November 2012 - At the 2012 Richard Newton Global Technology Leaders Conference held at UC Berkeley, the theme was “Engineering Innovation by Design”. Held in conjunction with the 5th annual Global Entrepreneurs Week, the half day event discussed a number of drivers of change in innovation in engineering. The event opened with an introduction to two new innovations centers - Skydeck an incubator in Berkeley that is targeted at alumni and professors from UCB to enter the marketplace with new products and the Feng Institute which is an incubator that is based on and supported by the crowd funding model.
Dean Shankar Sastry opened the event with a discussion of innovation and design. He stated that design is the key to innovation - it is not just the technology but also by societal use. The basis of design is the triad of imagination, iteration and persistent failure. Persistent failure is unique to engineering rather than science, as it is an optimization process that involves discovery, analysis, documentation and identification of tradeoffs that are based on both qualitative and quantitative metrics.
The first keynote speaker was Carl Bass CEO of Autodesk. Under the mantra of “Engineering Innovation for All” he identified the keys as being not technology but the access to capital, access to market and access to tools. On the access to tools part, Mr. Bass pointed out that all of the Autodesk software products are available free of charge to students and educators from K-12 and all levels of higher education at public and private facilities. Following the cost of tools, he indicated we are now in a world of infinite computing. Information on the educational program is at http://students.autodesk.com/
Historically, computing resources were limited and scarce. Now, with advancements in processors and the availability of GPUs and the cloud access model, compute is essentially free and available - hence it is not a resource impediment any longer. The current price on a commodity availability of computing is about $0.03/hr. The current illustrative thought is (1 computer * 10,000 seconds = $0.25) which is also (10,000 computers * 1 second = $0.25). This access to infinite compute causes a paradigm shift in what can be considered design-able.
Paradigm shifts such as 3D printing are becoming common place. This is an shift on two levels - it is an additive mfg process vs subtractive (cnc machines and milling machine tools), and it is a create on demand process driver rather than an inventory management process. These new ideas, in combination with infinite compute, allow for “blank sheet design” rather than incremental modification of existing designs.
The new focus is on “inventor fusion”. This is the invention process that relies on 24/7 real time access to tools on the web from any location, cloud based infinite compute capability, short term feedback (seconds vs days) and the ability share and collaborate with others on the ideas who have a common interest.
The second keynote was by Bernard Amadei who started “Engineers without Borders”. The basis is the world needs good disruptive engineering. 90% of the engineers focus on problems of 10% of the community. This leaves a large gap in the issues at large. The mantra for this talk was “doing well by doing good”. This was clarified by the markets of $202B for healthcare, $553B for energy, and $36T for agriculture & food. The challenges in these markets is the problems are presented in the form of social solutions not in standard engineering problem format.
To address this issue the new branch of “development engineering” has been created. Issues that impact the global economy that can be addressed are those such as 1B people in Africa live in the dark which is a huge loss of productivity. In this context, engineers should be referred to as - change makers, peace makers, social entrepreneurs or facilitators of sustainable human development. This requires the engineering to think not just high tech or low tech, but situationally to address the large scope of the issues, while addressing and solving the incremental issues in the process. The biggest area of short term growth and innovation for these markets is tele-medicine, tele-education, tele-anything.
The fundamental theme that tied the discussions together was that the solution for better engineering is not a STEM program (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) but a STEAM program (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math). The STEAM methodology brings to light social and community issues and presents news perspectives on both problem identification and solution from the traditional and now commoditizes post-WWII engineering higher education disciplines.