Ideas

TODAY'S COLUMN is about ideas. Let's start with the one that came from McDonald's - selling its own, fast-food crab cake at outlets on the Eastern Shore. Here's what reader David Reich of Perry Hall thinks about that: "Marylanders need crab cakes at McDonald's like Little Italy needs an Olive Garden." And speaking of things we really could do without - a new townhouse development in Harford County, the expansion of Arundel Mills mall, another Starbucks in Towson - how about watering the lawn?

You've done it -- invented a recipe for the perfect chocolate-chip cookie. But your boss wants to keep making them the old-fashioned way for now. So you go into business for yourself, selling the cookies like, well, hot cakes -- until your old boss sues . . . and wins.Why? Because, according to standards emerging from the growing number of lawsuits over the theft of trade secrets, you stole your own idea."If it's your invention or idea, it belongs to the employer if you were hired to come up with those kinds of inventions or those kinds of ideas," said Stephen L. Carter, who teaches intellectual property law at the Yale University Law School.

WASHINGTON - I'm glad that frustrated FBI agents are banging away at all the missed signals that might have tipped us off to Sept. 11, but we need to remember something: Not all the signals for Sept. 11 were hidden. Many were out there in public, in the form of hate speech and conspiracy theories directed at America and preached in mosques and schools throughout the Muslim world. If we are intent on preventing the next Sept. 11, we need to do more than just spy on our enemies better in secret.

Bad ideas abound these days. It's not so much that the people advancing them are stupid, but rather that they can't find many good ones under the circumstances we now face. In the matter of the world's seriously ill economy, for example, virtually all the "experts" - that is, those people whose previous policies and prescriptions resulted in this illness - are joining the chorus singing the Keynesian hymn, "We Must Spend Ourselves Out of Trouble, Dear Lord." OK, I made that up - the hymn part, that is - but what the mock title pronounces is the plan most economists and virtually all politicians are touting as a remedy for the ailing economy.

One day Patricia Ackman saw something she thought would make a fine lampshade, so she made a lamp to fit it.Then she made another. She got more ideas and made more. Then there were more ideas and more ideas. And before she knew it she was in trouble. "You can't have 12 lamps sitting in the living room," she says.When she had made 50 lamps she decided to have an open house, a invitation-only show and sale of her work. When 25 lamps went out the door that day, she knew she was on to something.

They're out there, the physicists, engineers and doctors. They're driving cabs, waiting on tables, delivering pizzas.They've just arrived in Baltimore from the Soviet Union, many of them driven out by a rising tide of anti-Semitism. And though they hold postgraduate degrees and spent years at research and academic institutions in their native land, in the United States many have to take whatever work they can get.And many potentially marketable ideas and technologies these highly skilled people brought with them are languishing for lack of business expertise and contacts.

What will it take to get people to opt out of suburban living and move to Baltimore?About 100 people put their heads together at a downtown hotel yesterday to come up with ideas. They ranged from the basic, such as cleaner streets, less crime and better schools, to grandiose plans for a Kennedy Center-like performing arts complex.The meeting was the first step in formulating the "Baltimore Campaign," which seeks to reverse the two-decade trend that ** has seen the city's population plummet from more than 900,000 to fewer than 700,000 residents.

Attention Gov. Gray Davis: Want to rescue California from the energy crisis? Cut the decorative lights on the Golden Gate Bridge, end all television shows at midnight and put the kibosh on any new theme parks. Oh, yeah, and while you're at it, ban electric golf carts. Make those duffers haul their own clubs. These are just a few of the hundreds of energy-saving ideas submitted to the state government in the past few weeks by folks who believe they can help guide California through the crisis.

HOWARD STREET is a boulevard of broken dreams. Since the 1970s, when the big department stores vacated that downtown corridor, countless attempts have been made to revive Baltimore's one-time retail hub. Progress has been slow. The most optimistic assessment today -- made in the afterglow of the opening of a huge Rite-Aid store in the old Hecht Co. building -- would be that the area's further decline may have at least been halted.The city's plans to turn the west side of the 400 block of Howard Street into housing for artists, studio space and entertainment venues are crawling ahead at a snail's pace.

For some companies, ideas are just as important as the products they produce. But navigating intellectual property laws and finding the money to patent those ideas is sometimes a daunting challenge for entrepreneurs and small-business owners. The Howard County Business Resource Center is developing a resource to help inventors through all the hoops - from getting basic information on patents to helping license the technology so that others can manufacture the product. The Intellectual Property Advisory Service, run by Nancy Gebhart, who worked in the Office of Technology Commercialization at the University of Maryland, College Park, is scheduling a series of seminars and networking opportunities, consulting with local inventors and searching for grants to help businesses cover the expenses of the patenting process.