For our trip to GE Healthcare in Wisconsin we were joined by Adam Rasheed who works on pulsed detonation engines at the Global Research Center. Anyway, Adam wrote a post about the experience of hanging out with us and had a bunch of interesting observations (it’s always fascinating to read how you’re perceived by others). Here’s one of my favorites:
From the perspective of innovation, I learned quite a bit. I am still trying to sort through it in my head, but there are a few things that really stood out. One thing is that a lot of the folks I met are involved in something based off the internet, and their medium is information. This is pretty fascinating environment. Because the “barrier to entry” is so low, it’s relatively easy to very quickly try many different things on the web – and just see which one sticks. And that appears to be one of the keys to coming up with ideas… many cheap and quick iterations to maximize your ability to learn. I am trying to figure out how to apply this to my world, where it simply isn’t practical to build 10 different designs for a jet engine (at billions of dollars and many years of development) – and then take the best one – we’d go out of business! But it is something we can do on a smaller scale in the lab.