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Segway Inventor Dean Kamen Shoots Down
Myths about Innovation and Invention
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 17, 2006 Contact: Al Rickard, 703-402-9713 or arickard@associationvision.com What's the difference between innovation and invention? And why does it matter? The answers to these and other questions were delivered March 16 in Washington, DC by prolific inventor Dean Kamen, famous for inventing the Segway Human Transporter and the IBOT stair-climbing wheelchair. Wearing his trademark blue jeans, Kamen spoke at a meeting of the Licensing Foundation, which promotes public awareness of the value and importance of licensing all forms of intellectual property. He was honored at the event for his enduring contributions to the field of intellectual property licensing. "Invent as a last resort," said Kamen, offering an unexpected view from someone who has invented hundreds of successful products. Instead, he urged would-be inventors to first focus on innovation: "Find the stuff on the shelf and figure out how to be a systems integrator that solves the problem. If you can't, go into the murky unknown and invent." As an example, Kamen cited the "South-pointing chariot" invented by the Chinese thousands of years ago to help them navigate across the Gobi desert at night to sneak up on their enemies. The chariot was a cumbersome contraption that accomplished the task of keeping them headed south, but the Chinese overlooked a much easier solution. More than 1,000 years earlier the Chinese had already discovered that if loadstone was placed in a container of water, magnetic force would cause the stone to drift to one side, acting as a compass. By innovating this discovery - instead of inventing the South-pointing chariot - the Chinese could have had a much more efficient tool to solve their problem. "It was the most expensive way to accomplish the job," Kamen observed. "It reminds me of a defense contractor." "We all do what we're good at. You have to ask, ‘Is this the best solution to someone's problem?' In this case, if someone comes along with a compass, we're toast. Theirs is an innovation and ours is an invention." Kamen quickly dispelled any notion that innovating or inventing is a glamorous activity. He displayed a "Flow Chart of Innovation," which showed a circuitous path that reached the bottom of the chart in what he called "the dark night of the innovator." "When you are down there and things are going really badly many people slow down and virtually stop. They lose their vision and their courage. But if you want to be innovative you better get comfortable with the knot in your stomach and the fact that you just have to keep going." For those that do keep going and succeed, the end of the chart ends on a high note at a point that says, "It Works!" At this point, Kamen quipped, "You find out how everybody was in your court the whole time." But tenacity doesn't always win the day. "I don't pretend that I know how to do this on command," he said, adding, "There are a lot of rude realities to deal with if you want to spend your life innovating. The process of getting an innovation accepted usually involves lots of surprises, many of which are bad." He told the instructive story of how his company, DEKA Research & Development Corporation, was hired by a major corporation to improve a traditional dialysis machine that needed to be more reliable. After his team wrestled with the problem and came up with the concept for a portable, briefcase-sized unit that would allow patients to do dialysis at home, he told the client his company could create it and gave the company a budget and a schedule. Months later, after the budget and schedule were exhausted and the device was still not perfected, the company cancelled the project. Undaunted, Kamen's team continued working on the project and later created a successful model. "By the early 1990s our product went on the market and within a year it wiped out the old dialysis machines," Kamen explained. "Now 50 million of these machines have been built and about 80 percent of people who get dialysis use this machine at home." The partnership Kamen forged with Baxter International, the company that brought the portable dialysis machine to market, illustrates the value of licensing in supporting new innovations and inventions. He long ago recognized that his talent was in problem-solving and innovation, and that corporate giants were the experts in systems management and process control. So the licensing process for his inventions allows his company to profit from creative innovations while the big companies gain a new product to bring to market. Everybody wins. Kamen is proud of how his inventions - most of which are medical devices - have helped millions of people around the world. But he is also focused on even larger goals to help even more people. For example, he is now in the 14th year of a program he launched calls FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), designed to ignite a love of science and technology among our nation's youth. FIRST is a nationwide competition where scientists and engineers work with teams of youth to build robots that compete in 33 regional events leading up to a national competition in the Georgia Dome that involves more than 80,000 people. "This organization will change the culture of kids in our society," he predicts. "We show kids how world-class people can accomplish things, using sports as a model." Kamen has also launched the Safe Water Network, which innovated the age-old Stirling engine to create a portable system that can generate electricity and clean water for people living in impoverished and disease-stricken developing nations around the world. The Licensing Foundation Day also featured an afternoon session that included university technology transfer success stories, the regional impact of the intellectual property business, and a case study of an intellectual property-based enterprise. ### |