The Inventivity Pod

Raha Saremi joins host James Di Virgilio to discuss how her company, EcoaTEX, is disrupting the highly pollutive textile industry by using natural materials to develop sustainable products for dyeing, coating, and finishing textiles.   Saremi and her team developed fabric treatment methods that uses 90% less water and fewer harmful chemicals than traditional techniques: “”[T]he go...

Carlos Moreno joins host James Di Virgilio to discuss his medical diagnostic company, ResonanceDX, and his unconventional journey to becoming a medical researcher. Like many innovators, Carlos started his career in a different field, yet those experiences have proven to be beneficial: “It’s not the traditional path. Most people started either going to med school or biology as their und...

In this episode, Dr. Christine Schmidt talks with host James Di Virgilio about her research in biochemically processed nerve grafts and what inspires her as an innovator: “When you think about innovation and invention, be open to the fact that what you’re doing may have applications in different spaces and that you may take turns and enjoying those turns versus resisting. Those turns m...

Mohit Patil and Parth Shah advise other future entrepreneurs on conceptualizing a company and its products: “Don’t come up with a solution looking for a problem, that almost always never works out…what you need is a problem. A problem that the society has, a problem that people are desperate to get solved and then use your engineering mind to think, oh, how can I solve that probl...

Dr. Jean-François Rossignol discusses the development behind a class of antiviral drugs, such as Nitazoxanide and Thiazolides, that stimulate immune cells, activating gene pathways that block viral transformation: “You’re leading an entire population, and you give them a pill for treating their problems, and you cannot have any side effects, any toxicity, or any kind of things l...

Dr. Norma A. Alcantar discusses the mechanisms in cacti ecosystems and the personal inspiration behind her research: “There were many other things that I learned from my mother and my grandmother, very valuable. And so, I think transferring knowledge from one generation, of our parents and our grandparents to our children…I think that’s very valuable. We should not lose that ever...

Susann Keohane discusses how she uses remote sensing to study behavior patterns in the aging population, a project she hopes will help the elderly thrive: “Overall, I really want us to make older adults feel like technology is for them…and it’s theirs to be used to, and it should be marketed, advertised, and designed for everyone”. Susann Keohane is the IBM Watson Health In...

Craig Bandes discusses how to avoid the same pitfalls of companies he has worked with in the past and how to create a structurally sound order of operations through his experience in business and finances: “And you get to a point where you just realize that if I don’t try it, I’ll never know, and I’ll always regret it. And then you jump into it . But jumping in with more ex...

Weaver Gaines shares his experiences as the CEO of several startup companies in terms of the highs, the lows, the expected, and the unexpected: “So I think you can inculcate a culture from the top, from the beginning, that says, ‘We don’t lie. We don’t cheat. We don’t steal. And we’re not going to tolerate people who do those things.’ You can make that hap...

As a first-time founder and CEO, guest Vinny Olmstead reflects on what it felt like to start something new: “The one word I would use is just excitement. If you were taking a picture, I think you would see wide eyes and a smile on my face… In my early days, as I was looking at opportunities, I was hyper focused on solving some type of problem and spending a good amount of time to figur...

On what it’s like becoming the CEO of a startup and gradually having more and more employees taking over some of the day-to-day responsibilities, guest Ron Tarro says the following: “It’s almost better to view what you’re building as a machine; it’s a machine where, if you actually step back from it, the machine keeps running.”  Tarro is the former CEO of a...

Recalling his time in the radio business, guest Lew Dickey tells host James Di Virgilio that, as a CEO, it is important to recognize that you are often forced to take things as you go: “The landscape is changing—you might be able to see a little bit around the corner, but nobody has perfect vision into the future.” Currently, Dickey is the Co-Founder and Chairman of DM Luxury, Am...

When Rick Carlson founded SharpSpring in 2012, he didn’t think of himself as a CEO.  “My co-founder and I were doing whatever it took to survive,” Carlson says, and they were responsible for everything from software development to buying office supplies. In the early days of the automated marketing software company, “there were so many failures it was hard to name them...

Medicine that talks to you. Eric Buffkin of eTectRx developed an “edible radio” powered by the chemicals in your stomach that tracks when you take every dose of your medication.  Eric’s colleague, pharmacist Susan Baumgartner, says about 50% of people that are prescribed medication do not take it when they are supposed to. Over the last decade, the company has extensively te...

Diabetes sometimes leads to loss of vision. What if there were a simple screening device to find out who is at risk? Dr. Lloyd Hildebrand, a Canadian ophthalmologist and founder of two start-up companies, invented a hand-held device that in minutes measures the eye’s electrical waves to detect patients who may be suffering from diabetic retinopathy. Hildebrand talks about the challenges in m...

A big problem for most prosthetics is they don’t send sensory information back to the brain. Until now. Dr. Ranu Jung and her team at Florida International University (FIU) have developed a device that restores the sense of touch and hand grasp when someone is using their prosthetic hands. This technology could eventually be applied to other non-functioning parts of the body. A finalist for...

“I remember early in my career,” says Gary Miller, “attending orthopedic conferences just listening to the surgeons talking to each other.  You build a vocabulary of what they’re talking about.”  Miller is the co-founder of Exactech, a Florida company which develops and manufactures orthopedic implants, and the holder of 14 US patents.   He talks with J...

When Carolyn Yarina, today’s guest, walked into her university’s Center for Entrepreneurship one day as an undergraduate, she was convinced that she would never become an entrepreneur herself. “I remember tapping my foot, being impatient,” she recalls, laughing, “I couldn’t wait to get out of there, thinking that entrepreneurship wasn’t for me.” Fast...

The fight for a cure to Parkinson’s Disease has been a decades-long battle, with several treatments evolving alongside the evolution of medicine as a practice. In this episode, host Richard Miles sits down with Dr. Michael Okun, the Chair of Neurology, and Professor and Executive Director of the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases at the University of Florida College of Medicine...

How do you measure the performance of people whose achievements are hard to measure? Building on the work of Harold Fethe, Jeff Lyons founded MindSolve, a company that developed a technology which made employee evaluations more accurate and more reliable. The company did well and was sold, and Jeff made the challenging transition from founder to employee. A self-described “nerd,” Jeff...

Nina Kraus, a professor of communication sciences, neurobiology, and physiology at Northwestern University in Chicago, has done a lot of research on the effect of playing music on processing sound, learning, and brain development.  She explains the “musician’s advantage,” which includes better reading skills, and how music training can be a tool to improve the performance of...

Is Bitcoin a store of value during a financial crisis? What role does it play in a portfolio? Scott Melker, a successful trader and one of the leading voices of Cryptos discusses the origins of bitcoin, its uses, and what the future may look like. *This episode was originally released on March 25, 2020.*   TRANSCRIPT: Intro ( 00:01 ): Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the...

The weather; everyone talks about it, so the old joke goes, no one does anything about it. Dr. Leela Watson, founder and CEO of InitWeather, says that by using advanced algorithms and machine learning, we can make faster and more reliable predictions about the weather that can help a wide range of industries, including agriculture, energy, and aerospace.  “When I started this,”&nb...

Nasal swabs, something many people had never heard of until COVID, suddenly became very hard to get just two weeks into the pandemic. Dr. Summer Decker and her team at the University of South Florida quickly determined they could make the swabs on a 3D printer. After making the printed swabs FDA compliant, Decker was able to share the design for free with the world.  Since then more than 60 m...

Making virus testing easy, or at least easier, will enable companies and organizations to reopen faster as we enter the beginning of the post-corona era. Dr. Timothy Garrett, the Chief of Experimental Pathology at the University of Florida, has developed a test that can detect multiple viruses, including variants, from a single sample. Better yet, this can be done in a portable lab for remote test...