Tag Archives: innovation

Goodhart’s law

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blueskyWe used to talk about R&D, i.e. research and development. In broad terms, most research happened in universities and national labs while most development was undertaken by companies. Nowadays we are being pressed to research and innovative. Nearly, every application for research funding from government agencies must include a section on the likely impact of the proposed research. This emphasis on impact is a global trend that was identified by Dr Helen Neville, Vice-President at Procter & Gamble for Global Open Innovation, in a recent talk I heard her give on trends in international research collaboration. The focus of university research used to be blue-sky, i.e. research with no pre-conceived application. We are exploiting the blue-sky research of twenty or thirty years ago now. And by only funding research with identifiable impacts our successors are likely to be short on breakthroughs to exploit in the middle of the century. It is analogous to a forester harvesting trees planted by his parents and not planting any for his children.

Attempting to evaluate the potential impact of a piece of research whose outcome, by definition, is not yet known is problematic and a matter of judgement rather than measurement.  Even for a piece of university research performed twenty years ago it is not possible to make a precise measurement of its impact. There are no international standards against which to make the measurement, as there is for the metre or the kilogram.  Consequently, the impact of research is probably one of those cultural measures that are subject to Goodhart’s law.  In 1975, Charles Goodhart postulated that once a measure is chosen for making policy decisions it begins to lose its value as a measure.  This is because people adjust their behaviour to optimise the value of the measure, e.g. university researchers tend towards research with short-term impact rather than focussing on discovery followed by dissemination and, or development.

Source: Measuring culture.  Robert P Crease in Physics World, April 2013.

The Charismatic Engineer

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stanfordcloisterEngineers do not have a great reputation for being charismatic leaders or communicators. In both print and speech we have a tendency towards being precise and concise, which often also means boring. However communicating is probably the most important part of the job for many engineers and for this charisma is important. The German historian and sociologist, Max Weber observed that people voluntarily comply with three types of authority: traditional, rational-legal and charismatic. Traditional authority is the type vested in age-old rules and conventions; so not much chance of engineers possessing much of this type of authority. Rational-legal authority derives from the bureaucratic or administrative system, the ‘laws’ enacted by it and their implementation by those appointed within the system; so again not much hope for engineers except within some engineering organisations. Charismatic authority is possessed by individuals who appear to be extraordinary or have ‘at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’. I think engineers have a decent chance of this last type of authority. As a profession, we have pretty extraordinary powers. Just look at our ability to provide round-the-clock water, food, energy, shelter and transportation in densely populated cities. Never mind adapting systems to cope with natural disasters or designing vehicles to land on Mars. So as individuals we need to develop exceptional qualities of integrity and communication, if we want society, or even just the CEO, to listen to and accept our advice.

Many engineers will shy away from the line that I have expressed above, preferring to hide in the test lab or behind their computer screen. This is in part because engineers are trained as problem-solvers and solving problems often requires a degree of solitude and silence that is not compatible with high profile communication. This conflict is shared by many scientists, who are often judged by their publication profile rather than their scientific achievements in part because it is easier to count publications that to assess the significance of achievements. Some of us enjoy the solitude of writing blogs, lectures and papers. I find the process deepens my understanding and goes a long way to resolving the conflict between communicating and problem-solving. However, it can be difficult in a modern professional life to create the necessary calm for problem-solving creativity.

Marily Oppezzo and Dan Schwartz at Stanford University have shown that taking a walk can stimulate creativity. So perhaps monks knew this when they built magnificent cloisters adjacent to many great cathedrals and monasteries in Europe. However, you don’t need a beautiful set of cloisters, the Stanford researchers found that creativity increased by the same amount whether their subjects strolled in Stanford’s lovely leafy campus or walked on a treadmill opposite a blank wall. So next time you feeling challenged by the preparation of a charismatic talk or you are stuck solving a problem, take stroll. The Stanford team found that eight minutes was enough to produce an appreciable improvement in creativity.

And oh, yes. Don’t forget to leave behind all your electronic devices when you walk. Their silence is crucial. See my post entitled ‘Silence is golden’ on January 14th, 2014.

Sources:

Robert P Crease, ‘Critical Point: Why don’t they listen?’ Physics World, May 2014

Max Weber, ‘Economy and Society’, 1922

Gretchen Reynolds, ‘Take a walk to stimulate creativity’, INYT, May 7th, 2014

Oppezzo, M., J. Schwartz, D., Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking, Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, April 2014.

Felicity Mellor, Shhhh?  Scientists need to talk about not talking, The Guardian Newspaper blog January 15th, 2014 also The power of silence, Physics World, April 2014

Disease of the modern age

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hot flatThomas Friedman described ‘continuous partial attention’ as a disease of the modern age in his book ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded – Why we need a green revolution and how it can renew America’ [Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2008].  Most university students suffer from this disease, which makes it difficult for lecturers to attract and hold their attention.  An NSF-funded consortium of university engineering departments in the USA has developed a strategy based on using Everyday Examples of Engineering to engage students (for exemplars see http://www.engageengineering.org/?page=161 ).

A Biological Science Curriculum Study in the 1980s developed the concept of 5Es as a framework for lecture or lesson plans based on the earlier work of Atkin and Karplus [Atkin JM, & Karplus R, Discovery or invention? Science Teacher, 29(5):45, 1962].  The 5Es are: ENGAGE, EXPLORE, EXPLAIN, ELABORATE and EVALUATE.

I have edited a series of lesson plans which combine the 5Es framework and Everyday Examples of Engineering principles [see http://www.engineeringexamples.org ], which are intended to support lecturers who want to use these examples in their teaching.  The lesson plans describe how the engineering principles can be applied and explained as well as providing worked analyses of the examples.  The worked analyses will also be useful to students although full explanations of the underlying principles are not included because it is assumed that these are well-known to the lecturer.

In my post about ‘Bridging cultures’ on June 12th, 2013, I made a commitment to write a series of posts about Everyday Examples of Engineering concepts.  When they are relevant, I intend to attached 5E lesson plans to these posts.

To quote Samuel Johnson: “the two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new”; I aspire to this and through the lesson plans help others to achieve it in the classroom.

Innovation jobs

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Yesterday, I listened to an interesting talk by Dr Liang-Gee Chen, President of the National Applied Research Laboratories of Taiwan at the UK-Taiwan Academic-Industry & Technology Transfer Collaboration Forum organised by the British Council.  He presented some statistics from the Kaufmann Foundation [http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/business-dynamics-statistics.aspx], which demonstrated that nearly all new jobs in the USA are generated by new companies.  When you combine this with my conclusion in my posting on ‘Population crunch’, that we need a higher level of innovation in engineering, then we need to review the education programmes provided for our engineers to ensure that they include innovation and entrepreneurship.  These need to be integrated in engineering education programmes [see Handscombe et al, 2009].  We seem to have lost the plot in the UK and retreated to teaching engineering science, design and management orientated towards the employers with the loudest voice, i.e. multi-nationals, who are not likely to be the source of innovation jobs that will pull us out of the global recession.

Handscombe, R.D., Rodriguez-Falcon, E., Patterson, E.A., 2009, ‘Embedding enterprise in engineering’, IJ Mechanical Engineering Education, 37(4):263-274.