THOUGHT LEADERS: DEAN KAMEN
Week one: "The Mind of The Innovator"
[00:07] Rebel With a Cause
Dean Kamen: I don’t think too many things last a thousand years and if they do, they exist as an artifact in a museum. What lasts a thousand years are ideas. I think ideas can live forever. Things are very ephemeral. I suspect nothing we make at DEKA is going to last very long and that is probably a good thing.
I wish I could say there was that seminal moment as a kid when I had my “ha-ha” about being an inventor or trying to make innovations come to be. Nothing could be farther from the truth. To me, starting to make stuff that I hoped people would want was a very self-interested activity.
[00:55]
Once I realized that like everybody else I’m going to have to have a career, I’m going to have to earn money. And once I realized I never liked doing what people tell me to do. I don’t like my parents telling me what to do, and from a very early age, that was friction between my parents and myself. Although, in the end they were very supportive. I never like teachers telling me what to do which is why after a while I just stopped doing their tests. I learned pretty early on that I could just read the question and know, “I know the answer to that, I don’t need to write it down.” And I’d look at the next question and know, “No, I don’t know the answer to that.” And I may be dumb, I may not know the answer. But I’m not so dumb that I don’t know that I don’t know. So why broadcast it? Why embarrass myself?
[01:40]
And I quickly decided, I’m really not interested in putting myself in the position to be judged by all these arbitrary sets of questions and people. As I got to be a teenager I realized, “Wow, this is supposed to be the easy, fun part of life. You’re a kid.” And I don’t like people judging me and telling me what to do. What am I going to do when I’m an adult, and I have a job, and I’m going to have a boss, and somebody telling me what to do? And I decided I will never let that happen. What else can I do? I know what I’ll do. I’ll make stuff that I hope will be so cool that people will want to buy it. And then I will be working for myself, making stuff and I won’t be judged by a boss, I’ll be judged by history. Did people like my stuff or not?
[02:25] Question Everything
I learned a long time ago that the most important part of ending up with a great solution to a problem that maybe is not one that other people would come up with, isn’t in the process of accomplishing the goal. It’s in the process of really understanding the question. The answer is almost always, pretty much after the fact when you look back at it. The answer is almost sort of defined by the question. And I think a lot of invention comes when somebody looks at the same problem everybody else looks at and sees it differently.
[03:06]
I am not sure you can teach innovation, but you can unteach it. I think every kid starts out as a scientist. Watch a baby. They poke themselves in the eye and then they learn, that wasn’t pleasant. They stop poking themselves in the eye. They try some other experiment. They might not like that. They stop doing it. They try another experiment, like crying, and get parents to do whatever they want, and they like that experiment. Kids are very good scientists. They try something, they analyze the result, they learn from it, and they build a base of knowledge based on it. They throw away the stuff that doesn’t work and build upon that which does work. That’s what science is.
[03:43] "What If It Was You?"
We do call our prosthetic arm project the Luke Project. And we call it the Luke Project because everybody here remembers finding out that Luke Skywalker’s arm was not a real one. But the one he had was pretty damn good. And we set out to do that. How do we figure out how to get a creative, effective solution to a problem? Do we have a strict process? No. I don’t have a strict anything around here. Most people that come in from the outside would say this is marginally organized chaos. So we have no strict process. Without a strict process, how do we get our projects moving in such a way that if they succeed, it’s a big deal? Again, a lot of it depends on the individual.
[04:35]
Deka has now collected a bunch of people that for one reason or another probably wouldn’t do very well in a big, structured organization. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy after a while. People that want to be in this environment have to be a little thick-skinned because they are sitting around a bunch of people that are irreverent and have no patience and aren’t exactly politically correct. But they are passionate. You put a bunch of people like that in a room, and they are all focused on “Hey, this 22 year old kid just had his entire arm blown off. He’s fully should disarticulated. And here’s the surprise. His other arm, he’s transhumeral." You think losing an arm is a problem? It’s an inconvenience compared to losing two.
[05:21]
And you sit in a room with a bunch of smart engineers, that are very happy, and they have spouses and kids and you say “By the way, we have a few hundred kids that are missing their arms. They deserve more than a tube and a hook. What are we going to do about that?” That’s sort of the problem statement. What are we going to do about that? What if it was you? We don’t start with, “Now here’s the specification.” We start with, “Wow, this is a really big problem. What are we going to do about this?” It’s not a linear process of thinking. It’s a bunch of fuzzy ideas in a spaghetti bowl. And you find that you started out here, crawling down that piece of spaghetti, and once in a while when we’re lucky, you come out the other end of that bowl with something that’s going to work.
[06:13] Maintaining Focus
The best way to keep people motivated, to be willing to do all that frustrating stuff that is inevitably part of innovation, like failing, the best way to do that, is to keep having really challenging problems and keep reminding the people that are working on them, that even though it might be a long shot, if we succeed at this one, if this actually works, we might supply clean water to a billion people. Point of used water. We might provide electricity to a billion people that have never used electricity. We might put arms back on kids that have given up hope.
[06:59]
I think that if you can balance the “It’s really, really hard” with the “If it works, it will be really, really important.” If you can balance those things, and you have the right people, you can keep the energy level up, you can keep the focus. And maybe, you know, to be truthful, sometimes you lose one or the other. In which case, your project generally fails.
Allocate your resources. If we’ve gotten good at solving the problem, solve more problems. Do what you’re good at. Don’t run a big company, don’t create the bureaucracy. Don’t create the stuff people know how to do.
[07:39]
And frankly, No matter what you do with your time, ultimately every business decision you make, you are trading one thing for another. And people think they are trading for money. You are trading something that is way more valuable-- your time. You got a little bit of time on this earth. Use it wisely to do things that matter, that are challenging, that are fun, that are important.