Disruptive Innovation - Seeing What's Next in the Engineering Arena

[gandersen]

Hello All:

I recently finished a book by Clayton Christiansen called "Seeing What's Next: using the theories of innovation to predict industry change". It is the third in a series about Disruptive Innovation and I have read each with great interest.

I have two questions.

1) Has anyone also read any of these books?

2) If so, do you have an opinion about what might be next in the field of Engineering (any structural changes coming)?



Glen R. Andersen, Sc.D., P.E.
Optimum Resource Engineering, Inc.

http://www.ore-engineering.com

 

[tbuelna]

Glen,

As an independent "innovator" (ie. a financially unsuccessful inventor), here's a few things I've noted about innovation.

-Companies don't really spend money on innovation, regardless of what their advertisements may claim. They simply buy the technology after someone else develops it. The sad truth is that it's more cost effective this way. Real innovation is expensive and risky, and thus has a low ROI.

-It is incredibly difficult for independents to get funding for their innovation. Unless you are well connected to someone in the investment community, getting even a small amount of development funding is virtually impossible.

-The typical upper-level manager of a company that would benefit from pursuing a new technical innovation, is usually not willing to risk his career doing so. And in many cases, this manager may also not be technically savvy enough to fully understand what they are presented with. The same can be said for the management of most investment firms.

The most "disruptive" innovations are always those that provide an economic benefit. It's very rare that a product creates a market. It's market demand that usually drives innovation.

In my opinion, in the near term, the big innovations will be in the field of materials. The advent of cheap and powerful computing power makes it possible to model and predict the properties of these materials before they physically exist.

That's my two cents.

 

[zdas04]

Seems like the boundaries around this discussion involve reading the book. I'll refrain from comments on innovation, and disruptive innovation since I haven't read the book.

David

 

[gandersen]

Bringing up the book by Christiansen was only a means to generate a thoughtful discussion. I was really wanting to see if there is any consensus upon what changes may be coming to the engineering profession.

Could we have foreseen the effect that low cost computing would have had on our profession?

What about the effect of larger firms buying out smaller firms and forming large conglomerates?

What about the effect of Design/Build?

I would be interested in any perspective. I do believe that with the present economic changes that are ocurring across the world, we may need to be focusing on how our profession will go forward.

One of Christiansen's quotes is from Wayne Gretsky

"A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be."

Read more:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/wayne_gretzky.html#ixzz18Br79qb1

I guess that I am asking people to think about where the "puck" is going to be.

Glen

Glen R. Andersen, Sc.D., P.E.
Optimum Resource Engineering, Inc.

http://www.ore-engineering.com

 

[IRstuff]

Glen,

The issue is not whether people see things or not, it's whether they come to fruition. This discussion has similar undertones to the one about invention, ala, "I invented that WAY before the patent got issued." So, there are plenty of game changers, but only some of them will survive.

We have a minor discussion going on at work about spectral analysis, wherein one faction wants to use a small number of samples and interpolation to the rest, while another faction points out that absorption spectra tend to be "spiky" and therefore un-interpolateable.

This is likewise the case with innovation. The apocryphal story about Intel's marketing guys poo-pooing the microprocessor because there were only about 16,000 annual minicomputer sales worldwide illustrates the point that predicting cataclysmic events is extremely difficult.

Companies would dearly love to be able to predict which technology to bet on; I know mine would. But, in many cases, until the technology actually exists and gets used, the problems it can actually solve are unknown. After all, how many "answers looking for questions" are out there?

In answer to the other posting, innovation is still being done, otherwise there would be no new patents; we just applied for a patent on a solution to a problem that has been around for 50 years, with numerous attempts and patents on previous solutions.

Claude Shannon supposedly said that you cannot "solve a problem before its time," which also points to the fact that you cannot predict a solution if you don't even know there's problem at all.

Many of the current cryptographic algorithms could not have been invented until there was a need to improve on older approaches because of flaws or technologies that make the older approaches obsolete.

Likewise, even 20 or 15 yrs ago, few people would have considered the possibility of using graphics processors to solve mathematical problems. I will confess that while I recognized that the processing power of the graphics cards in my computer exceeded that of the main processor, it wasn't obvious that the power could be harnessed to tackle non-graphics problems. And it's not even clear that the graphics processors from 15 yrs ago could, since they were purpose built for a specific application. Undoubtably, someone attempted to solve a similar problem and posed the question back to the designers, who were then able to see their way to a more general purpose architecture that could be applied to a larger class of problems.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[zdas04]

I had a boss in 1980 that actually said "if I ever see one of my engineers with his hands on a keyboard I'm going to reclassify him as a secretary and adjust his pay accordingly." He was dead serious. Today he's just dead.

Those attitudes were ubiquitous just 30 years ago. Has the computer changed our profession? Without a doubt. Has it lead to better engineering? Almost certainly not. We get more stuff done, but I'm not sure that taking an empirical equation designed to work effectively on a slide rule to a spreadsheet and running a +/-30% calculation out to 9 decimal places is really an improvement. The complexity of the problems that we can model has increased, but our reliance on buggy models that we can't verify has led to nonsense like the Global Warming scarefest.

David

 

[msquared48]

For the classroom, cellphones are the perfect example of disruptive innovation.

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering
Motto: KISS
Motivation: Don't ask

 

[VEBill]

In the future, if the present trends continue, automated design and rapid prototyping will require just minutes, but qualification and certification will take hundreds of thousands of years.

 

[KENAT]

VE1BLL brings up a good one.

If '3D printing' 'Rapid Manufacturing' or whatever you choose to call it really advances so they can produce items

1. More quickly

2. Out of even more robust materials.

3. More cheaply.

4. Larger.

And probably a few others I've forgotten, then that could be fairly disruptive.

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[btrueblood]

The problem with most current RP materials is fragility, owing to millimeter-level defects (voids, steps, general chunkiness).

When they get the precision of fabbers tweaked down from mill-scale to nano-, we may see something nifty. It'll be awhile yet.

 

[KENAT]

I suppose you're right, it's not just the robustness of the raw material but also eliminating the little stress raisers, discontinuities between layers etc. endemic in most (all?) current processes.

However, that said, we are using Fuse Deposition Modeled ABS covers on some very low volume stuff and they're pretty satisfactory.

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[btrueblood]

Agree Kenat, we've had some prototypes made from clear resin with a sealant applied, and subjected them to flow testing. They are durable enough for that at least, and they look pretty good. Also recently are having a fast prototype investment casting made from an SLA pattern, so getting from 3D model to very robust materials is becoming quite simple, if costly.

 

[KENAT]

You know that should be on my list.

5. Improve the surface finish (& related issues)

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