Wednesday, October 14, 2009

A Fan of Innovation

Innovation. Revolutionary. Industry changing. All big marketing words used to promote products and new ideas. But look under the hood and most likely it is a new package design, reformatted product formula, or just a better design of the original product. Not bad by any means because some of these are actually good. A new environmental package that uses less waste... great! A new formated soap that costs less to make and cleans better without phosphates... great again!! A better designed phone that uses touch screen technology and comes with a web based application store that developers can use the phones operating system to make cool and sometimes useful tools that work on the phone... super great!!! But what about a real revolutionary game changing idea. How do you do that, and what does a product look like that is revolutionary? What kind of company actually exists today that is making these revolutionary products?

Lets go back to Rochester Institute of Technology, when I was trying to survive college and pop out the other side with a degree and ultimately a job, to a little class we had called Creative Sources. It was a class that actually taught you how to be more creative. The class was one of our electives but now I wish it was a major and everyone going through college no matter the degree had to major in it. We had to do small little "art projects" that taught us how to improve our creativity. Here is one that stands out. Take a simple object, hold it out in front of you and in a dozen images draw the object getting closer to you. You will be graded on the range of far to close you depict in those dozen images. At the time it just seemed like another one of these silly little exercises we did each week. In fact, with such a demanding major I had, this class was always..."aaahhhgg I forgot about Creative Sources." Now I never forget. You see that silly little exercise when hung up for critique was very powerful. It taught that you can take a simple object and change the way you look at it by just moving it closer or pushing it farther away. When drawn on paper where the paper acts as a frame of reference the object changes to something else completely. By looking at something in a different way you change it into something completely different.

Here is a real world example. The mechanical movement of air. My first job out of college I worked for a farm equipment manufacturer. The whole concept of harvesting grain is to throw the grain into air, separating the chaff from the bran. Just taking a handful of grain and tossing it into air and catching it in a basket works and did so for thousands of years. But with mechanization now you can toss whole fields into a machine and huge volumes of air will handle millions of grain pieces. And it was all done with fans the size of a one story building using huge amounts of power. And so fans, blades twisted at angles that spun on a shaft, became an engineering speciality. You don't think much about it... fans have been fans since the industrial revolution. The first fan was a large paddle that hung from a ceiling and a servant pulled a chain to move it. Now the computer you are reading this on uses small fans to cool the electronics. Airplanes fly because huge fans in turbines draw the plane through the air. Boats use fans shaped like propellers to screw the boat through the water. And so the fan has become a part of life. There are small issues with using paddles to move air mostly around something called buffeting. The air can not move at a constant velocity. You feel the paddles in the air blowing out of a house fan. And when put to industrial use where a constant stream of air is needed so are skilled engineers to design fans that meet the needs of the application.

The other day I saw a fan that completely rocked my world. Not because it is beautiful, and it is, but because it has no blades. It used a circular ring that has a chamber extruded through it and using a process that is loosely explained (most likely for patent reasons) passes air into this channel which excellerates air 15 times the input. Huge. Revolutionary. And a small vacuum cleaner company called Dyson did it. How? Why?

I am not employed at Dyson. I do not own stock, I do not know anyone that works there, I do not even own one of their products. But I have seen enough to convince me of the following. Design, creativity, innovation are at the top of their corporate values, mission statement, company culture... whatever HR sanctioned buzz word Dyson calls it. AND most importantly the owner of the company is a creative problem solver, and then a CEO. In fact he is most likely a CEO way after he is anything else. Imagine with me what it must have been like when the first person at the company said... "What if we made a fan without blades?" Imagine at your company what would happen if someone said... "What if we [insert far out crazy off the wall idea here]." At most every company in the world choose a response from the following: a)can not do it, b)we never did it, c)they have not done it yet, d)the boss will not like it, e)my wife will not like it, f)the customer will not buy it, g)we will need to do a huge focus group and that will cost too much money... the list could go on and on. But because Dyson has a top down problem solving culture... someone said, "Hey not a bad idea. How would you do it, you know, actually design it and make it?" Dyson asked questions all centered around my old Creative Sources class, how can you look at something from a different angle using a frame of reference that allows the view to change what you are seeing. Thus creating something completely new never before imagined and in fact never before even thought needed such a radical improvement. A fan with no blades that moves a constant velocity of air. And looks really cool doing it.

Now I have no idea if this fan will be a market success. I actually invented a product that won all kinds of awards and it was a huge market bomb. But I learned something and went on to design all kinds of things that made a successful impact on the company. Failure is acceptable and Dyson has had its share of those. Apple needed the Newton to make the iPhone. Dyson's new fan, or air multiplier, has potential far beyond a simple house hold fan. If this thing can actually amplify air flow output at 15 times input, industrial and other air moving applications are just around the corner.

Check out Dysons' new fan here.

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