Inventive Minds honors employees for patents

The rain didn’t put a damper on this year’s Cook Inc. Inventive Minds banquet at French Lick Resort, which took place the weekend of June 9.

This event is designed to recognize those in Engineering who contributed to issued patents during the previous year. Those being honored receive an aluminum

Lego^®1-like building block with their name, the year, and the patent on it. Other Cook companies host similar events throughout the year, including Cook Ireland, Cook Australia, William Cook Europe, Cook Winston-Salem, Cook Research, Cook Biotech, and Cook Advanced Technology.

According to Dan Kaiser, vice president of Research & Development, some form of this event has been happening for the past 20 years. Originally, the group being honored was small, but throughout the years it has grown. Dan joined Cook in 2017 and that year the appreciation dinner was held in The Hall of Champions at the Indiana University football stadium.

“It’s critical to the future of Cook that we continue to innovate and spend the time to patent our ideas. This takes quite a bit of effort by the individuals honored and a great way to recognize their contributions,” Dan said.

This year, around 200 people, including Cook Inc. engineers and their guests, were invited. The event featured dinner, a Cook-history themed trivia contest hosted by Tom Osborne, and guest speaker Tim Diedrich from Callaway Golf.

“He talked about the golf industry, how they innovate, how they remain relevant, and some of the challenges that they have in short product life cycles,” Dan said. “Every year they have to bring something out and they could commiserate with some of our challenges in healthcare. It was a neat perspective on how they did it as a company and how it drove their growth.”

Below is a gallery of photos from the evening. Photos are courtesy of Doug Wright, Archival specialist at Park 48.

¹Lego is a registered trademark of Lego Group.