Inquiry, Discovery, Invention, and Innovation—The Personal Experience of Technology Generation and Transfer in Engineering and Scientific Research
Publication: Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 7, Issue 4
Understanding and developing one’s ability to do successful research requires a commitment. It’s about continuous adult learning and ongoing involvement in understanding the process of inquiry, discovery, invention, and innovation. To achieve these objectives a learning and research process framework is vital. Integrating these frameworks into the research paradigm allows us to enhance the personal research and learning process. This is the personal, inner challenge of every scientist and engineer.
Today’s created environment is one result of the human discovery, invention, and innovation process. It is based on millions of creative insights deeply rooted in our evolutionary history. This unique knowledge-generating, transformational process is constantly at work in human life. Today it is the essential work of engineering and scientific research. The focus of this article is the inner, personal experience of this remarkable and sometimes mysterious process. Inquiry, discovery, invention, and innovation are four distinct phases of the technological change process. Inquiry generates from a curious state of mind about a segment of nature or reality. Questions are asked. Answers are sought. Discovery involves finding a new understanding about an aspect of nature. Behavior is newly comprehended. Material is newly generated or transformed. Invention uses this understanding to create a new way of working or functioning. A device is constructed. A process is developed. Innovation broadly disseminates and distributes this new way of working or functioning to the greater society. People begin to work in new ways. New wealth is created. Only on very rare occasions does the same person making the discovery create the invention or distribute and popularize the innovation. This is primarily because of the vastly different and highly specialized talents that are needed to achieve success in each of these unique activities.
Through our intelligence, education, and energy each of us learns, more or less, how to make our way in the world. Like every other sector of society science and engineering rewards the human combination of energy and intelligence, particularly if it is used to support the policies and institutions of the scientific and engineering world. But what if your intelligence and energy generates new ideas? What if you are an engineering and scientific boat rocker? What do you do? What’s important about the science and engineering viewpoint? Can it be changed? If so, how?
Science and Truth
The worldview of science is a way of looking at and explaining the world. It has captured the imagination of millions of people in every culture for over four hundred years. Today it co-opts and dominates nearly every other explanation of the micro- and macrouniverse. The particular academic, ideological, political, religious, or secular persuasion doesn’t matter; whenever a position is being advocated, people usually feel a need to invoke scientific validity to establish its truth. From health to environment, from species evolution to economics, from psychological understanding to spiritual experiences, scientific validation is the key common ingredient that is openly sought to validate an ideology or a worldview.
But what is the world—the universe—really like? The truth, and you may find this hard to accept: we really don’t know for certain. We only know what we experience—the light, the sound, the odors, the energy, the tastes; and we know how we conceptualize our experiences so we can think about it. Science is one process for validating, explaining, and understanding our conceptualized experience. In the validating process science uses experiments, mathematical formulae, laws, principles, theories, and conceptual relationships to define and predict future experience. But science itself does not discover new understandings, invent new technology, or innovate in the marketplace. Only alive, curious, aware human beings can inquire, discover, invent, and innovate. So if you’re a person who is interested in new ideas and inventions you’ll need to develop some additional tools so you can better deal with and understand yourself, the world of science and engineering, and the marketplace.
Our Usual Experience
Most of the time we interact with our world in habitual ways based on past, learning, concepts, and experience. We see and experience what we were taught and learned to see and what we expect to see. We solve problems with the usual tried and true approaches or with a few, minor variations of these methods. We define, model, and bound our problems within limited parameters of rational thinking using familiar words, metaphors, and historical solutions such as scientific, games, ladders, races, travel, survival of the fittest, don’t-rock-the-boat, relationships to or analogies with the human body or nature, brainstorming, etc. But, occasionally, as humanity and society progresses on this journey of inquiry, discovery, invention, and innovation, our understanding of reality and truth is expanded. When this happens new metaphors emerge like machines, vehicles, computers, programming, chaos, self-organizing systems, or even strings. This is the journey of inquiry, discovery, and innovation.
Success, Prediction, and Knowing
New understandings invite us to change both our way of doing and of being. But, primarily due to our past successes, we are challenged by change. We develop familiar, ingrained behavior patterns that define a successful everyday and functional life in the world, and we find it is hard to change our ways. Most of our daily experience continues to be predictable and determined by our past knowledge and experience. We usually forget that our familiar ways of conceptualizing reality are the direct result of our prior education, training, and past experience. For example, it is due to our training and experience as scientists and engineers that we think like scientists and engineers. This holds true for artists, lawyers, doctors, writers, teachers, etc. We sometimes call this silent, mutually agreed upon behavior the “reality consensus.” But, why don’t we just learn to think differently? Well, it’s mainly because thinking differently takes a special ingredient. That ingredient is one of the tools you’ll need to identify and cultivate if you wish to be a person who generates new ideas.
Inquiry, Discovery, Invention, and Innovation
Since the beginning of what we now understand as human time people have been making discoveries. From the making of fire, to Archimedes eureka, to the discovery of penicillin, new ways of understanding the world and the cosmos were evolved or discovered by curious people. They were using the creative inquiry process. This process generated the “ah-ha!” insights and flashes of understanding. Discoveries are made by people who are curious about the new and novel and dissatisfied with the status quo. These are people who are curious and who ask old questions in new ways and who ask new questions. Inventions are created by curious people dissatisfied with current methods and means of working. These are people who seek something more than an incremental refinement in the usual way of working. And, innovation is spawned by dissatisfied people looking for new opportunities behind doors believed by most people to be closed. As you will read in a later section, even the basic methods and philosophy behind modern science was an innovative discovery made by a dissatisfied young person challenging the status quo.
The Insight Experience
Just what is the experience of insight? When we have a breakthrough experience, we rarely consider the nature of the experience itself. Our attention and awareness are so captured by the conceptual content of the breakthrough that we usually overlook the nature of experience itself. But the particular underlying nature of each unique insight experience can also point us to a new ingredient—something different about our mind, our presence, and our inner processes of learning and knowing. This ingredient points to new ways to interact with, experience, and understand our world.
Fine-Tuning Our Personal Instrument
The personal ability to deal with the unknown, to make new discoveries, and to experience and understand reality in new ways can be developed and enhanced. This personal growth process is tied directly to developing a more refined sensitivity to the physical, intellectual, and emotional experience of our familiar world. Cultivating these refined abilities necessarily means expanding our range of experience. This fine-tuning can only happen if we can learn ways to enhance our human experience instrument to receive a wider range of inputs. In today’s world, you could say we’re looking for ways to upgrade our personal-experience-processing program. It not only means having new experiences and but also learning new ways of experiencing the familiar world we know and see. Developing a more refined physical, intellectual, and emotional experience may include:
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New physical experiences via learning new ways to move your body, like a new dance; or a new physical activity or sport like juggling or golf; or a new body movement technique like Feldenkreis or yoga; or learning how to see the world in a more refined way by taking a drawing class;
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New intellectual experiences via learning to write poetry, studying metaphor, language, and communications to understand and find new metaphors and concepts for describing our personal experience of reality, or learning to consider nonlinear systems and use integral note keeping and information management techniques; and
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New emotional experiences via learning to expand inner awareness and curiosity, taking a creative writing class, a silent meditation retreat or guided visualization workshop; or taking up a personal journaling discipline.
For most adult people, particularly scientists and engineers, such new learning pursuits may be scary prospects. Since these are soft, touchy-feely subjects, and not physically real like chemistry and physics, they usually get dismissed by the technical person as unworthy of pursuit. But if we are to learn to experience and think in new ways about our world it necessarily must involve more subtle interior learning and development.
Another major reason we resist these subjects is new learning makes us confront an anxiety-producing inner state called “not knowing.” Now that we are educated and successful, we don’t like the idea of feeling ignorant. But on some deeper intuitive level we know it is only by this process of experiential learning that we can make new brain connections and enhance our personal development. In order to understand the world in a new way—a way that is different from the past and different from the ordinary knowledge, experience, and information in our personal memories—it is necessary to find new, more refined, and subtle approaches to experiencing the world and reality. We need to see it, feel it, or hear it differently fro our usual ways. The story goes that to find a new way of understanding light, Einstein rode around the universe on a beam of light in the inner world of his imagination. Not the usual experience of sunshine.
Now some new experiences are riskier than others. The experiences being pointed to here are empowering and permanent educational experiences that generate unique and new personal freedom and options. So let these qualities guide your choices.
Seeing as Engineering Experience
Here is a down-to-earth, personal example of what I mean by new experiential learning. Once, when I was just beginning my engineering career, I was taught an interesting lesson in refining my ability to see the world. The engineering firm I worked for won a contract to inspect several bridges. Ned Ashton, a prominent, Iowa State University structural engineering professor and bridge engineer, was a friend of our firm’s president. He was able to engage Ned to advise and assist us on the bridge inspection contract.
One day while Ned and I were standing down stream looking back at a multispan bridge Ned said to me, “It looks like this bridge has some serious settlement at the second pier from the south end.”
From my limited-experience viewpoint, I was quite surprised and asked, “How can you tell that without doing field measurements?”
Ned said, “It’s not that difficult. You just need to know what to look for. Follow along the top of the handrail with your eye and you’ll see what I mean.”
Sure enough there was a clearly visible dip at the second pier in the top of the otherwise flat handrail.
When we look, we don’t see everything before us. We see what we expect and think is in the scene before us. Mostly we see reality as it is bounded by our familiar words, symbols, and concepts, but not the full range of reality itself. Seeing more is part of the researcher’s challenge. It is also another reason why learning new ways to be in and experience the world are important to our ability to inquire, discover, invent, and innovate.
The Human Self-Organizing Learning System
For a mature adult, one of the keys to effective continuous learning is having an appropriate conceptual framework and method to generate and connect new knowledge. Such a conceptual framework is vital to understanding new processes, information, data, or ideas. Adult human learning and development is potentially an endless process. To be most effective and to access it in a new way requires an operational framework. One thing we do know is people learn when new things are happening to them, when they have new experiences. However, we don’t usually have a way of explaining the process by which we encounter new things or generate new experiences. These experiences are often left up to the vagaries and varieties of chance. But they can be more deliberate choices.
One particularly effective metaphorical explanation for human learning uses the relatively recent scientific understanding of self-organizing systems. New knowledge of self-organizing systems or dissipative structures, as they are known in the world of chemistry, won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for Belgian/Russian Ilya Prigogine in 1977. This understanding basically states that when a functioning, self-organizing system in a state of equilibrium is disturbed by some external influence, at first it tends to become chaotic. Then, at a later point in time, because it is self-organizing, the system begins to generate a new and interactive level of complexity, sensitivity, and functioning that includes and transcends the external disturbance. The self-organizing system internally evolves a new state of equilibrium. And this new state can result in the development of unpredictable, new, more complex, and refined patterns of a system’s functioning and behavior. Doesn’t this sound like a good description of how we, as human beings, learn something new? It’s been adopted as a metaphor by many social scientists to explain the process of human growth and learning.
In the individual person, this type of self-organizing behavior usually occurs with new experiential learning, but it can also happen occasionally with purely intellectual learning experiences. New and experiential learning results in more complex behavior. And it can generate new options for inquiry, discovery, invention, and innovation. With it can come new ways to approach our daily experience of the world in work and in life.
Becoming and being a normal adult means our human operating system is relatively stable. So for most adults, self-organizing system changes occur in us only when we experience radically new knowledge. This happens when we find ourselves in a totally new situation where we don’t know what to do, like starting or loosing a job or experiencing the loss of a loved one or a spiritual awakening.
For young children and adults the operating system is a state of continual flux. This self-organizing change in equilibrium is one reason why the first grade is so scary for a six-year-old, why high school is so traumatic for a teenager, and why college is so challenging for a young adult. It’s not just the reading, writing, arithmetic, and new ideas that are so challenging; it’s the added experience of major personal change and transformation taking place at each of these times in our life. Young people are leaving behind their old self and new people are being born almost on a moment-to-moment basis.
But don’t panic. You don’t have to create an earthquake in your life to learn something new. A new and focused approach to adult learning for people in the scientific research and development process doesn’t have to be as dramatic or radical as the journey from childhood to adulthood. However, it does require intentionally introducing new, selective, and experiential disturbances.
During our careers as young adults we experience learning disturbances as a normal part of our world. We accept change as another part of living. These experiences include graduation, new jobs, relocating in a new city, getting or not getting the promotion at work, a failed relationship, new life commitments like marriage and family, travel and unexpected success or failure in work and life, and much, much more. Each of these experiences challenges us to re-self-organized at a new, more complex state of behavior. This state includes the new knowledge and understandings of the most recent disturbance experience. As we get older and gain more experience these challenges become less frequent but they never completely disappear. To be alive is to change and grow. Only the velocity of change seems to decrease as we age.
The Importance of Conflict and Chaos in Learning
Self-organizing systems with an introduced disturbance is our foundation framework metaphor for the human learning process. With it we can begin to explore a particular intellectual challenge faced by the scientific and engineering researcher. To be effective in research and the discovery of new knowledge one must simultaneously know and not know. Why is knowing and not knowing such a challenge, perhaps the key challenge, in the world of inquiry, research, discovery, and innovation? Before we address this question, let’s briefly look at a part of the history of science.
Birth of Modern Science
This is a story about the birth of modern science. It is an accepted historic fact that on November 10, 1619, while on winter bivouac during the French Thirty Years’ War with Germany, a French soldier in his early twenties named Rene Descartes had three dreams that were to create the basis for what we know today as the scientific method. A significant aspect of this historic event was the inner attitude of the young Descartes. We are told that after the usual schooling and two years of law school he basically rejected the educational paradigm of his day as inadequate and bankrupt for individually learning the truth about the world and reality. The learning and education of Descartes’ day was based mostly on memorizing what the Catholic Church and the Romans and the Greeks thought was true. Descartes had a deep inner thirst for knowledge and truth. He had a burning curiosity about finding what might be a better, more verifiable, and personal method for learning the truth. Without this interior intellectual posture of both knowing and not knowing and not accepting the current knowledge paradigm, it is unlikely Descartes would have achieved the breakthrough insights and understandings contained in the three dreams. Each day, we take Descartes’ earthshaking insights for granted, along with the major global and scientific infrastructure his dreams spawned in academia, government, and business.
Today, we know that each human being is potentially a continuous learning organism—actually, a self-organizing continuous learning system. From our beginnings we had to learn how to use our bodies, and, with much thanks to Descartes, our rational minds, intuition, and creativity so we could function in the world. Humans do continue to learn, transform, and grow in knowledge and development throughout their life.
However, as we have observed, most people find a comfortable intellectual place and state of development. In this place they know a great deal about a particular segment of reality and so they stop or dramatically slow down real experiential learning. They then work to keep the status quo at that comfortable level of development. In this place they consciously and unconsciously carefully avoid any real change and/or radical new learning disturbances and work to stay in control of their life experiences. But as the earlier description of a self-organizing system implies, we can only truly learn when we are challenged or disturbed from our comfortable and established view of life and work by some problem or conflict.
Descartes lived in chaotic times in his society. He was actually at war, perhaps the most chaotic of human events, when his breakthrough insights occurred. In addition, for people of his time, there was a taboo against personal inner learning (i.e., learning anything for yourself). If it wasn’t in the Greek and Roman classics or approved by the Church, it was taboo. Today we have actually adopted a similar perspective with regard to the knowledge generated by science and some contemporary cultural, social, and political positions. How often do we hear people say that if something isn’t proven scientifically then it’s not valid? And this actually means that if the experience in question isn’t based on and verified by a knowledge system that was literally “dreamed up” four hundred years ago, it’s not okay. And, yes, science is one valid methodology for validating, explaining, and understanding performance and defining predictable behavior in natural phenomena. But science is not how we inquire, discover, invent, and innovate. The generation of new knowledge requires something else to happen within the consciousness of a human being. Then, when we discover the new thing, we can use the principles of science to help us validate and understand our new knowledge.
Systems and Chaos
In the self-organizing model we can characterize humans as a system of systems. As such, humans generally respond to the principles of systems theory. The principles of systems theory offer us another supporting framework that can help us further understand the use of learning disturbances in the creative inquiry process. One systems principle rooted in Prigogine’s discovery is “a complex, self-organizing system begins to evolve when it gets disturbed from its ordered way of operating.” This causes the system to move away from its usual ordered state and toward a less ordered, more chaotic state. The system is moving away from the ordered state toward the boundary between order and chaos. Another systems theory principle is that an ordered system tends to evolve as it approaches the ordered side of its boundary between order and chaos. It is important to face the challenges of a problem or conflict where we don’t know all the answers. In this place our human organism learns best. In this place of known ignorance, we know and accept that we do not know. This is the interior intellectual posture of not knowing and knowing but not accepting the current paradigm as the only way of approaching the issue we are considering. It is a key inner ingredient in the inquiry, discovery, invention, and innovation process—the mental posture that is the Descartes state of mind.
Basic Learning Processes
Normally we learn in two primary ways: (1) we learn by sensually experiencing reality from some new, unfamiliar perspective; and (2) we learn about reality through new concepts, analogies, and language. These two ways of learning are sometimes referred to as real/concrete learning and theoretical/symbolic learning. Both are considered rational cause and effect methods and result in more information, data, and understanding about existing things and processes. Both these learning methods work like algorithms and generate the information and ordinary knowledge that is then stored in our memory capacity.
Another observation from the systems perspective is that a seemingly unsolvable problem in one system usually has a solution in the next higher system. This characteristic is frequently experienced in family, social, and organizational system contexts. For example, when a rule or policy challenges a particular behavior or condition, the next higher system (in this case the rule-making authority) can generally resolve the situation. This understanding is also at play in other more creative methods of solution generation. This systems principle can be a way of explaining the role of creative insight into an apparently unsolvable problem from a current state of ordinary knowledge, experience, or performance.
When we have an “ah-ha!” experience we experience learning by seeing from the perspective of a higher knowledge system. So this is another way of learning. This ability to have insights and intuitions is a third category of learning sometimes called direct or intuitive insight. This third way is metarational approach and not directly cause-and-effect generated. It is different from our usual life activities and more rational ways of learning. This method seems to tap some unknown part of our own consciousness or perhaps some greater logos that is connected to the situation or challenge we are working to understand. This direct understanding usually results in new knowledge and a new understanding of reality for the observer, and sometimes, as with Descartes, for all of humanity.
So how do we deal with the basic research challenge of both knowing and not knowing? How do we develop greater understanding of it and cultivate our ability to have insight and function within it? To apply this new learning process of experiencing new knowledge and insight we require another conceptual framework. This framework bounds and defines the scientific research process. And that is where we turn now.
Framework of Discovery, Innovation, and Innovation
The Question behind the Challenge
The research challenge begins with an unusual question that can be phrased something like this: “How can I begin to learn what I don’t know about this problem?” Acquiring the habit of asking this question and listening for a spontaneous response can bring us to a new mental place, and potentially a new lifestyle place. Asking this question doesn’t mean that you forget what you know; rather, in asking this question, you open the possibility of learning something new. Actually, habitually and repeatedly asking this slightly confusing question can bring one to a new way of being in the research world. And it is in the act of asking this question that we further introduce the new ingredient and begin to change how we are. When we inquire we are present in a different way than our usual awareness. This brings us to the first stage of the process.
Stage 1: Research, Inquiry, and Information Saturation
To stimulate the ability to invent and innovate it is necessary to find ways to experience the unknown. This means we inquire—we cultivate the inner posture of curiosity. We seek questions, challenges, and problems. A famous playwright in the last century said, “Creativity is the capacity to see what’s there.” Another question worth asking is, “What is here that I’m not seeing?” Frequently we look but do not see the amazing breadth, depth, and diversity of a particular scenario. We dismiss many experiences in life with a “been there done that” attitude when all we’ve done is barely scratch the surface of the experience. By understanding the experience conceptually or by knowing one way to do what needs to be done we think we know all about it. One demonstration of this behavior is to think of several uses for a paper clip or a toothpick. You’ll be surprised that after six or eight uses people usually get stuck. Or you might try to think of more than one way to observe deflections at a bridge pier.
When you get stuck, if you are lucky, someone may show you how to see more of what’s there in the picture (like how I learned to see the bridge pier settlement). Mentors and teachers can be found if you’re willing to look for and engage them. A vital discipline for researchers is continually expanding our curiosity and experience of the world and watching and learning how we react to new scenarios. This discipline is essential to expanding the ability to discover and generate unique creative output.
Asking new questions and expanding our learning experiences takes work, time, and money. That may be one reason why many people resist learning new material. If it sounds like you might have to make some choices and perhaps even make some sacrifices to achieve this new level of creative output, you’re right—you do. True education always requires paying tuition. Expanding our unique talent and ability requires us to grow and change. It is one of life’s truths that you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over—behaving, functioning, and thinking in the same way—and expect things to really change or be different. That’s on reason why real learning is scary and most adults aren’t willing to do it. As a child at birth to when you begin school and on through college and graduate school you don’t usually have much choice in the matter of learning. When you were young, to learn actually meant growing up—to change as a person. This is one reason your children always seem to be questioning you about the world you have created for them, why they sometimes seem to challenge your authority, and why they seek out new experiences. But things start to change after we’re grown up and have been out in the world for a few years. Then we are making some money and acquiring some cultural positioning and personal and financial power and security and pleasure. At this point, real change and learning is not as easy—it’s risky and challenging to our circumstances. When it comes to making choices, even though the risk may be small, we usually choose the undisturbed pleasure of staying in the same old patterns of behavior rather than the potential pain of learning something really new.
So here we have another view of our research challenge and one of the many personal barriers to our creative output—it is our adult, ingrained, automatic, cultural mindset against genuinely new learning and experience. As we age we only want to “learn” through the relatively painless conceptual methods of books, words, and other communications media. As we get older traveling to a foreign country may be all (by way of radical new experience) we are willing to tolerate. But when we’re young and striving we don’t usually act so cautiously. We’re curious, we question, we’re more fearless, we have less to risk. A young person is going somewhere both on the inside and the outside.
So remember: making the kind of change needed to expand our inner abilities doesn’t mean starting again from scratch. Working on a new challenge, particularly one that will cause us to grow and evolve, can be one of the great joys and adventures of life. Using some of your time each day to expand your talents is a discipline worth cultivating. And your money? What is it for if it isn’t a means to help you along life’s journey? Frequently, it is the fear of our personal unknowns that usually holds us back. Curiosity and change challenge our perceived security, survival, and social position. But sometimes we don’t have a choice—our destiny brings us new change, knowledge, and experience.
Stage 2: Incubation
Once our courageous curiosity has generated some new information inputs our inner processor must digest the new experience. Because the action of incubation is a lot like “stopping” what you’ve been doing, it looks like we are giving up, or even worse, not working. In the modern world with all its multitasking, self-esteem training, motivational methods, and sports metaphors, just hanging out or looking like you gave up is not an acceptable cultural option. But human beings possess an internal, inborn ability to integrate, synthesize, and bring together recently acquired knowledge in new ways. It is not a rational process. It is metarational—above or higher than rational and somewhat mysterious—because we don’t know exactly how it happens. We do know that to function effectively this process needs some quiet time away from the usual mental thinking process. This internal incubation process adds to the research challenge. When we incubate our new information and data with our previously acquired knowledge and experience, it appears, by the usual standards of society, that we are not doing anything productive. From the usual expectations of managers and supervisors, the act of incubation in the process of discovery, invention, and innovation can look like laziness. This is another one of the cultural barriers we face as research scientists and engineers. This doesn’t mean that incubation is lethargy where no work is being done. However, it does mean that we step away from the particular task, give it some space, and perhaps move on and even begin some new task. In some new ideas the incubation period has gone on for years. The researcher just keeps returning to the problem from time to time when something reminds or motivates him. In these moments you see if you can observe something new or find something specific that you hadn’t considered.
Keystone of Discovery, Invention, and Innovation
Stage 3: Synthesis
This is the “ah-ha!” experience. It’s what most people think about when they think of creativity. Almost everyone has had some form of the “ah-ha!” experience—the spark of a new idea, the insight, the revelation that resolves a problem or conflict with new understanding. Remember its symbol? It’s the light coming on—enlightenment. The word “brilliance” is often used to describe these flashes of insight and understanding.
In the process of research (the verb) and creative inquiry, we uncover a variety of what appears to be disparate pieces of information and data. Initially, we do not see the preexisting underlying thread of unity that connects these elements of our knowledge. It is this thread that emerges from the darkness in the “ah-ha!” moment. As we work to hold the disparate knowledge elements generated by our inquiry in our consciousness, it is the metarational action of our inherent brilliance that eventually reveals the underlying connecting thread. When this happens we experience the flash of insight, expansion, and spaciousness of the “ah-ha!” experience. With this new knowledge we are then energized to take the next steps in the discovery process.
People don’t usually remember much about the “ah-ha!” experience specifically. This is usually because they are focused on the content of the insight. The objective of the research was to reveal a new understanding—to find the underlying thread of new knowledge and resolve of problem or conflict. But this new understanding is only a part of the inquiry, discovery, invention, and innovation process, and a relatively small part at that. Make no mistake—it is an essential ingredient and a vitally important part. But to the unattuned mind insights can be fleeting. Many inventors familiar with the process know they have had good ideas and have forgotten them. This was a synthesis they failed to capture in the momentary flash of light, mainly because their awareness was taken over by another new thought or situation.
The synthesis part of our creative engine has a type of automatic pilot. It’s always working. It takes a certain inner atmosphere of awareness and presence to capture the output of insight, and that’s why we sometime miss it or fail to capture the insight. The “ah-ha!” usually comes about when we are present and aware and in a quiet mind state. Such a state of consciousness is a rarity to modern man with the elements of modern culture competing for and attracting our attention and with our own inner enculturation processes dictating and directing our awareness. Cell phones, PDAs, computer games, text messages, and media of all types vie for our attention on a moment-by-moment basis.
Our normal consciousness is a stream of words, thoughts, concepts, and ideas including judgments about the past and plans for the future. Without a way to cultivate a quiet mind through meditative or contemplative mindfulness exercises, we have to be particularly alert to be attuned to the synthesis, insight, and illumination experience. You also require specific ways of capturing its output. Carrying a notebook or voice recorder or PDA can work quite well, if it is used for this purpose. When you are working on a tough problem, it’s also important to pay attention to your dreams and to be alert when you’re in the shower. Take quiet walks alone and ride alone in the car without your earplugs and your tunes. Many insights and illuminations are born in these relatively quiet, singular, common environments. The very act of inquiry and curiosity brings with a unique state of presence and awareness because inquiry can only take place in the current moment, in a more focused state of presence and awareness.
Something else usually happens automatically when the “ah-ha!” experience occurs, and this can be a major barrier to discovery, invention, and innovation. Habitually, because of our enculturation and education, we begin to critically judge the new insight based on our previous knowledge and experience. If we are not careful in this judging process we can discard new knowledge without giving it a chance to fully emerge. And that leads us to the next step in the discovery, invention, and innovation process.
For most researchers who work in the research, development, demonstration, and deployment paradigm, the illumination experience is like a graduation scenario. However, it is important to remember that graduation is a commencement and not a conclusion. Perhaps you’ve heard before that real change in inquiry, discovery, invention, and innovation is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration. What I have discussed up to this point has been the 10-percent-inspiration portion of the process—the is the inquiry and discovery portion. What remains is the 90 percent—the real, nonintellectual-world work—in the invention and innovation portion.
Manifesting the Idea in the World: Development, Demonstration, and Beginning the Work of Invention
Stage 4: Verification
When we make a new discovery and invent something truly new, there are frequently no words for it. Our first steps are to find familiar words, experiences, and metaphors that can explain the insight. This is part of validating and testing the insight. How does it fit into our current reality? A first question is whether or not we can we model it with concepts. How does it fit into the paradigm of our current field of knowledge? Can we model it physically with a small-scaled version or using a computer or model simulation? Every successful inventor does this modeling and simulation in one form or another.
If these small-scale tests of the idea are successful, the next step is a bigger test. Can we make it fully real—a full-scale demo? Scaling is one of the great problems and challenges in science. Frequently when we scale up from a laboratory bench model to a full-scale version the characteristics of the idea vary disproportionately and create new challenges. For example, the characteristics of a discovery or invention may not vary linearly, but may vary geometrically—instead of the impacts doubling as we double the size, they can quadruple. The complexity of working at the full scale can increase exponentially in ways we can’t immediately foresee. For example, when going to full scale it’s usually necessary to involve new people in the process of creating the full-scale demonstration. This involves a further refinement of the communications aspects of a new idea. In this modeling and scaling up or in the actual market-size sample of data, we validate, verify, and refine the new knowledge and discovery of the basic insight.
These actions of verification and validation are how we bring the inner concept of the “ah-ha!” into the world of reality. And as we describe it, we literally birth it by speaking it into being. This scaling up step is how we get from a good idea to a real-world invention. It is why an important act in the art of inventing is called “reduction to practice.” You can now see why verification is one part of the perspiration process; it involves real, experiential work. It can’t be done purely intellectually. And even though computers can now model and simulate a wide variety of ideas, concepts, and systems, their models are only as good as the limitations of their programming. Computer models can save time and money but they are not a substitute for the real-life, full-scale field demonstration. Beta tests almost always bring new information. One major reason is the full-scale field version involves the new idea interacting with other people and other parts of the world.
Deployment in the Marketplace and Building the Work of Innovation
Stage 5: Implementation
This is the last step. It’s where innovation in the world takes place. Today this work is known as “technology transfer.” We are transferring the idea from the special circumstances of the one-of-a-kind lab or field unit to the multiple versions that are necessary to serve society. This is an arena that many intellectual organizations like research labs and universities find unusually challenging. Deployment of a new idea means that it must become a success in the market place. Decisions on new ideas in the market place are business decisions. To achieve acceptance the new idea must have the potential to be a business success. To be a business success a new idea or technology in any field must be marketplace validated. Marketplace validation is another process that involves the realities of economics and common use. A business decision maker will decide in favor of the new idea if and only if it meets all the marketplace validation criteria. For the invention to be a success in the marketplace the following validations are vital in achieving a successful transfer from the lab or full-scale field test to the production model:
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Equivalency: For the engineering and technical validators the invention must effectively demonstrate its equivalence to or exceed the performance of the current methods or products and not instantly create more problems than it solves.
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Functionality/Usability: For the worker, user, or craftsperson who must use the invention it must be acceptable to them by making them more productive, be at least as easy or easier to learn and use than current methods, and be as safe or safer than the existing methods or products.
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Economic Value: For the owner/buyer who must pay for the new technology it must be competitively priced, more productive, and/or otherwise more economical than the current methods or products; be able to work within the current paradigm without making it instantly obsolete and worthless; and for investors, the invention must be able to produce a suitable return on their investment.
If the invention can demonstrate that it meets these criteria then it can begin to take its place in the world of the marketplace and people will begin using the new technology. This validation process is a small part of the work and perspiration that must be exerted to get to the final implementation. There is still much more work to do, however. Many different people play a part in this implementation step—entrepreneurs, lawyers, accountants, financiers, bankers, investors, consumers, craftspeople, clerical workers, engineers, marketers, salespeople, contractors, executives, managers, supervisors, manufacturers, publishers, reporters, and many others. A major challenge in implementing an invention is for each one of these people, in their own way, to understand and approve of the invention. Then, and only then, will it achieve the status of an innovation in the marketplace.
All this work can be viewed as another continuous activity in the process. To achieve the enduring success of innovation in the marketplace, at each step along the way the invention idea is being reviewed and improved by the inventor and many others. The craftspeople and users of the idea are very important in the improvement. They can and do have a very powerful role in the technology transfer success process and the validation of the new idea. Workers’ jobs depend on their productivity and they will not use a product that does not make them more productive workers. Providing useful improvement feedback demonstrates the workers’ ownership and buy-in to the invention. The user’s okay is vital to any new process or inventions success in the marketplace. This work of improving the invention is also the ongoing foundation for new challenges, problems, and research. It seems all of our current problems were generated by the solutions to problems of an earlier age. These new problems generated by the new invention are the source of the law of unintended consequences. If you are thirty-five-years old or older, think back about the development of the computer and the Internet. You will see all of these technology transfer process steps at play.
Our science, ideas, inventions, processes, and designs must ultimately satisfy not only our engineer colleagues but the whole spectrum of humanity. These are the people who work in the global marketplace. If we do not awaken to this larger picture, we will continue to think we know the reality picture when in truth what we know and understand is a very small piece of that picture. This awakening allows us to accept that in one way we are always like one of the blind men trying to describe the elephant by feeling for its parts. In this inquiring posture, we can embark on the journey of learning something truly new by beginning to understand what it is we do not know.
Suggested Reading
Almaas, A. H. (2002). Spacecruiser inquiry, Shambala, Boston. Almaas, A. H. (2006). Brilliancy, Shambala, Boston.Austin, J. (1978). Chase, chance, and creativity, Columbia University Press, New York.Bonasso, S. G. (1982). “Can we become more creative?”Civil Engineering, 53(1), 70-72.Bonasso, S. G. (2001). “Engineering, leadership, and integralphilosophy.” J. Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice, 127(1), 17-25.Harman, W., and Rheingold, H. (1984). Higher creativity, J.P. Tarcher, Los Angeles.Prigogine, I. (1980). From being to becoming, Freeman, NewYork.
Samuel G. Bonasso, P.E., F.ASCE, is an inventor with four U.S. patents. He is a consultant, writer, and adjunct civil engineering professor at West Virginia University. He has served as West Virginia’s secretary of transportation and as acting director of Research and Special Programs Administration for the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 7 • Issue 4 • October 2007
Pages: 141 - 150
Copyright
© 2007 ASCE.
History
Published online: Oct 1, 2007
Published in print: Oct 2007
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