Earlier this summer, LuminAID issued a press release to announce that it had been issued a patent grant from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office which covers its inflatable solar-powered LED technology. The patent is U.S. Patent No. 9347629, issued under the title Inflatable Solar-Powered Light. The inflatable solar-powered light claimed in this patent has an expandable bladder and a solar-powered light assembly positioned on a plastic surface and having a circuit board, a rechargeable battery, a solar panel and at least one LED; the plastic covering the solar panel and other components is both substantially transparent and waterproof.
As the patent’s background section notes, one of every six people in this world lack access to stable electricity. Often, people without access to electricity will use kerosene, a dangerous and toxic substance that can cost up to 30 percent of a person’s income in underdeveloped regions. This solar-lighting solution achieves the favorable outcomes of being easy to transport while eliminating recurring energy costs as well as the limited resources of non-rechargeable batteries.
The product hasn’t just attracted media attention from the likes of CNET and Popular Science, however. It also has wooed the financial backing of Mark Cuban, one of the regular business investors featured on hit reality TV show Shark Tank. According to reports from The Chicago Tribune, Cuban invested $200,000 which LuminAID’s founders were planning to use on financing expansion of their sales team and to launch new products.
LuminAID may not be a household name in America but it is making its presence felt in more than 70 countries. A group of humanitarian organizations have been using LuminAID products in their operations including ShelterBox, Médecines Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and the United Nations Population Fund. This January, business magazine Entrepreneur was reporting that LuminAID had completed $2 million in sales through the first nine months of 2015.
The LuminAID story is also interesting because both of the named inventors are women. Specifically, the ‘629 patent issued to LuminAID only lists co-founders Anna Stork and Andrea Sreshta as inventors. This is noteworthy because, despite great strides over the last 35 years, women still significantly lag behind men with respect to patenting.
Although the number of patents issued to women inventors still pales in comparison to patents issued to male inventors, the number of patented women inventors has quadrupled over the last three decades. Still, fewer than 20% of patents have at least one woman inventor. Further, a 2012 working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that women held a very small percentage of intellectual property assets, including only 5.5 percent of commercialized patents; the study also noted that there was very little difference in patenting rates among women with science or engineering degrees and women without those degrees.
“They are doing amazing things to help disaster stricken areas,” Cuban explained via e-mail when reached for comment.
Tags: LED, Mark Cuban, patent, patents
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