The
Katipunan Forum
The Industry-Academe Forum on
Linkage, University Technology Transfer and Technology SME Development
Opinion
More Ideas to Encourage a Culture of Innovation
by Michael Hansson
Michael Hansson is the General Manager of MH Consulting Phils., Inc., a local technology SME that develops test equipment and vision systems for the semiconductor industry. Michael has an MS in Computer Science and Engineering from the prestigious University of Linköping in Sweden, specializing in embedded systems and computer vision. He is a Swedish citizen but has taken residency in the Philippines. His company website is at http://www.mhconsulting.com.ph
In the
playful spirit of a free democracy, for better or worse, allow me to add to those
of Dennis some additional
not-so-wild
ideas in order to encourage a culture of innovation:
Arrange
fun contests. Few things fire up the mind as much as competitive playing.
Make contests devoid of commercial backing; ensure that there are no requirements
to use any supplier's components. Make contests public. Run them in malls, tip
off media. Get people buzzing. Have several levels with different rules and
prizes, from a relatively simple level for high-school entries up to
professional company-sponsored teams. Make it possible to join on a low budget.
(At my university in Sweden, for example, we once joined a contest that
involved firing sliced bread from a modified toaster. My team won, firing the
unfortunate piece of toast 26 meters using $1,000 worth of borrowed equipment,
but it's note-worthy that the first runner-up just used a $2 industrial rubber
band). Encourage local high-tech companies to sponsor student teams by
teaching them, or allowing students to use their facilities.
Work with
universities to bring more real-world experience into curriculums. I have
been surprised on more than one occasion to see how naive students can be about
the viability of their inventions/projects "out there". Yes,
technology can itself be incredibly exciting, but there is no substitute for
seeing one's invention bought by a big company, or better yet sold in stores to
millions of happy consumers. In my opinion students, especially at some of the
less well-off universities, could benefit from more knowledge about how the
market works and how to design for cost, for performance, for reliability, for
ergonomics, for time-to-market, etc.
Give
teachers more time for research. I don't know where to begin on
this one, given the commercial interests of schools here. In Sweden, a PhD
student is typically paid a full-time salary for half-time teaching work and is
expected to spend the other half of his/her time on research. Of course, the
universities there are also funded by a well-off government...
Encourage
schools and teachers to form start-up companies, often in
cooperation with their school and often based on research conducted there.
Again, this one may require a major overhaul of a lot of things, but I wanted
to mention it anyway. Without a good program to migrate innovators from
university to industry, we risk ending up with innovators that either do not
get enough exposure from market forces and thus become less effective at
spawning new innovators, or with innovators that fade away or leave the country
because they lost their access to high-tech infrastructure, because their
products failed and because they lost their source of income. Furthermore, as a
student, I would rather have two well-grounded quality hours a week with a
mentor regaling class with war stories from the trenches, than 12 hours a week
with a theoretically very skilled but uninspiring professor with his head in
the clouds.
Teach
students how to spot problems. We are fairly good at teaching
how to come up with solutions to problems, but successful inventions often
start with somebody first seeing a problem and THEN designing and launching a
solution to meet the need. As Apin Talisayon at UP once said, how many
inventor's fairs here are not awash in stoves?
Where are the UNIQUE ideas?
Learn from
successful zones of innovation such as Ideon
(http://www.ideon.se). Perhaps we can obtain grants and send selected champions
from government there for study visits?
It is one thing to read about successful silicon valley startups, quite
another to imbibe its atmosphere first-hand.
May there
be many more freethinking groups like this in the country. May they all
congregate into a full fledged movement. May we all continue to make this
pasture greener, rather than narrow-mindedly flee for what some perceive to be
greener pastures.