innovationguy.com

I have a couple of interesting links that people may be interested in.

• My friend forwarded this transcript of a pre-commencement lecture given by Narayana Murthy (chief mentor and chairman of the board, Infosys Technologies) at the New York University (Stern School of Business) on May 9. The theme of the lecture was the great impact that chance events played in shaping his life. Quite a good lecture. It really got me thinking as to the random events that lead to long friendships, family, professional success, and perception altering moments.

• I got a note in my email today with links to 3 new TED Talks.
  • John Doerr: Seeking salvation and profit in greentech
  • Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo on SeaDragon and PhotoSynth (AMAZING)
  • Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: How to help Africa? Do business there

• Also some interesting articles in SmallTimes this month. NanoDynamics is planning an IPO.

• The rankings for the top Schools with Nano programs according to SmallTimes is out. ( or the quick view for the impatient).
• The SmallTimes mergers and acquisitions summary this month seem to have quite a few interesting tid-bits.

  • Xradia with it’s minaturized microscope offerings with some new funding.
    
  • NaturalNano Funding deal is in there (Notice the much improved website with their new money).
  • SolarDiesel with a huge buyout deal on the plans to builds the worlds largest biodiesel plant.
  • Arrowhead Research Corporation continues its end-run to gobble up all the SWNT patents it can find with the purchase of C Sixty Inc. and CNI

• This story from Seth Godin about alignment is concise and to the point.

“When there’s a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed.”

I just made a post recently about Glowing Bacteria and how it is a good example of “convergence problem solving”. Basically where you are leveraging advances in adjacent fields with your core piece or expertise of technology to really do something beyond the scope of any of the individual pieces you are combing.

I think this advancement is a great example for a creavity excercise I call “List Combination”. This is a great example of convergence for one application. Where else can I use this same solution to make money in another application or field? (Something we all wish we could do more of?)

It basically works like this. In this case I have a new technology which might turn out to have a short list of useful attibutes (lets us use 3, while this technique works well with less 3 or 4, you’ll see why later, any more you can’t get it done).

• It allow you to spread out a liquid or paste
• Detect something you usually can’t see
• Does it quickly in a remote location (with a device you can carry).

S o here is the excercise. Start by making a couple of lists of answers to questions based on your 3 attributes. Be careful and general in your question definition. In my case I would use.

1. What can I spread a paste or liquid onto?
2. What would I like to detect that I can’t see?
3. Where (or in what context) do I need to know something is present?

Now make a list of answers to your questions. Set a target # that you want to work with for each list (example start with 25). It is really important to set a target for the list length, because you have to make it high enough to get out of the context you have already created in your mind. This is really effective if you can get someone to help you that you haven’t told the example technology to yet.

The next step is to build the three possible 2-D matrices where Lists 1-3 are your axis. So cross lists 1/2, 2/3, and 1/3. I do this in Excel . Basically start picking cells at random and decide if the juxtaposition you have created for each X & Y combination makes sense. If so put a X or a green color in the box. For those you don’t like or don’t make sense color them grey or red. Do this for all threee matrices separately. Then take the green squares and list out your combinations or your short lists of only the green cells.

At this point you will have 3 lists of pairs based on your three lists. Now iterate through these combination lists with whatever 3rd axis you didn’t do in teh combination. So these are the three: (If I have 4 attributes, I choose to do only the best 2 combinations I see and combine those, 6 combinations to start with is too many)

1. Intersection of List 1 & 2, with List 3
2. Intersection of List 2 & 3, with List 1
3. Intersection of List 1 & 3, with List 2

Given this activity you should be able to generate 3-5 good adjacent markets or uses for this convergence technology that you can then go and explore in detail. I really like this because of the juxataposition that occurs as you do the list comparisons. Set your lists big enough that you have to get outside your first assumption. And this really works in 2 or 3 man teams. Sometimes those crazy combinations get you very far away from what you were thinking.

Good luck and think about this next time you have to look at the “Where else can I take this Convergence Technology?” type of problem.

If you use this to solve a problem, let me know by dropping me an email or comment.

Disclaimer: I cannot remember seeing an example of this anywhere but can’t be sure that someone else didn’t come up with this method 1st as it seems pretty intuitive.

The original article for this post was actually carried by the BBC News a while back, but I thouht it was worth some

discussion here.

The news announcement in question talks about some work done by Steve Rimmer’s research group at the University of Sheffield. Their research is basically about how to generate lumiscence when a specific biological binding happens. What this would enable is that when one of the customized tags they create comes into contact with the specific pathogen it is specific to, the tag will generate

luminescence. Their work focuses primarily on the tag design coupling the work in flourescent

polymers with the work on biological specific binding agents. I really like that their application is in portable detection of pathogens or bio-threats. To

the right is an image of anthrax (Top:not using this technique) and the second image is one from the Rimmer group website looking at bio-luminescnence detection (specifically: Bottom: Micrograph showing fluorescent particles inside dermal fibroblast cells (blue = particles, red = F-actin)). One specific application the article mentions is the ability to spread a gel of their material into a open wound and quickly determine the presence of bacteria or instance.

I think this is an excellent example of convergence in technology to solve problems. In this case they are combining advances in portable optics and microelectronics, the large biochemistry advancement in target specific binding, and their experise which is the design of highly specialized polymeric units designed for light emission and luminescence. This is a perfect example of “Convergence Problem Solving”, leveraging advances in adjacent fields with your core piece of expertise of technology to really do something beyond the scope of any of the individual pieces of technology you are combining.

Look at this post for how I use this as the basic example for a creativity and ideation examples.

I was actually watching an episode of “Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe” where he was working with someone making biodiesel from waste cooking oil. I was surprised at the relative straight-forward nature of the process. This started me thinking about the growth in awareness of biofuel.

For a while now I have been somewhat following the interest in bio-sourced plastics, biofuels, and carbon footprint as a factor in purchasing decisions and marketing. With Walmart including sustainability (carbon footprint and biodegradability) as factors in its Packaging Scorecard for vendors and the rise of interest in bio-sourced fuels and chemical feedstocks it is a good idea to keep an eye on this trend.  For example, in my inbox last week I noticed again that 10 of the top25 articles in Chemical Engineering on ScienceDirect are articles on biodiesel or biofuel processing.

So I decided to go to Google Trends and see what the search rates look like for some relavent terms: biodiesel, biofuel, carbon footprint, PLA.

For biodiesel I was wondering how much of thisinterest  is really linked to crude oil prices versus the publics commitment to eco concerns? So I compared biodiesel, Crude Oil, and “carbon footprint” in the same graph. (separate terms by commas to compare, neat feature). This is the comparison that came up:

(Blue=biodiesel ; Red=Crude Oil ; Yellow= carbon footprint)

I was shocked to see how tightly biodiesel and crude oil searches were linked. The cause:effect relationship is not clear however. Are people searching for biodiesel because of high crude oil prices or are they looking up crude oil prices to see how much they are saving by using the biodiesel that have already decided to use for environmental reasons? Either way the two terms are linked tightly. The other interesting thing to note is that carbon footprint is a farily new term emerging in late 2005, with press coverage picking up in late 2006. (bottom lines are news reference volumes.)

Some questions:

• Is biodiesel a hype tech  or the future?
• Do you pay more for eco-friendly products?
• Do you choose an “eco” labeled product over another product that you view have similar performance?
• Does bottom-line overrule “eco” every time?

I’d appreciate your opinions on the subject, drop me a comment or an email.

I was reading my copy of NASA Techbriefs this morning and came across this article describing some work by Harish Manohara and Michael Bronkowski of Caltech for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. What really caught my attention was the image below (click to enlarge).

The image shows as array of Bundles of Carbon Nanotubes grown by CVD onto a substrate. Each of the pillars is a mass of carbon nanotubes. The inset image shows a close-up of one of the tips of the pillars. The original Article is here. An excerpt from which describes how the pillars were manufactured.

In preparation for the experiments, planar arrays of bundles of carbon nanotubes having various bundle diameters, bundle heights, and bundle spacings were fabricated. The fabrication process can be summarized as follows: Electron-beam lithography was used to form planar arrays of iron dots having various thicknesses and having diameters and inter-dot spacings corresponding to the desired diameters and spacings of the carbon-nanotube bundles. The dots served as catalysts for the growth of carbon nanotubes: Bundles of multi-walled 20-nm-diameter carbon nanotubes were grown on the iron dots by chemical vapor deposition. The average height of the bundles was 70 ± 2?m. The heights of the bundles were found to depend on the thicknesses of the iron dots. The tallest bundles (112 ?m high) were found on iron dots 8 ?m thick.

This work is targeted at constructing better field emission sources. The reasearches were looking to (1) understand the relationship between nanotube bundle size and spacing while also probing (2) whether bundles of nanotubes are more rubost to operation than single nanotubes.

I saw this article in my mailbox this morning:

“The Japan Water Agency and the Monohakobi Technology Institute (MTI) are undertaking joint sea trials in which water transportation sacks filled with fresh water will be towed by a tugboat. The material used for the sacks is Kuraray’s VECTRAN polyarylate superfiber. “

MTI has built a giant ballon/sack that measures 44 meters long, 10 meters wide and 4 meters high, with a volume of approximately 1,000 cubic meters. The sacks are made from a compound material comprising VECTRAN and urethane resin. The concept is that in a disaster situation, you can unroll this sack, fill it full of water and quickly deploy it by towing it behind a boat to there it is needed.

I was reading this and could not get the image of a CamelBack for the sea. It seems to me that is it a pretty interesting concept and hopefully can be developed to eventually help in disaster situations. The bigger question is whether or not this means of transporting water is cost effective for water re-distribution from those areas that have it to more arid regions? Another interesting find when looking up the Kuraray website was some of the other uses of Vectran fiber: Fishing Line, Air Ship Bladders, protective nets, anti-cut gloves, lifting straps, and hose and belt reinforcement.

<image from Kuraray website http://www.kuraray.co.jp/en/release/2007/070226.html>

I find myself a regular reader of this particular website Molecule of the Day. Just about everyday the author provides a chemical structure of a chemical molecule and some interesting fact, use, or history about it.

Some notable ones of late are:

• Bitrex - Worlds most bitter substance
• Havitrol - Made up drug
• Isohumulone - Compound causing bitterness in beer
• You can also search up your favorites

Here is a quick post to introduce myself and what you might expect to find here.

I am a 30 something year old scientist who works for a fortune 500 company in a technical role.  I am a Chemical Engineering by training (BS,MS,PhD).   I work primarily in the materials area.  My primary role is as a scientist and developer of new products.

I am facsinated by how new materials and prodcuts are developed and enter into the marketplace.  Which ones sell? which ones don’t?  and which ones change the way things are done.

So you will find a couple of key themes at this spot:

• Innovation Topics
• Advances in science and how they might be used
• New materials and their commercialization

Tune in and we’ll see how this develops.

I also plan on using this venue to sharing some experimentation with my own personal growth through a couple of on-going series:

• Read something new - My personal attempt on a weekly basis to expose myself to something new.  This might include picking up a magazine, trade journal, or book on something I never would usually read or be interested in.
• New science article - A weekly basis of pointing out something interesting I see in a scientific paper and how it might be used.

I look forward to comments and suggestions.  The site design may change and improve/regress as I get settled on something that works.