Innovation… What Does It Mean?
By: Stewart Da’Silva
Senior Designer, Product Design
8th November 2017
The buzz word of the moment that is constantly being bandied about is ‘innovation’. There is hardly a departmental or company briefing where that word isn’t mentioned.
Indeed, it seems to be held up in the business world as the holy grail of survival; a panacea against the risk of extinction (in the corporate sense). Market gurus metaphorically stand on tip-toes whilst balancing on rooftops shouting through megaphones…”INNOVATE OR DIE!”
But what exactly does ‘innovation’ mean? What does it mean to us as individuals and as a company?
My perception of ‘innovation’ is that it isn’t something that I, personally, should bother my pretty little head about. After all, I know for certain that having spent my whole working life immersed in the world of engineering… I have never once in all those many, many years had a spark of an original idea that has ever taken seed and germinated in the wilderness that is my brain.
No, I had assumed that this call for us to innovate was directed towards the more intelligent amongst us and that they were being asked to dream up some new ground-breaking idea… a blinding flash of inspiration that our company could exploit in the form of some great new product.
Then the realisation began to dawn; that there, in fact, had been very few real inventions of any substance for many years.
A case in point is in our own industry – electronics.
It is accepted that the transistor was the starting point of the phenomenal growth of the electronics industry as we know it today. The ‘invention’ of the transistor took place in the Bell Laboratories in 1947 by John Barbeen and Walter Brattain, in fact, they, together with William Shockley, received the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for “their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.”
Except… they didn’t ‘discover’ the transistor effect.
It was, in fact, described by one Julius Lilienfeld in a patent that he filed in Canada on the ‘field effect transistor’ in 1925. Although he patented it – he published no known research articles on the subject. Bell scientists Bardeen and Brattain, in fact, built a field effect transistor utilising Lilienfeld’s patent in their research laboratory and surprisingly it worked, they then set about improving and refining the efficiency of the device and then published their findings – although Lilienfeld’s patent was the basis for their transistor, he was never credited in their published papers.
But then Lilienfeld himself had built upon research and observations that had gone before.
In 1833, Faraday’s research on the negative temperature coefficient of resistance of silver sulphide was the first recorded observation of any semiconductor property. The trail from Faraday’s experiments to the Lilienfeld patent had many, many contributors.
My point?
‘Nanos gigantum humeris insidentes’ – discovering truth by building on previous discoveries.
The first working transistor wasn’t invented in 1947, it evolved from Faraday’s first observations in 1833. At that time, that is all it was, an observation – with no obvious applications.
This meandering pathway had then progressed towards its conclusion (the transistor) in a succession of incremental steps. Academics and scientists didn’t carry on their given research in splendid isolation from those that went before. If they found some relevance to their own research then they applied those previous observations and investigations to further their own knowledge and that of those that were to follow.
Which brings me back to where I started – ‘Innovation… what does it mean?’
In today’s engineering environment, I believe that it means that we, each and every one of us, could be an innovator. We don’t have to be qualified in a specific field. We just need to be open and have the vision to see how established techniques in the world around us could be transferred and applied to other disciplines to create or improve an existing product: cross-pollination of ideas and skills. Indeed, in the first instance, there is no need for detail… just the vision.
I believe that each and every one of us is capable of doing that.
The buzz word of the moment that is constantly being bandied about is ‘innovation’. There is hardly a departmental or company briefing where that word isn’t mentioned.
Indeed, it seems to be held up in the business world as the holy grail of survival; a panacea against the risk of extinction (in the corporate sense). Market gurus metaphorically stand on tip-toes whilst balancing on rooftops shouting through megaphones…”INNOVATE OR DIE!”
But what exactly does ‘innovation’ mean? What does it mean to us as individuals and as a company?
My perception of ‘innovation’ is that it isn’t something that I, personally, should bother my pretty little head about. After all, I know for certain that having spent my whole working life immersed in the world of engineering… I have never once in all those many, many years had a spark of an original idea that has ever taken seed and germinated in the wilderness that is my brain.
No, I had assumed that this call for us to innovate was directed towards the more intelligent amongst us and that they were being asked to dream up some new ground-breaking idea… a blinding flash of inspiration that our company could exploit in the form of some great new product.
Then the realisation began to dawn; that there, in fact, had been very few real inventions of any substance for many years.
A case in point is in our own industry – electronics.
It is accepted that the transistor was the starting point of the phenomenal growth of the electronics industry as we know it today. The ‘invention’ of the transistor took place in the Bell Laboratories in 1947 by John Barbeen and Walter Brattain, in fact, they, together with William Shockley, received the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for “their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.”
Except… they didn’t ‘discover’ the transistor effect.
It was, in fact, described by one Julius Lilienfeld in a patent that he filed in Canada on the ‘field effect transistor’ in 1925. Although he patented it – he published no known research articles on the subject. Bell scientists Bardeen and Brattain, in fact, built a field effect transistor utilising Lilienfeld’s patent in their research laboratory and surprisingly it worked, they then set about improving and refining the efficiency of the device and then published their findings – although Lilienfeld’s patent was the basis for their transistor, he was never credited in their published papers.
But then Lilienfeld himself had built upon research and observations that had gone before.
In 1833, Faraday’s research on the negative temperature coefficient of resistance of silver sulphide was the first recorded observation of any semiconductor property. The trail from Faraday’s experiments to the Lilienfeld patent had many, many contributors.
My point?
‘Nanos gigantum humeris insidentes’ – discovering truth by building on previous discoveries.
The first working transistor wasn’t invented in 1947, it evolved from Faraday’s first observations in 1833. At that time, that is all it was, an observation – with no obvious applications.
This meandering pathway had then progressed towards its conclusion (the transistor) in a succession of incremental steps. Academics and scientists didn’t carry on their given research in splendid isolation from those that went before. If they found some relevance to their own research then they applied those previous observations and investigations to further their own knowledge and that of those that were to follow.
Which brings me back to where I started – ‘Innovation… what does it mean?’
In today’s engineering environment, I believe that it means that we, each and every one of us, could be an innovator. We don’t have to be qualified in a specific field. We just need to be open and have the vision to see how established techniques in the world around us could be transferred and applied to other disciplines to create or improve an existing product: cross-pollination of ideas and skills. Indeed, in the first instance, there is no need for detail… just the vision.
I believe that each and every one of us is capable of doing that.
