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07.09

Industry, University & Government Leaders Gather for State of Innovation Summit

By Daryll Griffin

In President Obama's first nationwide presidential address, he declared the dawn of a new era guided by American ingenuity, and defined not by the magnitude of the current economic crisis but by an innovative response to it. Working toward finding those innovative responses to the issues of today are the Council on Competitiveness and Seed Magazine, who hosted on 23 June in Washington, D.C., top Executives, science and tech leaders, university heads and top government officials for a one-day State of Innovation Summit. Organizers of this national conference are working to address the key roles played by design, cross-disciplinary collaboration, comprehensive policy and scientific innovation itself in preserving and enhancing a climate of innovation in American business.

The Summit was broken down into five panel discussions focusing on those different aspects of innovation. To keep things interesting throughout the day, Summit sponsors incorporated three “Show & Tells” providing examples of real innovation through design, socially relevant innovation and scientific innovation.

The first panel discussion, entitled “Landscape of Change,” was highlighted by the participation of Wayne Clough, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution and Charles O. Holliday, Jr., Chairman of the Board, DuPont. Responding to questions posed by the Council on Competitiveness President Deborah L. Wince-Smith, both gentlemen discussed the way they incorporate innovation into their very different organizations. They both agreed that one of the best innovation strategies for companies is to bring a diverse set of people together and create a process for drawing innovative ideas out of them. Providing a creative environment to stimulate innovation, commented Clough, is what he’s trying to produce at the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian is a science-based organization with many young and older workers, so Smithsonian wants to cultivate an environment that closes generational gaps to allows innovation to flourish.

According to Holliday, innovation is at the forefront of everything at DuPont because it, too, is a science company. They use science to solve problems. They connect market needs with science. They need to make smarter things to continue to be successful. Therefore there is a need for innovation.

Clough and Holliday also spent time discussing U.S. education and its relationship to innovation. They both agreed that for America to remain dominate in science and technology, we have to improve how we educate young people from K-12. For the first time in our history, future generations are less educated than the previous generation. If the trend continues, many in the Sci-tech community fear that American will cede its position of dominance.

The panel ended with a discussion about the profession of innovation. Both Clough and Holliday view innovation as a profession. Do you need a BS or MS? Neither was sure; however, they agreed that getting people inside companies to think about innovation is necessary to advance innovation in this country.

Show & Tell

One of the most interesting “Show & Tells” was provided by Ryan Chin, a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the MIT Media laboratory in the Smart Cities research group and this year’s winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. He is building the car of the future — a foldable, stackable, sharable, electric, two-passenger city vehicle that rethinks urban mobility. With the same concept as the Zipcar, the one-way sharable user model is designed to be used in dense urban areas. “Vehicle Stacks” will be placed throughout the city to create an urban transportation network that takes advantage of existing infrastructure such as subway and bus lines. By placing stacks in urban spaces and key points of convergence, the vehicle allows the citizens the flexibility to combine mass transit effectively with individualized mobility.

In 2007, Chin co-founded the MIT Smart Customization group with Professors William J. Mitchell, Marvin Minsky and Frank T. Piller with the task of improving the ability of companies to efficiently customize products and services across a diverse set of industries and customer groups. In 2007, Chin lead a team of Media Lab students in the creation of the RoboScooter — a lightweight electric folding scooter designed as a clean, green mobility solution for today’s crowded cities. Chin shared a video presentation of each vehicles with the audience.

Other Panels discussed topics such as:

• New Forms of Design - How interdisciplinary innovation and the open-source culture are transforming design into a driving force for social agenda and policy-making.

• Watercooler 3.0 - Game-changing ways of bringing people and ideas together to break traditional boundaries and spark new collaborations: Case studies from government, academia and industry.

• The Problems we Will Solve - Employing science as a lens, not just a subject matter, to create a framework for addressing financial, geopolitical and environmental challenges facing the United States and the world.

• Conversations from the C-Suite - Leading-edge top-level executives give a behind-the-scenes view into the day-to-day business of innovation.

• How We Will Compete - How can policy help the U.S. sustain a competitive S&T edge? A public-private dialogue about how the global economy is affecting the practice of government, business and science, and the new intersections between the three.

The other two Show & Tells were:

• Disruptive Creativity - A case of paradigm bending by the fantastic trio of design, science and industry.

• Innovating For The Last Mile - From technological breakthrough to adoption — how to make a socially relevant innovation survive the last mile.

The conference was shown live via the Web. To view one or all of the panel discussions, visit: www.compete.org/video/Innovation_summit_replay.htm.

IEEE-USA's Innovation Insititute

In response to the National Academies' Rising Above the Gathering Storm report, IEEE-USA launched an Innovation Institute in 2007. IEEE-USA’s Innovation Institute has conducted a number of educational and interactive forums to help promote innovative thinking within IEEE’s membership. Currently, the Innovation Institute has been involved in gathering market research to determine how it can best assist IEEE members and American businesses to be competitive in a global market. In the first few months of 2009, the Institute held three roundtable discussions in Atlanta, Ga., Austin, Texas and Denver, Colo., with executives from a wide range of companies seeking information about their innovation efforts. In November 2009, the IEEE-USA Innovation Institute plans to present a detailed plan that will involve participation from a range of partners that the Institute believes will help spur innovation in America businesses. Stay tuned!

Daryll Griffin is administrator of IEEE-USA's Career and Innovation Programs. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.