Today IGERT students had a round-table discussion with Dr. Keith Sawyer, a visiting professor from UNC and a researcher on creativity and innovation. After introductions, Dr. Sawyer started off talking about the differences in ‘innovation culture’ of today’s society verses one in the 1960s. More recently, innovation is become trendy and companies are starting to recognize the need for an innovative mindset in all aspects of company transactions rather than just the R&D department alone.
Dr. Sawyer highlighted the past challenges of transferring knowledge from the R&D division to the manufacturing division. Sometimes researchers develop a new technology and felt as if they were ‘throwing it over a wall’ hoping that someone on the manufacturing side would catch it. The classic example is with Xerox PARC whose researchers developed a computer complete with mouse and graphical user interface, but when presented it to other departments of the company, no one seemed to value the innovation as a marketable product. However, when Steve Jobs invited by a friend toured Xerox PARC he immediately recognized the personal computer as a radical innovation that would change the world and started the line of Macintosh computers.
One of the challenges with commercializing innovation is first recognizing that what you have is a useful product that could meet an unmet market need. The goal of the WPI IGERT is to teach IGERT students how to recognize translatable applications of their research and to find ‘uses’ of the basic research they are doing in the lab.
Dr. Sawyer has written a book about innovations and collaborations entitled ‘Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration’. He talked briefly about companies patenting inventions that they don’t really know how to pursue in hopes that someday someone might have an application and license their invention to market as part of a profitable product creating a ‘patent thicket’. In order to produce the best innovation, companies may have to acquire patents own by other companies. Although this may hinder development of innovations, it requires companies to collaborate if they share patents needed to form the best product. Again, there are parallels to the Gateway community. The IGERT is meant to be interdisciplinary as ‘BioFabriacation’ cannot be lumped into one department, but encompasses a multitude of different ones. Students in the program have access to professors in intersecting fields facilitating both collaboration and innovative problem solving.
In conclusion, the IGERT program is training students both to have an innovative mindset and to form collaborations. Both attributes as Dr. Sawyer highlighted, is clearly needed by companies today especially in the biomedical field to create translatable products with high consumer value. In a culture where the motto ‘Innovate or die’ is becoming more and more real, these skills are needed for the continued production of quality medical products and devices and the persistence of strong companies.
