The Eye For Innovation

There's Always Hope

There’s Always Hope

There is a well-known cartoon showing a pelican attempting to swallow a frog while the grog is simultaneously trying to choke the pelican.  The tag line is “Never Give Up!”

“I don’t know if I have for all these years been in the throes of being swallowed by a management development pelican (paradigm) that refuses technological improvement, but I surely have felt like choking some of its practitioners from time to time!”

And I’ve never given up.  Now at last I see a ray of hope.  In the Economist Technology Quarterly, December 8, 2007 it is reported, in a lead article uncaptioned “Serious,” that by means of virtual reality and games that:  “With the popularity of virtual worlds such as Second Life and games such as “World of Warcraft” and “Sims Online,” companies, academics, healthcare provides  and the military are evaluating virtual environments for use in training, management and collaboration.”  [Evaluating?  Well we can’t take heart too soon]  It goes on to quote David Wartby, Director of Coventry University’s Serious Games Institute:  “The thing that distinguishes [the use of these technologies] from games is the outcome.”  The article then adds:  “The aim is to find new ways for people to learn or work together.”  And I might add:  to learn to work together. 

Any serious observer of the real world in the practice of management will find that the single most common failing of supervisors and managers is “performance appraisal.”  Performance appraisals have been misunderstood, misused and misapplied since the beginning of organizations.  They are subject to all the frailties of human nature.  Grading subordinates is an arduous task, and has been a good mine for human resource consultants and guru firms forever  -  the 49’ers never hit a lode so rich!

But all those schemes and catechisms in the end simply don’t work.  Is Joe a ‘4.0 or a 3.5’?  Well, he might not be the greatest, but if I give him a 3.5 he won’t ever make flag rank.  Is Sally’s performance “above expectations or meeting expectations?”  Well, if I give her a ‘meeting expectations’ ranking we can only give her a cost-of-living raise, but I want her to have more than that.  And on and in every industry at every level, the performance appraisal process is conducted by duffers playing in the pro leagues.

Think about  that.  Let’s say that a manager does annual performance appraisals on 10 subordinates.  In the course of a 30 year management career that works out to something like 300.  Now let’s take a would be golfer. Will hitting 300 golf balls make a good golfer?  That’s so silly no one would contemplate it.  But which is the harder task?  One is basically motor skills which is hard enough, the other psychological skill and that’s even tougher.  Both of them take lots – lots and lots! – of practice.

We have, we have had for nearly half a century now the technology via computer simulation to allow us to train would be managers to improve their “short game,” things such as performance appraisal, to the point of being a scratch golfer.  A few hours in the virtual reality world of performance appraisal would equal a lifetime of experience.  The Serious Games Institute may not be there but at least there is still hope.  Never give up!

Clocks

   

There is something always fascinating about stories of innovation.  It stimulates us because it is about people who are creative and caring enough to make our lives a little bit better.  Breakthroughs that ease the difficulty of daily life, or at least make the daily routine a bit more bearable.  These days, of course, much of that has to do with healthcare and wellness.  But we forget how innovators of old made lives of people and ours today, just a little bit better. 

No one, absolutely no one, in this day of atomic clocks remembers that two thousand or so years ago people did not even have a way of measuring time, something that’s taken for granted in our daily existence.  This little vignette of the beginnings of measure of time is a reminder of that and of one of the basics of innovation  -  that ordinary people, motivated to find a better way, can achieve lasting change in people’s lives.

Before about 300BC there was no such thing as a “clock.”  Then a young man, working in his father’s barbershop in Alexandria, Egypt came up with an innovation that produced the first mechanical clock.  It’s accuracy and applicability would not be surpassed for more than 1800 years!  Think about that.  How many of us, tasking away at daily duties, would not like to devise an innovation that would last more than one and a half millennia!  But that’s what this young man, Ctesibius by name, would do.  This is his story.

There had existed in ancient days a device known as the “clepsydra,” literally the “thief of time.”  But the clepsydra was truly nothing more than what we think of today as a “timer.”  It was a simple device:  it consisted of a metal sphere with a tube at the top and small holes drilled in the bottom.  When you wanted to time something, perhaps for example how long it took Ctesibius’ dad to do a shave or a haircut, you simply filled the clepsydra with water and waited for it to empty.  There was a problem with this, however, because the water dripped faster when the vessel was full and slower as it emptied.  But it was not a true “clock.”  Ctesibius’ first innovation was simply to devise a method of keeping the vessel always full and therefore producing a constant rate of drip.  He did this with the simple device of a tank above the clepsydra and let it keep the vessel full and therefore at constant pressure and rate of drip.  The excess simply flowed into another vessel and was reused.

By adding a scale to the tank below the clepsydra and marking it with a scale, a floater and a pointer Ctesibius’ device could measure time constantly.  He had innovated a true clock.  Like many a later innovation, Ctesibius and others would devise elaborations that, using values and mechanical devices, could make this clock chime, or “sing”  -  the world’s first cuckoo clock.

What’s the story here?  Simply that any of us with the desire to find a better way to meet a need can be innovators.  There are failures and frustrations along the way, but patience and desire can, and does, result in remarkable, long-lasting innovations.  Can we not find one in our daily toil?  If Ctesibius could, so can we.

New Life for an Old Technology

This is a reprint from the WSJ, 10/12/07:  “Humble Home Printer Takes New role in Cell Research”   The humdrum home-office printer has been modified by scientists to investigate the ways cells interact with tissue.  Researchers hope that one day the technology could be used to help construct artificial organs for implantation.

Paul Calvert, a materials scientist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, says he and his colleagues, and other research teams, have adapted ordinary inkjet printers so that instead of squirting a droplet of ink onto paper, they squirt cells onto samples of tissue. 

Inkjet printers have certain advantages over the machines typically used to perform similar tasks.  They are simple to operate, work quickly and voice contaminating the cells.  They also allow scientists to precisely time which cells are added to the tissue and, of course, to “print” the cells in a patter, allowing scientists to study how the distance between cells affects their development.  Prof. Calvert says the printing technique could eventually be used to build tissues for bones and corneas piece by piece.   End/article.

I have found that one of the most difficult concepts of innovation to grasp is that innovation is just as possible, perhaps even more possible, by novel applications of old technologies as it is by inventing new technologies.  What a great example this is and how wonderfully fitting it is that this WSJ article appeared October 12, the very day that we were celebrating the 50^th year of Control Data’s founding by a day and even of a tribute to Control Data’s legacy of innovation.