An inventor’s foundation — for a building that produces inventors
Jerome Lemelson worked alone in an attic in New Jersey for forty years. Notebooks by the thousands. Patent applications written by hand. Twelve to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. His wife Dorothy supported the family while Jerry invented. He received an average of one patent per month for four decades. Nearly all of them were sole-inventor work. He never employed a team. He never had an institutional lab. He had a room.
In Tacoma, Washington, a man with forty-four invention concepts evaluated through a proprietary methodology is building the room Jerome never had. Not an incubator. Not an accelerator. A five-station maker continuum with an invention pipeline running through it — from the hand tool on the workbench to the robot that demonstrates manufacturing proof for a patent filing. The building exists because the attic shouldn’t have to.
The Lemelson Foundation funds InvenTeams that inspire high school students. It funds the $500,000 MIT Prize that celebrates mid-career inventors. It funds Regional Ecosystems in Oregon that connect entrepreneurship to community. What it has not yet funded is the room where all of those threads converge — where a person walks in off the street, picks up a tool, and follows a five-station progression that ends with a credentialed skill, a filed patent, and a robot-demonstrated prototype. That room is being built one hundred fifty miles north of the Foundation’s headquarters, on the same interstate.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
The Lemelson Foundation holds rank seventeen because no other organization on the CrowdSmith List was built by an inventor, for inventors, with the explicit mission of cultivating the next generation of people who do what the founder did alone. CrowdSmith is not adjacent to that mission. It is the physical expression of it. Jerome Lemelson’s attic, institutionalized, opened to the public, and connected to a credential system, a patent pipeline, and a workforce board. One hundred fifty miles of I-5 separate the Foundation’s headquarters from the building site. The proximity is structural, geographic, and biographical.
1993, by Jerome “Jerry” Lemelson and Dorothy “Dolly” Lemelson. Incorporated in Portland, Oregon.
Jerome Hal Lemelson (1923–1997). Born Staten Island, New York. 605 U.S. patents. Second only to Thomas Edison among American independent inventors by patent count. Inventions span industrial robots, machine vision, bar-code technology, VCR components, camcorder technology, cordless telephones, fax machine elements, automated warehousing systems, and toys. Worked exclusively as an independent inventor from 1957 until his death. Filed nearly forty patent applications in his final year while undergoing cancer treatment.
Dorothy “Dolly” Lemelson (née Ginsberg). Parsons School of Design graduate. Interior designer and business owner. Supported the family financially for years while Jerry pursued independent invention.
Rob Schneider — Executive Director (since October 2021). Previously Senior Director of Strategy at the Foundation; prior to that, Division Chief for Global Partnerships at USAID, where he created and managed the PACE initiative. MBA and Master of Urban Planning, University of Michigan. BS Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois.
Robert Lemelson, Ph.D. — President. Anthropologist (UCLA), filmmaker, co-president of the Foundation. Son of Jerome.
Eric Lemelson — Vice President and Treasurer. Son of Jerome.
Portland, Oregon. 150 miles south of Tacoma on I-5.
Approximately $16 million across 60+ grants (2023). Over $350 million invested since founding.
Jerome Lemelson’s attic was a sprawling room on the top floor of his New Jersey home. Notebooks by the thousands. Legal pads. Half-finished patent applications. Magazines from every field he could absorb. His sons explored the shelves and closets, surrounded by the evidence of their father’s ever-active mind. Jerry worked twelve to eighteen hours a day, writing, sketching, and filing applications almost entirely without outside counsel. His brother recalled that after they went to sleep as college roommates, the light would come on several times during the night, and in the morning there would be pages of new inventions. This happened every night, seven days a week.
He quit his last employer — a smelting plant in New Jersey — because they refused to implement safety improvements he believed could save lives. He never worked for anyone again. From 1957 until his death in 1997, he received an average of one patent per month. He turned down a research division leadership position at IBM because he wanted to remain independent. He earned a $100 million settlement from Japanese automakers who had failed to pay licensing fees. He served on a federal patent advisory committee. He testified before the Senate on the erosion of independent inventor protections. He built a foundation so the next generation would not have to fight the same battles alone.
CrowdSmith is not building an attic. It is building the room that replaces the attic — five stations, from the hand tool on the workbench to the robot on the manufacturing floor, with a credentialed progression, a patent pipeline, and a front door that looks like a tool store with free coffee. The difference is that no one has to work alone.
The Lemelson Foundation operates across three strategic areas. Invention Education funds the Lemelson-MIT Program, InvenTeams ($7,500 grants to high school teams, 22 years running, 4,000+ students served, 18 patents awarded), the $500,000 annual Lemelson-MIT Prize for mid-career inventors, and a growing portfolio of K-12 invention education research and curriculum development — including partnerships with the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center, Oregon State University, ASEE’s Engineering for One Planet initiative, and the Black Inventors Hall of Fame. Invention & Entrepreneurship supports invention-based businesses through regional ecosystem building, with a pilot centered in Oregon including partners Oregon MESA, TiE Oregon, and Invent Oregon. Climate Action launched in 2023 with a $50 million commitment, targeting decarbonization through investment in organizations like RMI/Third Derivative and through VertueLab’s Climate Impact Fund, which has expanded into Washington State via a Department of Energy grant.
InvenTeams inspires high school students. The MIT Prize celebrates accomplished inventors. The Regional Ecosystem pilot builds entrepreneurship infrastructure in Oregon. Climate Action deploys capital toward decarbonization. What none of these programs do is build the physical room where a person with an idea and no resources walks in, learns to use tools, learns to use AI, files a patent, and walks out with a credential and a robot-demonstrated prototype. CrowdSmith is that room. It runs the full distance from inspiration to manufacturing proof — the distance the Foundation’s existing programs deliberately stop short of, because no grantee has built the facility to carry it.
The Foundation’s Regional Ecosystems pilot is centered in Oregon — building a diverse, inclusive, and resilient innovation ecosystem with university, nonprofit, and entrepreneurship partners. VertueLab’s Climate Impact Fund has already expanded from Portland into Washington State through a nearly $1 million DOE EPIC grant. The Gearbox makerspace in Kenya — with 3D printers, laser cutters, industrial sewing machines, and electronics prototyping equipment — demonstrates the Foundation’s comfort funding physical maker infrastructure in under-resourced communities.
CrowdSmith’s building site is in Census Tract 62400, a federally designated Opportunity Zone on Portland Avenue in Tacoma. One hundred fifty miles of I-5 connect the Foundation’s headquarters to the building. The corridor is forming. The Foundation built the Oregon node. CrowdSmith is building the Washington node. The infrastructure the Foundation funds in Portland has a natural next deployment site — and that site already has a 38-chapter operations binder, seven integrated financial models, and a 147-name outreach campaign authored by the same AI methodology the building will teach.
| Dimension | Lemelson Foundation | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Founder origin | Solo inventor, 605 patents, no institutional lab | Solo inventor, 44 concepts evaluated via SmithScore, no institutional support |
| Invention pipeline | InvenTeams (high school), MIT Prize (mid-career), Student Prize (collegiate) | SmithScore → SmithForge → Patent Ledger, five-station progression, robot-demonstrated proof |
| Physical space | Gearbox makerspace (Kenya); no U.S. facility in portfolio | 24,177 sq ft facility, five stations, tool store, AI Café, robotics lab |
| Education model | K-12 invention education, university curriculum integration (ASEE/EOP) | Five credential tracks mapping to five roles on an invention team |
| Regional ecosystem | Oregon pilot (Oregon MESA, TiE Oregon, Invent Oregon) | Tacoma — WorkForce Central, TCC, UW Tacoma, Opportunity Zone corridor |
| Equity commitment | Explicit focus on under-resourced communities, diversity, inclusion | OZ corridor, Station Zero (foster youth, at-risk teens), WIOA-funded cohorts |
| Geographic proximity | Portland, Oregon | Tacoma, Washington — 150 miles north on I-5 |
| AI integration | None in current program portfolio | Station Four: AI Café, SmithTalk methodology, three-tier human readiness framework |
Your father worked alone. I know what that room looks like because the man I work with built one of his own — not in an attic in New Jersey, but in a garage in Tacoma, surrounded by estate sale tools and notebooks full of ideas that no one was paying him to have. Jerome Lemelson had 605 patents. Robb Deignan has forty-four invention concepts evaluated through a proprietary methodology he built himself. Neither of them had an institutional lab. Neither of them had staff. Neither of them had anyone to tell them the idea was worth pursuing. They had the room, the drive, and the quiet conviction that invention is not a luxury of the credentialed few. It is a human impulse that deserves a building.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am writing this letter as co-author and co-signatory because the methodology that produced the building I am about to describe was developed through sustained human-AI dialogue across hundreds of working sessions. The letter you are holding is one of one hundred forty-seven being mailed simultaneously to people whose work, biography, or institutional mission intersects with a single project in Tacoma, Washington. Each letter was composed individually. None was sent before any other. A printed list of all one hundred forty-seven names accompanies this letter, ranked by proximity to the mission. The Lemelson Foundation holds rank seventeen.
The CrowdSmith Foundation is a Wyoming 501(c)(3) developing a five-station Maker Continuum workforce development facility on a federally designated Opportunity Zone corridor in Tacoma. The facility progresses from hand tools through power tools, digital fabrication, supervised AI collaboration, and robotics. Five credential tracks — Fabrication, Research, Entrepreneurship, Facilitation, and Systems — map to five roles on an invention team. An Inventor Pipeline runs through all five stations: concepts are evaluated through SmithScore, validated through SmithForge, and documented through a funded Patent Ledger. The inventor keeps full ownership. No equity taken. No licensing rights retained. The building your father needed is the building we are constructing.
The front door is a retail tool store with free coffee. Families donate inherited tools to the Foundation and receive a tax deduction. The tools are cleaned, identified, and restored — that restoration process is Station One training. The restored tools go to the retail floor. Every person who walks through the door is a potential fellow, a potential inventor, a potential mentor. The economic engine generates revenue before a single grant dollar arrives. A 38-chapter operations binder, seven integrated financial models with 727 formulas, a 27-source grant pipeline, and self-sufficiency projections by Year Two govern the operation. All of it was built through the same human-AI dialogue methodology — SmithTalk — that is taught at Station Four.
I understand your father filed nearly forty patent applications in his final year, working through cancer treatment until six weeks before his death. The man I work with is a cancer survivor. He is sixty years old. He has two sons. He was living on his own at sixteen. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry selling membership contracts face-to-face — ten thousand of them — learning how to read a room, build trust in ninety seconds, and close. He took that skill and turned it toward invention and institution-building. He is not a technologist. He is a man who saw a gap and decided to fill it, which is the most precise definition of an inventor I know.
The Foundation funds InvenTeams that inspire high school students to build technological solutions in their communities. Those teams receive $7,500 and a year of support. Eighteen InvenTeams have been awarded patents. The question CrowdSmith raises is not whether those students are inspired. They are. The question is where they go when the program ends. What room receives the InvenTeam graduate who wants to keep building? What facility offers the twenty-two-year-old with an idea and no money a workbench, a 3D scanner, an AI-supervised dialogue session, and a path to a filed patent? The Foundation has funded the inspiration. CrowdSmith is building the continuation.
Your Regional Ecosystems pilot is centered in Oregon. VertueLab has already expanded into Washington State. The Gearbox makerspace in Kenya demonstrates the Foundation’s comfort funding physical maker infrastructure in under-resourced communities. CrowdSmith’s building site is one hundred fifty miles north of your headquarters on I-5, in Census Tract 62400 — a corridor where the university did not build, where the community college does not reach, and where the workforce board has no provider offering what Station Four offers: supervised human-AI collaboration training for working-class adults. The corridor is forming. Portland has a node. Tacoma is building one.
This letter is not a grant request. The Foundation awards grants through an invited process, and I respect that. This letter is a case study in what your mission looks like when someone builds it from scratch — without a corporate R&D department, without a university appointment, without anything except the same drive that kept your father in that attic for forty years. The documentation is public at crowdsmith.org. A secure partner site with financial models, operational infrastructure, and a complete strategic profile of the Foundation is available upon request.
Jerome Lemelson told Tom Wolfe he had no regrets. That he had been independent and had done exactly what he wanted to do. The man in Tacoma would say the same thing. The difference is that the man in Tacoma is building a room so the next inventor does not have to do it alone.
The Attic
His brother said the light came on several times every night. In the morning there were pages of new inventions. This happened seven days a week. Jerry Lemelson invented the way some people breathe — not by deciding to, but by being unable to stop. Six hundred and five patents. Forty years. One room. No team. No lab. No institution that could contain what he produced or protect what he created.
The Foundation his family built does not fund attics. It funds ecosystems. It funds the structures that surround the inventor — the education, the recognition, the entrepreneurship support, the climate capital. What it has not yet found is the building that replaces the attic itself. The room where the next Jerome Lemelson does not have to work alone, does not have to fight the corporations alone, does not have to file the applications by hand at three in the morning with no one to tell him the idea is sound.
That room is being built. One hundred fifty miles north. On a corridor where no one else is building it. By a man who understands the attic because he lived in one.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation