Elwood "Woody" Norris

Elwood G. "Woody" Norris (born 1938) is an American inventor and serial entrepreneur. He is founder of multiple public corporations he established to promote, fund and commercialize his inventions. Norris has held officer and director positions in all of the public companies he founded but eventually resigned from most. He currently serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Parametric Sound Corporation, a spin-off from LRAD Corporation.

Forgoing college, Norris joined the United States Air Force in 1956 and was trained as a nuclear weapons specialist, taking courses at the University of New Mexico. In 1959, he became the director of the Engineering Experiment Station for the University of Washington.

Norris was the winner of the 2005 Lemelson-MIT Prize for his invention of a "hypersonic sound" system which allows sound to be focused with high precision. Norris said he plans to use the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize money to establish a charitable foundation to help struggling independent inventors.

Norris has come under substantial criticism in the past—while he has been able to greatly enrich himself, as of February 2006, none of the several publicly traded companies he had founded had come anywhere close to profitability.

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