Washington — If you had to pick one name, who would you call the “coolest dude” on the planet? At the time of his death in October 2011, a lot of votes no doubt would have gone to Steve Jobs, the late head of Apple Inc. From his fertile mind sprang some of the “coolest” products in the world: the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. And by designing and marketing these products, the world’s coolest dude also became one of its wealthiest.

The October 2011 biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is selling by the millions in dozens of languages, filling young people around the world with entrepreneurial fire. As portrayed by Isaacson, Jobs was not so much a mathematical, technological, engineering genius as he was an artist who blended beauty, style and ease of use with technology.

Another student of Jobs, David K. Allison, associate director of the National Museum of American History, says Apple products were generally not the cheapest and sometimes they were not even the best technically. But they were definitely cool. Jobs was “able to mix business savvy and design sensibility, by making his technology something that is really cool,” writes Allison.

But, hold it a second! When you come up with a cool idea, how do you take ownership of it so that you can sell it and make money? This is the often-overlooked aspect of the Jobs story that entrepreneurs everywhere need to be aware of as they seek to parlay their ideas into wealth.

To throw light on this part of the Jobs story, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington is providing space for an exhibit, “The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World.” The exhibit displays documents for 312 of the 317 patents that were granted to Jobs during his lifetime. What jumps out at the viewer is that the majority of the patents were for “ornamental designs,” and that very few were for what is traditionally thought of as inventions, such as the incandescent light bulb or phonograph that made Thomas Edison a household name.

For example, Jobs and colleagues (Jobs got none of his patents alone) obtained a patent for a staircase. A staircase? Jobs did not invent the staircase. But he did design a translucent one that gives the impression that it is floating in air. Jobs and company got the patent for how it is fastened, which imparts the floating illusion, according to Isaacson.

The exhibit, organized by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, shows that Jobs obtained patents on the “ornamental designs” of Apple packaging. As Isaacson explains it, Jobs understood that visual beauty was important to attract customers the moment they laid eyes on a product. Similarly, he took out design patents on lanyards used to hang iPods around users’ necks while they listened to their iTunes, on the cases iPhones were kept in, on adapter plugs to recharge Apple devices, even on the curved edges that connect the front and back faces of some versions of the iPhone.

The collective effect of the design patents was to give Apple products a distinctive look and feel that Jobs and his co-patent holders owned and which brought them great wealth. The implicit message from the Patent and Trademark Office exhibit is that effective protection for intellectual property is necessary for an entrepreneurial culture to thrive.