Elizabeth Morris advocates for a two-pronged approach to uncovering patentable innovation at Pure Storage: direct, high-touch engagement with inventors combined with intelligent tools that surface work teams might not recognize as patent-worthy.
Her engagement strategy is remarkably hands-on. The patent team travels to Pure’s major design centers—Santa Clara, Bangalore, and Prague—for week-long innovation events featuring daily educational sessions, information tables, and playful elements like enormous musical Plinko games and hidden rubber duck scavenger hunts (a nod to the “rubber duck debugging” tradition among coders). In smaller offices, they take inventors to dinner. The effort has been so successful that the team is now “drowning” in invention disclosures.
Ed: You mentioned earlier that you want inventors to submit the right innovations. How do you actually engage with inventors to make that happen?
Elizabeth: One of the things that we did very successfully this year is we put on a week of focus on patents and innovation at all of our major design centers. We did three of them—one in Santa Clara, one in Bangalore, India, and one in Prague, Czech Republic. The whole team is involved. We have educational sessions every day, in person. We fly out, we do them in person. We have an information table, and we give away stickers and little prizes.
Ed: Can you give us a sense of what that looks like in practice?
Elizabeth: At Santa Clara, we gave away these little backpacks to every person who had ever been an inventor in the Santa Clara office. We had them all at this table downstairs by our elevators. And then we also had this ridiculous, enormous Plinko game that played music when the Plinko thing hit the bottom. Depending on where it landed, you got a different prize—like a pen, or a notebook, or a mug. We also had really cool-looking prizes for a drawing at the end of the week—a tent, some LEGO sets, some steins. People could come by and play the game every day, and they could interact with us, and get to know us, and take stickers. It was very effective at getting people to be aware of the patent program, and to submit new invention disclosures, and to know who we are.
Ed: Did you do anything different at the other offices?
Elizabeth: In India and the Czech Republic, because they’re smaller, we took the inventors out to dinner. In Prague, we did something really fun—we got these little rubber ducks from Amazon. You know, there’s this thing called rubber duck debugging, where engineers talk to a rubber duck on their desk to work through code problems. Rubber ducks have this thing for coders—people often collect them. We brought these tiny ducks in my suitcase, and we hid them all around the office—in the break room refrigerators, on top of coffee makers, on top of conference room signs, next to phones. We sent out an email saying, “Look for the ducks,” and if you found one, you could spin the prize wheel an extra time. People were so into it. One guy found like 25 of them.
Ed: What kind of results have you seen from these efforts?
Elizabeth: We’re the victims of our own success. I was just talking about how I want more invention disclosures, but we’re kind of drowning in the numbers that we’re getting. It was very, very successful, and we are planning on doing it again this coming year. We even had a very prolific inventor—a retired professor from UC Santa Cruz who sits on our Chief Technology Officer team—volunteer to come to Prague and give a speech about the founding of Pure. He had such a good time that he volunteered to come to India next year. So we’re already planning that and having other people come out as well. It takes a lot of time and effort and money to do it, but we’ve found great success and great engagement. That’s something we’re really proud of for this last year, and also something I’m looking forward to.
Ed: Tell us about the AI tools you believe would separate “signal from noise” for the patent team?
Elizabeth: Even the most effective direct engagement alone isn’t enough, because not every engineer thinks to bring their innovative work to the patent team—some don’t recognize its patentability, others are too deep in development to pause and document. I think this is where AI presents compelling possibilities as a listening tool. Rather than waiting for inventors to come forward, AI could monitor organizational systems—code repositories, internal documentation, technical discussions—to proactively identify breakthrough work that might otherwise go unnoticed. The value proposition is clear: cast a wider net to ensure the patent team isn’t missing genuine innovation simply because it never reached their inbox.
I believe the combination of human connection and intelligent technological monitoring would offer the most comprehensive framework for finding and protecting Pure’s most valuable innovations. And, the AI listening tools are top of mind for me in 2026.
