“I’ll take my torch and shine it in her eye.”
“What about an elephant trumpeting in her ear.”
“I’ll jump on her.”
“Can we just flip the bed?”
The Post-It notes came thick and fast – concept fragments for an innovative solution to my multi-faceted problem of waking my 7 year-old daughter, getting her out of bed and then dressed. The creative minds at my disposal were my daughter’s class-mates. This was fun. An hour spent in West Zone ELC school in Boston. Some minds more creative than others (“Go to bed on time, get up early” was one low-risk approach), some more cruel than others (“Bucket of water on her head”) but all full of enthusiasm and energy.
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No such thing as a bad idea
Year 1 had just finished a module on Innovation and I was delighted to see my daughter’s enthusiasm for the subject; from concern at Margaret E. Knight’s patent problem as she toiled to commercialize a machine to manufacture the flat-bottomed brown paper bag to excitement on the day she was to prototype her own innovation – a glass rain shelter roof for a horse-drawn carriage – thus solving a problem so many generations of Disney princesses have had to face (although maybe not a typical user group for Consumer Product Development)
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Rapunzel would have appreciated this
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The Cool Wall – vehicle innovations
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So that’s what we do…
I volunteered my services to the school to talk about what part engineers, scientists and designers have to play when turning ideas into reality (although the boat-space-station might present a challenge to even NASA). Turns out that they had a pretty good idea of some of the roles anyway.
The teachers welcomed my approach warmly but a few days out I began to worry about what I had taken on. My wife, a teacher, provided some much needed coaching on the challenge of presenting ideas to curious and demanding 7-year olds as opposed to curious and demanding marketing and technical leaders – although both audiences demand to be wow’d.
I talked through my own enthusiasm for the difference a humble pair of glasses makes to so many people each and every day, and also the bicycle. They recognized the evolution of the bicycle and its reliance from a corner-stone of innovation – the wheel. I challenged them to a game of true/false for the type of inventions that an engineer might get to work on (admittedly slightly biased towards Cambridge Consultants):
- Surgical tools and drug delivery devices that help people get better. (The little lad who used in inhaler was delighted.)
- A full-scale hurricane simulator (“is there a twister in there…….”)
- A tea-bag – “is that a coffee bag?” (still forgetting that this nation has different favorite drink to the UK, having departed my homeland a year ago.) This was a reference to Cambridge Consultants’ involvement in creating the first round tea bag many years ago as opposed to our more recent innovation in a capsule based tea beverage system – Te.
To launch into the brainstorm to address my own problem I showed them a Post-It and the funnel – two very important tools for innovation. They embraced the idea that there is no such thing as a bad idea (“A dinosaur would scare her out of bed”) and set about filling the metaphorical funnel with ideas to solve my problem. 7 teams of 4. About 30 ideas per table. Even we take a couple of hours to come up with 200 ideas from a typical session during one of our Innovation Management programs – these guys took 10 minutes flat. I haven’t yet implemented the ideas despite the odd promise.
Some thank you notes showed I had managed to make a connection and hopefully inspire a few down the road.
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.
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I concluded with a clip from Wallace and Gromit where the problem had already been solved.
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Yes you can!
Finally an observation on a key difference I have seen in the education systems either side of the pond. In the UK we have a reliance on bottom-up education, with the foundation stones of RRR (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic) put in place from a very early age with accompanying testing. In the US there seems to be top-down approach of showing what an end product might be and lighting the touch-paper of enthusiasm for kids to then engage in the building blocks. My daughter enjoyed school in the UK, she loves school in the US as she is encouraged to think big. Is it an accident that the levels of R&D spending is so much higher this side of the pond? It remains the land of opportunity and that helps keep a smile on my face of both professional engineers and those inspired to follow that path.
And good news if you are reading this with a few more years under your belt. We’re recruiting – heavily and globally.