Patent lawyers, like undertakers, generally have the decorum not to gloat when business is good, but, boy, these days it must be hard for them to keep quiet. Lately, there seem to be more patent lawsuits under way or threatened than at any other time I can remember. And that leads me to wonder, Don't the companies filing these lawsuits have anything better to do?

The obvious answer is yes, they do. Despite difficult economic times, today's high tech companies need to remember their core mission: to bring better products and services to market. Innovation and problem solving play central roles. Equally important is how these organizations pick the problems they will address. With that in mind, I interrupt my normally scheduled program-exposing intellectual-property shenanigans-to bring you a hopeful message about creative problem solving.

As a case in point, I give you physicist Joshua Silver. A University of Oxford experimentalist and self-described "tinkerer," Silver had a successful academic career in atomic physics, as well as consulting work for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. With a good working knowledge of optics and, as he says, "the hopes of making piles of money," he undertook some commercial research in the mid-1990s with cosmetics maker Este Lauder: development of a cheap mirror a user could adjust to magnify his or her reflection.

While he was experimenting with prototypes of mirrors and lenses, Silver found a way to adjust the lenses' focus. By varying the amount of silicone oil between two flexible membranes, Silver realized he could effectively change their curvature. The potential for his research hit home when he took off his own glasses (Silver is myopic) and discovered he could see clearly through his crude lenses.