Rick Howell formed Howell Product Development in 1972—while in high school—specifically to define the type of pro bono skiing safety standards development activity that would be provided to the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) sub-committee on Skiing Safety.  Since that time, Rick Howell / Howell Product Development have provided significant pro bono work to organizations that have made a major positive impact on society—especially in skiing safety.  

Rick Howell / Howell Product Development joined the ASTM Skiing Safety Subcommittee shortly after the conception of the subcommittee in 1973 and actively participated in one of the subcommittee's first meetings in Montreal.  For a period of 14 consecutive years, Rick Howell actively participated in the many areas of skiing safety standards development within the ASTM Skiing Safety subcommittee -- and this activity (together with the pro bono contributions of many others) caused a major impact on the standards that are in place, today.  Specifically, Rick Howell's pro bono focus within ASTM included the creation and dissemination of a "Skiing Safety Bibliography" that included all known research within the field, real-time;  and the exploration of "defining" ski binding retention (anti-pre-release) characteristics of ski bindings.  The pro bono retention work involved a collaboration with Professor Gene Bahniuk of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio;  Claude Gantet of Salomon, SA in Annecy, France;  and Walter Knable of Marker GmbH in Garmish-Partenkirchen, Germany.  This collaboration became a kind of product development mentorship that proved to be invaluable in future skiing safety activities (see below).

Concurrently, in 1977, Rick Howell was asked by Wolfhart Hauser, MD, to smooth-over the English translation of the German "IAS Ski Binding Safety Recommendations" that were being refined.  This pro bono activity transformed from "smoothing-over" to actively recommending many changes within the IAS Recommendations, all of which changes were accepted.  A few of the key changes included the elimination of the so-called "Tibia-Method" from the IAS recommendation (which method Prof. Malcome H. Pope had decisively disproved several years earlier, but had largely gone unheeded in Europe);  the incorporation of a "correct way" to perform a "self-release check" based on the advice of John S. Perryman;  and most significantly — proper lever-arm corrections were devised for the generation of the desired levels of release torque within the new SI-units of deka Newton-meters (daNm) — based upon Rick Howell's integration of advice from Dr-Ing. Peter Biermann of Geze GmbH in Leonberg, Germany and Gordon C. Lipe of Skaneateles, New York.  Here also the 8-year collaboration with Dr-ing. Biermann and the collaboration (since high school) with Gordon Lipe later proved to become invaluable to further pro bono skiing safety work.

The German Industrial Norm (DIN) group largely-adapted the IAS Recommendations in 1979 to become the "DIN ski binding standard" which, within a few years, then became largely-adapted as the "International Standards Organization (ISO) ski binding release standard".  This standard, with little fundamental change, is — still today — the de facto ski binding "release adjustment" standard utilized world-wide by ski shops and skiers to set the release levels of their ski bindings.  This pro bono work caused a major improvement in skiing safety, contributing, in-part, to the reduction of the total incidence of skiing injuries by 50% since the early-1970's; and transforming the prevalence of skiing tibia fractures from 15% of all skiing injuries in the early-1970's to less than 2% of all, today.... though it must again be emphasized that scores of other people across many nations, especially in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, were actively involved in the development of these safety standards, too.

Presently, Rick Howell is the Chairman of the Ski Binding Research committee within the International Society for Skiing Safety (ISSS), a pro bono organization that he joined in 1974.  Rick Howell's activities within the ISSS led to the development and presentation of the new "Femur Torque Test Method" at the 2005 ISSS conference in Nagano, Japan—which presentation exposed how ordinary alpine ski bindings do not (at all) sense the principle "signature-load" that causes skiing-ACL-injuries.  It is anticipated that this new test method will lead to a positive disruption of the skiing-safety-paradigm by illuminating how a new mode of ski binding technology can greatly reduce skiing ACL injuries, which injuries are, today, the most prevalent (23% of all) in alpine skiing.

Rick Howell also served two terms on the Board of Directors of the Helen Day Art center in Stowe, Vermont (1992-93);  two terms on the Board of Directors of the Rotary Club of Stowe (1993-94);  and four semesters at Norwich University, in Northfield, Vermont, as a mentor for senior accounting majors (2003-04).