Micron patent expert Kaveri Jain

Kaveri Jain was just 26 and pursuing PhD at the University of Iowa in 2003 when she filed her first patent. But the big acceleration in Kaveri’s innovation journey came after she joined memory and storage solutions provider Micron in the US in 2005.

Kaveri, who is a chemical engineering graduate from Panjab University and who now works at Micron’s Hyderabad office, has filed over 70-80 disclosures and has her name on 27 patents.

She clearly remembers the day when the idea for her first patent at Micron – Methods of forming a reversed pattern in a substrate – was conceived in the office cafeteria and completely changed the picture she had about patents being something complex, involving ground breaking technology.

“I was sitting with my manager in the cafeteria and telling him I can’t understand how to fix this (problem), but I have this thought. It was a simple thought about a small addition in the semi-circuit line. He said let’s capture the thought immediately. He picked up a napkin, drew that thought, signed his name, made me sign, and made a colleague, who was eating at the table, a witness.”

That patent led to reducing the number of steps it takes to make the chip and also improved its performance. That experience helped her get insights into the patenting process and provided her biggest learning – any idea you have, however silly it seems, don’t discard it.

“Initially I would do that thinking it’s stupid or someone else would have done it, but that was wrong. Not every idea may be of business value, but that does not mean it’s not a good idea,” she says.

She also remembers an invention where they just drew it on the drawing board, clicked a picture of it, and handed it over with a couple of lines on a slide to the internal committee at Micron. “So, it can be as simple as that. You don’t have to write everything, as we have patent lawyers to draft it and file it.”

Another valuable lesson she learnt along the way was that small changes sometimes lead to bigger ones that have far reaching implications over time, resulting in profits of millions of dollars.

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