Jon Dudas was director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from 2005-2009. Afterward, while working as a partner in a private D.C. law firm, famed U.S. inventor Dean Kamen made Dudas an offer he couldn’t refuse – take over as president of FIRST or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, an international youth robotic competition. Dudas is now the point man for an organization devoted to inspiring young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. We’re down with that. And Dudas was down with taking time out of his busy schedule to chat with us.
ID: What’s a typical day like for you at FIRST?
JD: It’s probably as difficult as talking about a typical day at the USPTO, because each day is dramatically different.
I’m working with kids and doing strategic planning. I spend a lot of time talking with sponsors and working with our staff of about 100 and how to get the most impact for kids across the country. I also spend a lot of time looking at policy. So in a lot of ways it’s like what I was doing at the Patent and Trademark Office.
But our larger vision is to change the culture so that becoming engineers, inventors and collaborators will be as celebrated as much as sports figures and Hollywood entertainers are.
ID: How did you fall into Kamen’s orbit?
JD: I got involved with FIRST while at the Patent and Trademark Office. I asked Dean Kamen if he’d serve on our Patent Public Advisory Committee. He said, ‘Great, why don’t you come to a FIRST event?’
I had never heard of FIRST. I thought, ‘This will be easy. I’ll go to a FIRST event and check off that obligation.’
I went to a championship in Atlanta and saw there were tens of thousands of kids doing really meaningful things. It looked like the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament. And I quickly realized that from a USPTO policy perspective that this was something we needed to get behind. And we needed to do more about promoting inventing and collaboration.
And selfishly, at the USPTO we were hiring 1,200 engineers a year. It was getting difficult to find the right people. I thought, ‘Boy, if we can tap into this organization … that would be great’.
ID: So, what’s the best part of the job?
JD: Waking up knowing that what we’re doing is making an impact. No matter how bad your day is, we’re making an impact on innovation and helping kids. At the USPTO, I thought it was incredibly impactful to help inventors make things. Here at FIRST, we’re using robots and events to make inventors.
ID: Now the flip-side – what’s the most challenging aspect of the job?
JD: We have 90,000 volunteers and 250,000 kids involved and all of them are incredibly passionate about the goals of FIRST. But sometimes their views can be diametrically opposed about how we accomplish those goals. With that many people passionately supporting kids, determining what’s the best way forward and explaining to everyone why we’re making certain decisions can be challenging at times.
ID: What’s different this year than in years past?
JD: Well, we moved the championship to St. Louis, from Atlanta. The St. Louis venue had seating for more than 70,000. And we also for the first time incorporated the FIRST Tech Challenge, which uses smaller robots, and the FIRST Robotics Competition. The competition incorporates the smaller robots – the big robots deploy the smaller ones.
Visit www.usfirst.org
Editor’s note: This article appears in the June 2011 print edition.
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