray for others, help them solve their problems.
Rusty Rueff: Amen. So two quick lightning rounds for me and then we'll go to close. Coolest invention or IP that you ever got a chance to work on?
JiNan Glasgow George: Oh, I can't say it's too many. There's too many because we do high tech, too biotech. But we have done amazing solutions that improve communication. We've done things that improve water quality. We have done things that improve how we handle energy. The electric power grid. Inventions that are really fascinating communications, wireless comm, diabetes treatments, it is too many to pull out one. They're all important in their own way.
Rusty Rueff: All right. And then the book title, IP Miracle. Yes. It's your intellectual property. You come up with that by yourself or is that a trade secret? Did somebody else come up with that?
JiNan Glasgow George: Well, it's no secret. It's out right on Amazon everywhere. No, it's just reflecting my point of view on the abundant resource that ideas are and that it is miraculous that we create assets from ideas. That's miraculous. It's amazing. And usually the most valuable asset. So that's where it came from. It is a miracle. I think it is God's power. Working in us does infinitely more than we ask or imagine. It's a miracle.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, absolutely.
Henry Kaestner: Is a well-known trade secret like the ultimate business oxymoron?
JiNan Glasgow George: Doesn't exist? I think.
Rusty Rueff: Okay, so, William, if he's here with us today, he usually does this. This is his own patented question. But I get to do it today, which is always great. So we always like to close out the episode with hearing from our guests, you know, what is God teaching you right now? You know, what have you found in God's word that just stuck with you recently?
JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, I'm really meditating on Ephesians right now and the [....], what I pray for capacity that God's going to give me wisdom and perception of what's revealed. Right? Because wisdom is the principal thing. And so I'm really meditating on that right now. The Ephesians chapter one and then chapter two, remembering that we are God's work of art, we're created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has already designated to make up our way of life. In Ephesians three, that it's his power working in us that does infinitely or we ask or imagine. Ephesians four that we're walking up rightly in our calling with humility, gentleness, patience then, and that we have unity, we pray for unity and Ephesians five, that we try to discover what God wants of us. What He wants for us is higher than what we want. And Ephesians six, we're well equipped with all spiritual armor, I am into Ephesians right now in a big way.
Henry Kaestner: I love it, I love it. So we're going to close our. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for being part of this. We're going to close out with a quick blessing and benediction and prayer for the faith driven audience. For this reason, we kneel before the father from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. We pray that out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you the Faith Driven Entrepreneur with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And we pray that you being rooted in established and love may have power together with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
JiNan Glasgow George: Amen Ephesians three go in for.
Henry Kaestner: Indeed, JiNan and great being with you. Thank you.
JiNan Glasgow George: Thank you. God bless.