A better fish ladder?

Central Oregon man thinks his invention is a winner, but marketing it isn't easy

By David Fisher / The Bulletin

Central Oregon inventor Mark Rubbert believes he has designed a miracle for Pacific Northwest fish.

He says his design for a huge, floating, flexible, fish-collecting, water-distributing machine - a modification of the $62 million monster that PGE engineers have already designed for the Round Butte Dam at Lake Billy Chinook - could help millions of little smolts get safely around the region's hydroelectric dams, open hundreds of miles of rivers to salmon and steelhead again and shave millions of dollars in costs from PGE's existing designs.

His design, Rubbert is convinced, could affect the lives of millions of people by improving their environment, saving the region's dams and lowering the ultimate cost of their power.

Rubbert, a Brothers-area rancher and charter boat captain, has shipped his drawings to the U.S. Patent Office for approval of a patent that he hopes will not just save fish, but make him millions someday.

But now he faces the biggest challenge that most inventors face: Who do you sell this thing to?

In his case, the market pretty much boils down to people who build or own mega-expensive dams. With fish swimming toward them.

If, that is, they're under pressure to save the fish or lose their dam. And if - a big if - Rubbert's design is precisely the tool that's needed to fit the configurations of their dams, and is precisely the tool that's needed to fix the particular problems faced by each river's particular runs of fish.

In other words, the ultimate job of an inventor - getting the great idea built - can be a daunting task. Even - and, perhaps, especially - if it's a really BIG idea.

"That's one of the hardest parts," Rubbert said Wednesday, hoping that the right people would notice his idea in the newspaper and call him. "Everybody thinks inventing it and patenting it is the tough part. But no. It's marketing it."

The 10th percentile

There is no shortage of inventiveness out there.

More than 196,000 new patents were issued to Americans in 2006, according to the U.S. Patent Office, up 24.5 percent from the year before.

Oregon accounted for 2,536 of those, according to the Patent Office - about on a par with Colorado and North Carolina, but well short of California, the nation's leader with 25,043 patents issued in 2006, and the two closest runners-up, Texas, with 6,717, and New York, with 6,407.

Most patents are issued to groups who are associated in one way or another with universities, state- or corporate-funded research consortiums and corporations. But more than 29,300 of the patents issued in 2006 were issued to individual inventors, according to the Patent Office, with 326 issued to people who lived in Oregon.

How many will result in actual products, produced and sold in the marketplace?

Fewer than 10 percent, by most estimates.

Even though it can cost several thousand dollars to acquire one - even a simple one - "90 percent of patents go nowhere," said Bonnie Griffin Kaake, a Colorado-based marketing consultant for new product developers and the acting executive director of the United Inventors Association, a New York-based group that provides support and information to 10,000 individual inventor-members worldwide.

"You can frame it and put in on your wall and brag about it at your next cocktail party, but it's an expensive piece of artwork," she said. "Unless an inventor learns to think like an entrepreneur, it's a hobby."

Just getting a typical patent can cost $5,000 to $10,000, Kaake said. Defending one in court can easily cost $500,000. Or more.

To Kaake, who cut her teeth in new product development and marketing with General Electric, thinking like an entrepreneur means concentrating on ideas that are both defensible - sometimes against ruthless raiders who figure they can knock off ideas from poorly funded patent owners with impunity - and marketable, which means they have a clearly definable potential customer base that's large enough to make the whole process worthwhile.

In other words, it's got to work, it's got to be different enough to truly warrant a patent, and it's got to make enough money to attract interest, Kaake said - preferably, enough money to pay for the lawyers it might take to defend it.

Once all that research is in place, it's time to find the companies who might realistically want to buy the patent or license it for production, Kaake said. Doing that requires the ability to boil the invention and its virtues down to a simple sales pitch that can be understood by the typical nonengineer CEO - a skill that most inventors lack.

Then, finally - the sales pitch has to happen, and it has to work.

All of the above - and not any lack of genuine inventiveness - is what trips up most inventors, said Louis Foreman, publisher of the Charlotte, N.C.-based Inventors Digest magazine and owner of a company that buys and designs new products for a variety of markets.

"The classic mistake that most inventors make is they don't quantify the opportunity prior to the financial investment," Foreman said. "So they quit the job, cash in the 401(k), take a mortgage out on the house, pay for the patent, and then discover that they can't sell enough of these things to even break even."

There are plenty of predators out there willing to "help" an aspiring inventor cash in.

The Federal Trade Commission won a $26 million award in March 2006 from Davison & Associates Inc. and three of its officers - the largest amount yet levied on an invention marketing company - for allegedly milking thousands of dollars apiece in marketing and development revenue from amateur inventors on the overhyped promise that their products could succeed.

In a separate case, the FTC filed a civil contempt action against four individuals and eight invention-promotion businesses earlier this year, alleging that they violated previous court orders to stop deceptively marketing their services.

There's legitimate help out there as well.

The Central Oregon Inventors Group, stratusceo@aol.com, gets local inventors together once a month to hear from speakers and learn from one another.

The United Inventors Association, www.uiausa.org, which grew out of meetings held in the early 1990s by the U.S. Department of Energy to foster help for independent inventors, maintains a list of pre-vetted patent attorneys and invention marketers, along with advice on its Web page and links to other organizations.

The National Inventor Fraud Center Inc., www.inventorfraud .com, sponsored by a Fargo, N.D., law office, posts advice and links to FTC actions against shady actors in the invention promotion field.

And then there's the American Investor's Protection Act, which requires companies that market inventions help to provide potential clients with information they can use to check out their effectiveness and reliability, such as the number of clients they have agreed to represent versus the number of clients who have contacted them in the last five years; the number who have actually profited from their inventions; and references to clients who have profited.

Rubbert's design

In Rubbert's case, the marketing hasn't gotten far yet.

Rubbert's design is an extensive modification of a project that PGE has already spent millions to develop for the Round Butte Dam, one of a series of dams on the Des-chutes River it owns with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.

At Lake Billy Chinook, the reservoir that backs up behind the Round Butte Dam, young salmon and steelhead have a hard time getting around the dam to get back downstream to feed and grow in the ocean. The problem apparently has to do with the water - warmer water, where the fish swim, sits on top of frigid water at the bottom of the reservoir. Young fish tend to swirl aimlessly in the twirling currents at the top, never finding the currents that would take them to safety. And warm water at the top of the dam needs to be mixed with the cold water at the bottom, where the turbine intakes are, to keep temperatures in the river below regulated to fish-friendly levels.

Since none of that is happening now, the dams have pretty much killed off salmon and steelhead runs to the Upper Deschutes over the 50 years they have been there.

The PGE-Warm Springs project, slated to start construction toward the end of this summer, would mount a floating fish catcher on top of a 270-foot, semi-flexible tube attached to the turbines at the bottom. The tube would draw warm water from the top and cold from the bottom, mixing it to form the right temperatures after the water flows through the dam to produce electricity. The fish catcher, meanwhile, would funnel fish into a sorting facility, where they would be loaded in trucks and driven around the dams to continue their treks downstream.

The project has environmentalists excited enough to be launching projects to improve long unused salmon and steelhead habitat above the dams, but Rubbert says he has a better way of doing it that could make the PGE-Warm Springs fish machine adaptable to a lot more dams.

His design would include a more flexible tube, possibly made of heavy-duty corrugated plastic or telescoping tube pieces that would slide inside each piece below, allowing for more sideways movement in the water, better earthquake resistance, and more potential up-and-down movement as the water rises and falls.

His fish catcher would be attached with a slip ring, which would allow the dams handlers to point it in a broad range of directions to create the desired currents wherever the fish are.

He has designed what he says is an improved housing to connect the tube to the turbines. And he has designed a modular approach to building fish ladders, which he says could make the process of building one much cheaper, whether it's built at Lake Billy Chinook or at some other place.

Rubbert sold electrical equipment for a few years for General Electric after he got his master's degree in mechanical engineering in the 1980s. After that, he carved a niche business for himself by harvesting big trees out of yards around the Seattle area, figuring inventive ways to maneuver mostly aging giants around homes and fences before they blew down and crushed something.

Life after that brought him to the 9,000-acre ranch he's running today with his wife between Brothers and the Prineville Reservoir.

How it all started

An avid hunter and fisherman, Rubbert said his mind started spinning on the PGE-Warm Springs fish machine after he attended a public meeting a few years ago.

So far, he said he has briefly talked with one of PGE's lead engineers about his design, but the talks haven't really gone anywhere. The Bonneville Power Administration's engineers told him they liked it but didn't have much use for it because they believe their fish systems are working OK now.

He says he's tried to do some guerrilla marketing: He's tried to contact a National Marine Fisheries biologist to try to sell the biologist on the design's merits in hopes that an NMR staffer would put a bug in a dam owner's ear about buying a fish-moving machine that could be built fairly cheaply and meet federal fish goals, but so far those attempts have stalled in a game of phone tag.

And he's tried to contact attorneys and staffers involved in the lawsuits that currently threaten to close at least eight Pacific Northwest dams if their fish movement doesn't improve. So far, those contacts haven't brought him much.

PGE, for its part, doesn't seem enthused.

"All I can say at this point is we have had preliminary discussions with Mr. Rubbert and those discussions did not lead to us seeking a design from him," PGE spokes-man Mark Fryburg said Thursday.

Rubbert, meanwhile, said he has no plans to quit the farm or the charter fishing business he runs to pursue his fish machine dream. But he's not giving up either. The next step, he says, may be to file a Freedom of Information Act on some of the big dam owners to find out who they have used to do their engineering design work in the past, so he can contact those firms to sell his patent - assuming it is finally granted - or license it.

"Everybody I can talk to, I will," Rubbert said Wednesday. "You throw enough at the wall and something will stick. Right?"

David Fisher can be reached at 617-7862 or at dfisher@bendbulletin.com.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted
material  herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have
expressed  a  prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit
research and  educational purposes only. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

Source:  http://www.bendbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070506/

BIZ0102/705060303/1008&nav_category=