Do you know any people over 55?  John P. Walsh of the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology studied thousands of patent applications in the U.S. and Japan to find that people over 55 have the greatest chance of receiving a “high value” patent, or one that can make someone lots of money. (The finding was stronger in the U.S. than in Japan, where there remains “strong pressure to retire people in their 50s or 60s,” Walsh says.) As he sums it up, “There is a tendency to think of innovation as something you do when you are very young, but that’s not the case. There are lots more senior people who are contributing, and lots of contributions come from more senior people.”