eGFI - An Excellent Place for Young Engineers

I serve on the Board of Advisors for School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at University of Oklahoma. My engagement with university education has been in large part due to my tremendous unhappiness with the engineers I was trying to hire at P&G and my friend, mentor and colleague Dr. Farrokh Mistree since 2006.

This has led me deeper into engaging in engineering education, one result being co-developing "Product Innovation: Designing Open Engineering Systems" with Dr. Dirk Schaefer, Dr. Mistree and Dr. Jitesh Panchal, and teaching it.

Yet, what about engineering education through K-12, guidance and learning about the possibilites for the high school students. A good place is eGFI, see here:

"eGFI is proudly brought to you by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). We are committed to promoting and enhancing efforts to improve K-12 STEM and engineering education."

I found the sight to be delightful, easy, engaging and most importantly... intuitive.

Roger Martin - On Designing the Future

My astute friend from McKinsey, Samvit Kanoria forwards "What's Thwarting American Innovation? Too Much Science, Says Roger Martin", in Fast Company, see here.  The article highlights Mr. Martin's focus on creativity in innovation being a combination of science and design aspects of product or service development working together.

For the scientist, he states - "The future has no legitimacy for analytical thinkers."

Mr. Martin thrashes the large management consulting companies and lays the blame of innovation bottle neck on a corporate structure mired in research and analysis of the past - "But what they analyze is the past.  And if the future is not exactly like the past, or there are things happening that are hard to measure scientifically, they get ignored."

Mr. Martin is asked - "Are you saying that the regression analysis jockeys and Six Sigma black belts have got it all wrong?" and he states - "Well, yes."

Interestingly, my tenure at P&G was during the time Roger Martin was advising A.G. Lafley and I was a part of the substantial changes brought within P&G's approach to business.  See information on some my work related to Virtual Shopper here on my friend Franz Dill's blog, who also was one of the founders of the P&G Innovation Centers.

Though Mr. Martin speaks candidly, yet the change he suggests carries pain to the corporate as a whole and the machinery of suppliers supporting it.  Corporate innovation remains more perception than reality, with incremental results seen in their markets from licensing, buyouts, etc.  Breakthrough innovation remains the domain of the entrepreneur, one who can imagine a future unburdened by the past!

Product Innovation from India

While at P&G, I developed a R&D center outside of the USA. It is exciting to read this article "Outsourcing: Product Innovation from India" here, highlighting how India has slowly but steadily moved up the product innovation value chain at RealInnovation.com. Even though the article is based on a white paper originally published by Zinnov in 2005, it is insightful. The article states:

"As of 2005, more than 150 international companies, large and small, were doing R&D in India. Multinational companies started hiring strong leaders to run their development centers in India. Some of these companies imported expats (professionals returning from the United States, the United Kingdom and other Western countries) to run their operations in India. The leadership teams of these companies understood that they could do a lot more from India than simply being a back office to the product teams in their home countries. Thus began a quiet revolution. The India-based leadership teams of these companies convinced their executive management to allow them to take ownership of certain products whereby the Indian teams could conceptualize and build new features and modules."

Here an excellent diagram from the article showing the product companies operating in India as of 2005.



Update: A macro-economic number showing India had 5.4% growth in Q1 2009 vs. projected growth of 5.2%.