Transcript for the Piece Audio version of The Mind of the Innovator
From the National Science Foundation, this is “The Mind of the Innovator.” A look at how engineers think and where innovation originates.
Music
Innovation. We’re told almost daily that we need it.
MONTAGE
SPEAKER 1: We need to encourage American innovation
SPEAKER 2: Innovation creates jobs
SPEAKER 8: Right now we lead the world in innovation in so many areas
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
And it’s true. Innovation changes the world in large ways and small. It makes our lives better.
ENGINEER (FEMALE): There is potential for us to build sidewalks where -- yes -- these sidewalks will suck CO2 out of the air.
It drives prosperity and economic growth. Innovation is the engine of job creation.
ENGINEER (MALE): We organized the vehicle with two motors. It takes hydrogen and oxygen, they combine inside the fuel cell to make electricity, water and heat. We’ve come out of it being science fiction and now we’re into the engineering disciplines that it takes to make the technology fundamentally robust.
We hear about these innovations all the time. They come to us on the news or we read about them on-line
ENGINEER (MALE): We can certainly put this into all of our structures built in high seismic regions and expect that these structures will perform well in earthquakes and that indeed lives can be saved.
It makes you wonder: These innovators; where do they come from? What drives them to see things differently? To be change-makers?
ENGINEER (MALE): There is a way that we are looking at to deliver drugs and that is to use what’s called inkjet technology. What that amounts to is taking a solution that has the active drug in it and depositing it, very precisely, onto an edible substrate.
We live in an age of ideas and inventions that are changing how we gather and process information …. how we use precious natural resources …. how we fight disease. We accept that. But do we ever stop and wonder where the innovation comes from? What fosters it? How we keep it flowing? We’ve all heard Edison’s quote:
FADE IN SOUND – EDISON VIA PHONOGRAPH
EDISON: This is Edison Speaking
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” The same’s true for innovation. Occasionally, like in the movies, there’s a flash of inspiration.
But more often, innovation emerges when the ground is sown. (FADE IN SOUND – WATER SPRINKLER ON A FARM) Where the proper seeds are planted. Where innovators cultivate an environment of curiosity and experimentation. We’re going to tell you the stories of some of these change-makers in this program …. And examine just where their big ideas come from. And here’s what’s fascinating: Though they might be designing different things—from molecules, to robots, to virtual worlds—the ways they innovate have a lot in common.
MUSIC SHIFTS
For starters, innovators connect the dots between problems and solutions.
MATSUOKA: I actually start looking at a stroke victim, and then say, “I'm an engineer. I have certain tools This is a problem. How can I solve it?”
Innovators think about the real-world application of their work.
LEIFER: There was a kind of mindset that looked at the person as a machine and the robot as a machine and well, all I have to do is hook up these two machines and I’ll get a better machine. And the big “a-ha” was meeting this woman who said, “You’re messing with a social unit.” You have to solve the family unit.
Innovators aren’t afraid of failure.
MIRKIN: We do a lot of things in the lab and some things work as planned and some things are total surprises. And, sometimes a surprise (chuckles) is a lot better than what you originally intended to make.
They create environments where playful invention thrives.
RALLY ANNOUNCER: We're getting splashed from the field. Wheely Wonka is facing off. Oh! Wheels function are down. Oh! Oh! Glue Mobile is trying to tag people on the -- oh! Now Glue Mobile is in jail because they tried to tag
And finally, maybe most important: innovators find a way to bring their creation out into the wider world.
WIDMAIER: There are lots of startups, there are very few successful startups. (chuckles)
Those are the common threads. Let’s see how they tie together.
MUSIC ENDS
Up first: connecting the dots. (music that’s science-y but has “dots” in it)
TAPE FROM CHAD MIRKIN’S SUBGROUP MEETING
JOSH: I'm going to talk about a project in collaboration with the Mead group. I think Matt gave you a small update on it in the last meeting. So, I wanted to then kind of give everyone an update on what our goals are.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
This is a meeting of graduate students who work with Nanotechnology at Northwestern University. Today, it’s a presentation of new research on how to use his group’s existing, breakthrough invention to alter the pictures you get from an MRI scan.
TAPE FROM CHAD MIRKIN’S SUBGROUP MEETING
JOSH: If we can use technology that we've developed, incorporate it into what the medical field already uses, maybe we have a winner there.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
The meeting is kind of like a PhD dissertation defense. The student presents his findings and his professor and colleagues pepper him with questions to help him think more deeply and maybe even re-shape his work.
TAPE FROM CHAD MIRKIN’S SUBGROUP MEETING
MIRKIN: But hold on a second. The problem with this, it's the “on” to “off” mechanism. So, you're going to see dark spots rather than light spots when you image?
JOSH: Right.
MIRKIN: And the question is, is there a way to design this system in such a way that we can flip that around?
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
That’s the professor. Chad Mirkin, director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology, which is housed at Northwestern.
MIRKIN: We don’t discriminate. We have biologists in the group, we’ve got medical doctors in the group, we’ve got engineers in the group.
FADE IN TAPE FROM CHAD MIRKIN’S SUBGROUP MEETING
MIRKIN: You follow what he's saying?
JOSH: Yeah. I see what you're saying. Just use the geometry of the particle to somehow modulate –
MIRKIN: No, to use the binding of the RNA to trigger the formation of a hairpin that moves that MRI contrast agent close to the particle.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
MIRKIN: One of the unique things that we do is the ability to cross disciplines and to bridge ideas from different fields and in the process, create a lot of interesting new science and a lot of interesting new technology along the way.
He calls it “Interesting.” He’s being polite. Some of their new science and technology is mesmerizing. Some of it could be life-changing. And all of it is very small physically, but scientifically huge. Like what? How about the world’s smallest pen, that lets you place molecules on top of other molecules? Or a particle so small that it can climb inside a cancer cell (sound of a mechanical click) and turn it off. Or this one:
MIRKIN: Well, this actually – it's called the Verigene system, you know, veri-gene, truth gene, right?
Imagine you go to the doctor’s, and right there in the office, your body is analyzed at the level of your DNA. They take some blood
MIRKIN: You can make little microscopic spots of DNA and those are the spots that are going to interrogate the sample and search for different types of disease targets
And you have a disease assessment (finger snap) that quick. Mirkin’s tool screens for multiple diseases simultaneously. A 3-D structure of gold nano-particles – each with hundreds of identical strands of DNA attached to it – responds to specific DNA disease targets to determine your risk.
MIRKIN: The disease targets are released, they can bind to the right spots if they're present
And you come away knowing – say – that you’ve just had a heart attack.
MIRKIN: In less than five minutes.
That quick. And they know for sure.
MIRKIN: There is a protein called Troponin I associated with heart muscle damage that is released into your blood stream
They don’t send you home saying it’s indigestion. They know. Your blood proteins just told them you had a heart attack.
MIRKIN: You can catch the early signs of a heart attack much earlier than you can with a conventional tools.
Amazing, right? But it exists. Chad Mirkin’s lab made it. How? Where did this innovation come from? That process is amazing too. It all started when a solution turned from red to blue.
MIRKIN: I’ll never forget the moment.
A moment of discovery.
MIRKIN: You’ve got to see this. It’s incredible.
That Doctor Mirkin was able to turn into so much more.
MIRKIN: You immediately think, you know, “This is big.”
MUSIC COMES IN
Chad Mirkin has a hold – a firm hold – on the first step of innovation: connecting the dots. We have a thing over here that I see changing color. (Music that “sounds like” colors changing) We have a thing over here that could diagnose your heart attack. (SOUND OF A POLAROID FILM POPPING OUT) They’re connected by the same mind. But how? Let’s take a look.
MUSIC CHANGES
Figuring out how to connect the dots requires two things: First, a deep understanding of human needs – say – the need to diagnose a heart attack quickly. And second, an equal understanding of the technology needed to meet those needs. In this case, “nanotechnology,” the science of submicroscopic particles. Chad Mirkin started out in the earliest days of nanotechnology.
MIRKIN: We were working on developing ways of making miniaturized structures.
As an architect of the very small, he was forging new directions by breaking materials down into their fundamental building blocks and reassembling them.
MIRKIN: If you could do that, then, in principle, you could take all these new building blocks that have these fantastic properties and then build from the bottom up any material you’d like that would have the perfect properties for a given application.
They started out looking at the way tiny things change color.
MIRKIN: Figuring out the rules that govern why things are a particular color when they’re a particular size and shape on that scale is interesting science.
But his desire was to go beyond just doing “interesting science.” He was looking to form products with unique capabilities. That solved specific human needs.
MIRKIN: And so the idea became maybe we could create chemically-programmed forms of nano Velcro, right? You could take little particles and put DNA sequences on them so that they now have the recognition properties of DNA and then you could design other particles that were complementary to those,
Using DNA strands as Nano-Velcro; that could make these particles stick together. DNA that searches out and then binds with other DNA. And the engineer could pick and choose what went where; and what new material was created.
MIRKIN: That was, at least, the tantalizing prospect.
Tiny structures have unusual properties. When things are that small, everything changes. Even things you associate them with, like their color.
MIRKIN: Gold, for example, is no longer gold. When you make 13 nanometer gold particles, they’re red in color.
Chad got interested in figuring out the rules that govern why this is … what’s called “structure-function correlations” – why is it that when something is a certain shape, it behaves in a particular way. And how you make these tiny bits of elements bond together. If that sounds obscure, think about it this way:
MIRKIN: What we’re talking about doing is building a new periodic table.
A new periodic table – because elements behave differently at the nano-scale But that wasn’t all.
MIRKIN: Building a new periodic table and then learning how to construct from those atoms molecules and then extended materials.
The trick became finding a way to get these particles to bind. He sent two graduate students out to set things up He told them
MIRKIN: “Let’s do a simple experiment.”
Make two particles that have nothing to do with each other. Then add some DNA that can attach to each of the two particles.
MIRKIN: And so they made those particles and they did the first experiment and I’ll never forget the moment.
MUSIC BEGINS
MIRKIN: They came down to my office and they said, you know, “You’ve got to see this. It’s incredible.” I went up to the lab and we watched them add the particles to the solution containing the linker DNA strand. And the particles, which are red in color,
MUSIC SHIFT WHILE UNDER turns blue after you add them to the linker strand. And they said, you know, “We’ll put this in an oven and when you do that, they turn red,” and the reason is the DNA is unraveling. You go, “Holy smokes, that’s amazing!” We were literally watching the formation of the double helix linking these particles together, right? And then were watching the unraveling of the double helix for the first time. And then you pull it back on the bench top and it turns blue as you’re watching it ravel and it you could go back and forth, back and forth and we had this incredibly reversible process now. I mean, it’s just remarkable.
MUSIC SHIFT
The innovation wasn’t what took place in that test tube—it was what followed in Chad’s mind.
MIRKIN: You immediately think, you know, “This is big. This is huge because this was going to be a completely new way of doing material science.” And almost immediately in unison, we go “New sensor for DNA.”
A whole new way to diagnose diseases.
MIRKIN: Now you could think about building particles that could recognize target strands of DNA that were unique to certain diseases.
MUSIC SHIFT
MIRKIN: There were a lot of high-fives that went around ‘cause, you know, it actually worked, and it worked extremely well. I can, in principle, take any set of building blocks, metal, semiconductors, insulators, magnetic particles, non-magnetic structures and I can begin to use them as building blocks. So that was the “Wow.” Wow, this is probably the simplest way of doing DNA diagnostics.
Understanding a need – doctors want a quick and cheap way to diagnose diseases
MIRKIN: It was so simple and so fast and, frankly, really cheap.
And then understanding how your discovery can be translated into new approaches to meeting that need. Chad sees nanotechnology as a promising way to meet other needs, too.
MUSIC SHIFTS
MIRKIN: We’re going to find that many of the nanostructures that were developed here are going to lead to important new therapies for many forms of cancer and cardiovascular disease, among others
“Others.” Like finally figuring out a way to treat drug-resistant bacteria.
MIRKIN: We figured out ways of creating particles that will naturally enter cells and can be used to turn on and off genetic switches and cells,
So if you have a cell that’s doing something it shouldn’t -- like a bacteria cell whose proteins protect it from antibiotics …
MIRKIN: You can create particles that go in and flip a switch and cause that cell to no longer produce that particular protein and therefore, treat the disease.
At that point, he says, we won’t need to find new antibiotics anymore.
MIRKIN: Just move with the bug genetically and knock down its resistance to existing antibiotics.
Because he is focused from the outset on translating knowledge into something useful, Chad Mirkin doesn’t just stop when he sees something interesting; when he makes a discovery. He is an innovator because he takes the next step – connecting the dots – to figure out how he can make his discovery work to enhance people’s lives. A look at the playful—and occasionally wacky—environments where innovations are born when we come back. Plus robots that give strength to people with disabilities, bridges that tell you when they’re rusty, and bulletproof vests from manmade spider silk. This is “The Mind of the Innovator.” More after a break. Stay with us.
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From the National Science Foundation, this is “The Mind of the Innovator.” A look at the challenges of innovating for people and how the process plays out in the real world.
MONTAGE WITH MUSIC
STUDENT 8: I got into engineering because I really like to solve problems.
STUDENT 3: I personally went into engineering because I really like to solve problems.
STUDENT 9: For problem-solving and also applying it to real-world things.
STUDENT 1: You can almost always see, like, what’s going wrong and how to fix it.
STUDENT 1: I got into engineering because I knew I liked building things
STUDENT 1: I got into engineering so I could build stuff.
STUDENT 2: I grew up always thinking, “Oh, I want to be an inventor” and inventor is not a real profession, but I think this is as close as you can get because they are teaching you to come from a perspective where you have some vague idea or you know that you want to make some change to the world and they’re trying to teach to bring that idea to fruition.
American innovation is not a cliché. Engineers come here from all over the world to learn how to do it. Yoky Matsuoka is a MacArthur Fellow and a professor of engineering at the University of Washington.
MATSUOKA: The word “innovation” is so important for this country. It’s not true for many other countries. Here from early on, you know: “innovation, innovation.” It’s really important.
But how do you teach a process of imagination and vision—how do you practically teach someone to be creative?
MUSIC UP FULL AND ENDS
Let’s take a look at what – exactly – those young engineers come here to learn.
FADE IN SOUND OF THE PAPER BIKE RALLY BEING PLAYED
ANNOUNCER: Oh, we have a crash here. [Whistle blows] Oh, my goodness. What we have here is a crash between two teammates.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
We’re at Stanford University. Today Mechanical Engineering students are plowing across a soccer field next to, on top of and sometimes inside some of the weirdest looking vehicles you’ve ever seen.
FADE IN SOUND OF THE PAPER BIKE RALLY BEING PLAYED
ANNOUNCER: Oh, oh! They’ve been tagged. They’ve been tagged. Back to jail for the Glue Mobile.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
This afternoon is the culmination of a two week period of thinking, discussing, building and design; part of a class created to teach students that they can come up with new ways to look at problems, and then set them free to explore.
FADE IN SOUND – ENGINEERING CLASS
GRAD ASSISTANT: We want you to tell us quickly, how you address the problem, what you learned, what the important points are, what the features are.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
This opportunity to explore comes along with what seems like an impossible project: Building a bicycle out of nothing but paper.
FADE TO
STUDENT 2: When I first heard “paper bike,” I thought, you know, folding the paper, like, in your notebook
FADE IN SOUND – STUDENTS WORKING ON A PAPER BIKE
STUDENT 9: Cardboard on cardboard, I thought it’d just – I don’t know – get in the way but it’s actually working really well and some of the other teams have tried some different papers.
STUDENT 10: I wonder if paper would work – you know – that shiny magazine paper, if that would work?
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
The concept is: Give students the opportunity to just go nuts with their own ideas -- to take charge and create something really cool. And along the way – it’s hoped– they’ll be learning to think like an engineer.
FADE IN SOUND – STUDENTS WORKING ON A PAPER BIKE
STUDENT 3: Did you guys hear what he said about the grocery bag? That was golden.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
In this case the engineered product will just be a Paper Bike. But classes like this have a broader mission. They are where the thinking comes from that will lead to the next iPad, the next energy technology, the next breakthrough in diagnosing disease. Professor Larry Leifer, Director of Stanford’s Center for Design Research, created the Paper Bike Challenge. He says it came from his experience in engineering school, where he spent all his spare time building surfboards.
LEIFER: Surfboards are for catching the next wave, right? And you don’t know where that is and you don’t know when it’s arriving.
To find the Next Wave, Leifer says – it’s not enough to master science and mathematics. Engineering class should be about playing around. Having fun.
FADE IN SOUND OF ENGINEERING CLASS
GRAD ASSISTANT 1: Obviously, you’ve heard about and seen some paper bikes already. But this year, we’re going to do something new and we’re going to play Capture the Flag with them.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
In the search for the next innovation, an engineer is armed with technical knowledge. But, in the best case, there’s something else. The engineer has learned to build mental road maps that help to navigate the uncertain stretches on the road to innovation …. What to do when you find something interesting, but you’re not sure where it will lead.
LEIFER: You have a sense of where the problem is leading you but you’re not quite sure about something: How to make an axle out of paper. So, we say, “OK. Prototype an axle. Not the whole vehicle; just the axle.”
FADE IN SOUND – STUDENTS WORKING ON A PAPER BIKE
STUDENT 9: We put in, I think, a couple hours every day building something and then trying it and ended up breaking it and then having to build it, modify again.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
LEIFER: And now build that, analyze it, evaluate it, test it. Whoops. That axle didn’t work.
FADE IN SOUND – STUDENTS WORKING ON A PAPER BIKE
STUDENT 25: So then we came, like, two possible prototypes to solve the problems
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
LEIFER: One of the ways you can prototype is to go see what the guys next to you are doing. “Oh, hey, they’ve got an axle that really works. Let’s prototype their axle.” And this is something that’s also part of what we have to educate them to do. If there’s a good idea out there in the world, you better use it.
A lot of the students spent the week focused on the critical functions of the bike itself: How much weight can it handle? Will it melt?
FADE IN SOUND – ENGINEERING CLASS
LEIFER: I think it’s a good choice of a critical function.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
One goal of the Paper Bike Challenge is to counter a common tendency among newly minted engineers: To only think about the problem that’s right in front of you. The challenge is to teach students to also think about context – about the system in which their machine will exist. (SOUND OF GEARS IN A ROBOTIC HAND) So don’t just think about how the machine works. Think also: Who uses the machine? (GEAR SOUND) Where do they use it? What did they use before they used it? (GEAR SOUND) How do their expectations change the way they use it? When Larry Leifer teaches this, he does it from experience because he’s learned personally the consequences when you don’t get it right.
LEIFER: I can speak to that with pain. I’ve been there.
MUSIC
When Larry got out of school, he spent 10 years with the VA, making robots for veterans who’d lost the use of their arms and legs.
LEIFER: We had placed two of these robot systems in an industry setting, helping quadriplegic computer scientists do their job of writing software.
One of the veterans liked his robot. A lot!
LEIFER: And he wanted to take it home.
Larry said they’d consider it,
LEIFER: But first, let’s bring your wife and family into the office.
MUSIC IN
LEIFER: And the man’s wife simply said, “No way in hell. You’re not going to bring this thing into my home. In the home, this is my job. I take care of him. I take good care of him. I don’t want your machine.” MUSIC SHIFTS What we had missed entirely is that the machine would violate a social relationship. Some workers don’t want robots in the factory ‘cause it takes their job away and this woman, I think, in absolute rightfulness, said, “I don’t want this robot in my home. You’re not taking my job away.”
MUSIC SHIFTS
LEIFER: All through that period, there was a kind of mindset that looked at the person as a machine and the robot as a machine and well, all I have to do is hook up these two machines and I’ll get a better machine. And the big “a-ha” was meeting this woman who said, “You’re messing with a social unit.” And that plays out all the way back to the paper bike. It’s not just about the bike. It’s not just about somebody riding the bike. It’s the bike being used in a game. So if you don’t have the best seat on the field and your rider falls off in midgame and disqualifies the bike, then this is what’s critical and it’s a human interface.
FADE IN SOUND OF THE PAPER BIKE RALLY BEING PLAYED
ANNOUNCER: Pink Lightning, they have a very nicely designed -- from an appearance standpoint – water balloon holder but, unfortunately, it has not held together as well. Hence, the rapidly applied packing tape to hold it together.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
As paper bikes roll, water balloons fly and flags are captured, the students learn valuable lessons about inventing for the real world, like: Whether the innovations they dreamed up were truly useful.
FADE IN SOUND OF THE PAPER BIKE RALLY BEING PLAYED
ANNOUNCER: Oh! Wow! We have our first flip. The Dark Horse has become the Dark Upside-Down Horse. Wow. There’s nothing like breaking your vehicle with your face.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
This challenge is a warm-up.
LEIFER: The core of our curriculum is to prepare students to enter the world of building real products and services and do it in global teams with other people.
When it’s over, students take what they’ve learned and apply it to real problems, brought by real companies.
LEIFER: A leading manufacturer of cosmetics in Latin America has invited us to reinvent eye makeup. There’s a company that does consumer electronics and they want us to reinvent the kitchen -- to re-imagine the appliances that are there. We have another project in which a software company is partnering with an automotive company to try to create an environment so you can be working while you’re driving without getting you killed (laughs)
All of which are challenges that definitely require a bit of imagination—and yes, maybe even, play.
FADE IN SOUND OF THE PAPER BIKE RALLY BEING PLAYED
ANNOUNCER: Wild Bull has made it across! [Whistle blows] Wild Bull has scored! (cheering)
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Teaching engineers to think this way is not only aimed at creating a better eye makeup, or a car that can park itself. It also aims to spur innovations that can change life for some of society’s most vulnerable members.
NAT SOUND OF A WOMAN PLAYING TENNIS
Yoky Matsuoka is one of the nation’s leading robotics engineers; designing machines that help stroke victims and quadriplegics move again. But she didn’t start out that way.
MATSUOKA: I grew up in Japan and all I wanted to do was to play tennis all my life.
She was good enough to be ranked 11th–in-the-country in Japan. But when she came to the US in high school, she kept getting injured. But Yoky wasn’t only a tennis prodigy, she was also brilliant at science and math.
MATSUOKA: I thought, “Well, maybe I should think about something else to do.” So, that’s when I decided that, you know, I’m going to use my math skill and build my Tennis Buddy.
Tennis Buddy was a robot she dreamed up. You could tweak it to play at your level. (SOUND OF A TENNIS BALL BEING HIT) If you’re hurt, the machine holds back. Feeling 100%, it goes full out. (SOUND OF A TENNIS BALL BEING HIT) Building the Tennis Buddy became her obsession. It took her to graduate school -- at Berkeley and MIT – where she helped build a robotic leg and then made a robotic arm that had the reflexes of a 2-year old human. But she wanted her robots to do more.
MATSUOKA: We can use tools, we can build buildings. We can even have this level of consciousness, some people believe, because we gather information using our amazing sensory information from our hand; then manipulate objects in the intricate way that other primates don’t do.
But making a robot do all that was something she just couldn’t figure out. What she then realized was: While she understood robots quite well, what she didn’t understand was the human brain.
MATSUOKA: I need to study more about the brain and then that would allow me to build a better robotic device and then (chuckles) the next phase that I even got into was that I started to get fascinated by people who are missing some function in their brain or even spinal cord.
So she stepped away from robotics, went back to school and studied neurology.
MUSIC THAT SOUNDS LIKE ELECTRICAL PULSES
Now – just like Chad Mirkin – Yoky was armed with two sets of skills. An understanding of human needs – how the brain moves the muscles, especially in the disabled -- and an equal understanding of machines to meet those needs. That’s where her flash of inspiration came (“FLASH” MUSIC FROM EARLIER) She started looking at people with disabilities in a whole new way.
MATSUOKA: Solving problems … like how to get people who have a stroke to move better, that is, itself, an engineering problem, and anything to do with solving problems is an engineering problem.
An engineering problem that could be solved with technology.
MATSUOKA: A lot of engineers look at things like iPhone and then say, “Oh, maybe there’s another App that I can come up with which might be interesting,”
Instead, she sees herself as creating Apps for people. Looking at problems in rehabilitation and then innovating solutions using technology. But always keeping context in mind. Don’t just look at fixing the problem in front of you. As a result, she’s created devices that don’t just solve problems created by breakdowns in the systems of the human body. They also address breakdowns in the medical system.
MATSUOKA: How the current physical therapy was done and what kind of people were left behind because of the current structure.
FADE TO SOUND IN HER LAB
BRIAN: We are in the Neurobotics lab. This is a great tech lab in the University of Washington Computer Science Department
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
This lab is the place where Yoky’s solving these problems. Creating things like the ACT Hand, a robot that – some day – a paraplegic will drive using nothing but thoughts. While the ACT is still a ways-off, what’s up-and-running today is the BAM – the Brake Actuated Manipulator. It’s for stroke patients who’ve developed something called “Learned Non-Use.”
MATSUOKA: They perceive their capability of what they can do to be different from what they really can do.
People with “Learned Non-Use” are crippled not by what’s wrong with them, but by what they think is wrong with them. It’s a break-down in the human system. (SOUND OF GEARS SCREECHING) When someone has a stroke, one side of their body will often be weaker than the other. To compensate, as Dr. Cara Stepp a researcher in Yoky’s lab explains
CARA: The therapist will instruct them, you know, “Look, you can learn to brush your teeth with your left hand even though you’re used to doing it with your right hand.”
A month later, the patient’s right arm may have recovered completely. But because she hasn’t been using it, she’s convinced herself that it’s still too weak. The way most health insurance plans are set up, it’s just too difficult to teach her otherwise. A break-down in the medical system. (SOUND OF GEARS SCREECHING) The result is: the limbs on the “bad side” continue to whither. Even when they don’t have to.
MATSUOKA: When I noticed this happening, thought, “Oh, boy, this is unfortunate.”
But she also thought:
MATSUOKA: “This is a problem. How can I solve it? I’m an engineer. I have certain tools. How can I use my tools to solve the problem?”
And not just solve the physical problem, but the mental ones too, and even work around the problems with the healthcare system.
FADE TO SOUND IN HER LAB
BRIAN: All right. Let’s don the head-mounted display.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
The BAM uses Virtual Reality. It’s a giant joystick that actually lets you touch and feel in a virtual environment. The BAM sits on the end of large, telescoping arm. A stroke patient -- or in this case Dr. Stepp, playing a stroke patient -- grabs the arm and puts on a Virtual Reality helmet.
FADE TO CARA USING THE BAM
CARA: It’s really cool. I’m sort of on a tennis court although it looks like grass instead of pavement.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
According to Brian Dellon, a doctor who got his PhD in engineering working in the Neurobotics lab, what the machine does is trick the patient’s brain … Making her think she’s doing a lot less than she really is.
BRIAN: If their hand is moving a very large amount, they might see their virtual avatar move in a very small motion.
Maybe someone’s convinced she can only swing her arm at 15 percent of her normal ability. If you just said to her, “Move it 30 percent,” she’d tell you she can’t. But with the BAM, you set the robot arm to provide enough resistance and you tweak the Virtual Image, so that she thinks she’s only doing 15 percent when her muscles are actually working to do 50 percent, or even more.
FADE TO CARA USING THE BAM
CARA: I’m moving my hand in free space but when I made impact with the ball, it actually felt like hitting a tennis ball.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
MATSUOKA: We’re getting people to still believe that they’re using the same amount of what they think their own limits are. And then meanwhile, we’re actually training their limbs and their muscles to move stronger.
FADE TO CARA USING THE BAM
CARA: This ball is flying toward me from the other side and I can actually take a swing in 3-D space and I missed it.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
MATSUOKA: And then over time, as they take the goggles off and then they see their arm, they start to realize that they can do a little bit more than they thought.
The BAM can be monitored remotely, so one therapist can help multiple patients at the same time and from far away. That cuts down on commuting, making it more likely patients will go to physical therapy. It also makes it more cost-effective for insurance companies. And it gives the therapist precise measurements of how much a patient is improving. It also overcomes another barrier to effective rehabilitation: it makes therapy fun.
FADE TO CARA USING THE BAM
CARA: So now I’m playing the game and I missed it again, but it’s actually really intuitive. Actually, I just hit the ball a little bit and I actually felt a resistance against it.
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The BAM works because it wasn’t invented in isolation. Yoky designed her innovation to be part of a bigger system—a family, a therapist’s practice, an insurance plan. Just like the paper bikes
BRING UP SOUND OF PAPER BIKES
ANNOUNCER: [Whistle blows] OK. They're starting again. They've discarded the shield, realizing that it didn't help them much at all.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
No innovation is “rider-less.” The best engineers know that intuitively… and they build around their user.
To have game-changing impact, innovations eventually must come to market. When they do, they can change industries and lives. When we come back we’ll see some innovations that are on the right track. Stay with us.
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Welcome back. This is “The Mind of the Innovator” from the National Science Foundation. We‘ve learned that innovation doesn’t come in a flash. It comes as part of a process. You need to connect the dots. You need to keep the wider world in mind. And it helps to be playful.
FADE IN SOUND FROM THE PAPER BIKE RALLY
ANNOUNCER: Pink Lightning, they're standing up trying to shield their flag from a launch back across the goal here. Let's see what happens here. Physical shield. They're actually standing on their vehicle. Wait. We lost the flag.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
But what if you’ve done all those things right, and, lo and behold, you still end up at a dead end? It happens to everyone. No innovation process is without failure. But what separates change-makers from the rest is that when they reach a dead end they re-frame the problem.
FADE TO SOUND OF JERRY LYNCH ON A BRIDGE.
LYNCH: So, right now, we’re outside on the Grove Street Bridge in Ypsilanti, Michigan
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Jerry Lynch is a civil engineering professor at the University of Michigan. He’s an interesting sort of hybrid engineer, doing traditional civil engineering like bridges and buildings, but with brand-new things like micro-sensors. And he’s put them together to create an astonishing new technology.
SOUND OF JERRY LYNCH ON A BRIDGE.
LYNCH: Now, the future, basically, has been tested on this particular bridge, the Grove Street Bridge.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
It’s a “future” inspired by something that seems as distant from this grubby overpass as you can get. It’s based on nature. (SOUND OF BIRDS) It’s an increasingly common practice these days to play off of natural systems. So many of them are better – stronger, lighter, more energy efficient – than the ones that humans create. What Jerry has managed to do is translate his understanding of the essential properties of one system into a new technology in a different context. In this case, skin (SOUND OF A SHOWER RUNNING AND SOMEONE SINGING IN THE SHOWER) Your skin is designed to protect your vital organs from damage and infection. To do this, it’s developed over time to send you signals when there’s any danger – a burn, a cut, a tear – that might cause damage to your insides. When those things happen, your skin sends signals to your brain; telling it what’s happened. Inspired by skin, Jerry Lynch has managed to make a technological equivalent for bridges.
SOUND OF JERRY LYNCH ON A BRIDGE.
LYNCH: This particular self-sensing material is able to detect when it’s cracking as well as the level of strain that it has placed upon it.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
What he’s created is a skin that you can lay over any structure, and it can monitor whether it’s sound.
SOUND OF JERRY LYNCH ON A BRIDGE
LYNCH: We might see it in self-sensing abutments, self-sensing piers, that can self-report essentially when they’re in distress.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
And it’s not just “skin” because it’s draped over the outside of a structure. It’s skin, because it actually works a lot like skin. It’s an opaque black fabric embedded with a lattice-work of tiny carbon nanotubes. Those carbon nanotubes serve a dual purpose, just like human nerves: they sense changes and they transmit them. In a bridge, those signals go to a central receiving station where technicians sit.
LYNCH: When we started to look at skin, we were really captivated by the efficiency of human skin systems and we took this path that we wanted to look at the skin system and try to mimic its functionality.
He began by doing what we mentioned earlier: building a mental road map to help navigate uncertain stretches ahead. In Jerry’s case, he started by gaining an intimate knowledge of the biology of human skin.
LYNCH: Books, journal articles among others. So we started to study that, my students and I – we were able to learn enough about the skin system that we were in a position to start working towards mimicking what we saw in skin systems.
After the reading and studying was done, it was time to start building. The central problem was how to get sensors, distributed across an entire structure, to all work together, and then transmit information to a central hub – the way nerves carry impulses to the brain. It was a brilliant idea. It was backed with stacks of research. The only problem? It didn’t work. (SOUND OF A BUZZER)
LYNCH: We hit a double. There came a point where there were certain limitations to the approach we were using,
And it’s a point all innovators are familiar with. You invest time and effort, you run calculations and do prototypes, and at some point you realize—“Hang on, this isn’t working!” The problem was, Jerry and his team had lumped-together the sensors for stress and corrosion.
LYNCH: But when we tried to combine the two, that’s where we encounter a lot of challenges. Different layers exhibit different electrical properties when they’re stimulated electrically. It was very hard to get one skin to be selective when the other was not.
Luckily, innovators are well acquainted with setbacks. And the best ones even know how to use failure to their advantage. When things don’t work the way you expect, it’s because the science is trying to tell you something. In this case, Jerry and his team went back to their original inspiration, human skin. They realized there was another feature of skin they hadn’t adopted—its multiple layers. In our skin there’s different layers for blood vessels, for nerves, for waterproofing. So Jerry decided to try the same thing for his bridge skin.
LYNCH: We ended up designing a multilayered skin system that has different types of sensing. Just like the way in human skin, you can sense different things. One of the layers of our skin is actually measuring strain. We have another layer in the skin that’s looking at corrosion. And we convert that into electrical signals.
The result? Engineers have their finger constantly on the pulse of the bridge. When it's time for the bridge’s routine checkup, the inspector simply pushes a button. In minutes, the skin could create a map and wirelessly send it to the inspector.
LYNCH: It will give us a complete two-dimensional mapping over the full surface area of the skin what is going on in terms of what we’re trying to sense.
And it was all made possible because, when he reached a dead end—“Hang on, this isn’t working!”—Jerry came at the problem from a different angle.
MUSIC UP AND ENDS
There’s one final—crucial—step for any innovation that’s going to truly change people’s lives. It has to get to those people.
FADE IN SOUND FROM CHAD MIRKIN’S SUBGROUP MEETING
JOSH: We're going to learn a lot about these systems.
MIRKIN: Yeah, but to have a real winner, you have to have it the other way around. It's got to go from dark to bright.
JOSH: Right.
MIRKIN: Because nobody's looking for a turn-off system.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
We’re back in Chad Mirkin’s subgroup meeting at Northwestern University. A Grad Student has a new idea for using nanotechnology to alter the image you get from an MRI. But as he presents his findings, professor Mirkin seems unimpressed.
FADE IN SOUND FROM CHAD MIRKIN’S SUBGROUP MEETING
JOSH: As Chad mentioned, we want to investigate how we can take these flares and turn them into a “dark”-to-“bright,” if we can get some kind of binding group.
MIRKIN: I think that's the whole crux of the issue. If we don't do that, then this isn't worth a whole lot.
JOSH: Right. I agree with you.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
The student is hoping his lab work will end in some interesting science.
FADE IN SOUND FROM CHAD MIRKIN’S SUBGROUP MEETING
JOSH: I hope to be able to learn a lot about these different systems.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
But does it have potential to be a useful innovation?
MIRKIN: There have been a lot of widgets that have been made and a lot of money pumped into the development of those widgets and they basically end up being $10, $20, $100 million paperweights.
Chad Mirkin has patented dozens of devices and processes that are significant advances in American medicine. He’s learned – through successes and failures – that making a cool, new technology is not an end in itself.
MIRKIN: I think that sometimes, as a scientist, you make a discovery, develop a new technology and you say “I want to develop this and turn it into something useful” and you get so caught up in the technology and the development of it that you don’t think about, well, “Who am I going to sell this to? Who is ultimately going to use this?”
FADE IN SOUND OF CHAD MIRKIN’S SUBGROUP MEETING
MIRKIN: Why aren't we going for the gold, so to speak?
JOSH: What do you mean?
MIRKIN: Well, nobody is going to use the “on” to “off” system. They could use, and likely would use, the “off” to “on” system. And if we've got a strategy for making that, why mess around in the weeds with the other one?
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
MIRKIN: One of the things that we do is to say, “OK, we have a new technology here. Where can it make a difference? Where can it actually win?”
And that’s the final, but crucial, step in innovation: bringing it out into the world. Where it can make a difference.
SOUND OF A TOUR OF DAN WIDMAIER’S LAB
DAVID: Welcome to Refactored Materials. As you can see, this is sort of a typical biological laboratory.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
David Breslauer and Dan Widmaier are two engineers right in the midst of their first foray into bringing an innovation out into the world. They’re young guys who have spun their childhood love of building things into a start-up company that’s spinning something else. As Dan says
WIDMAIER: Our first product is spider silk. We make the silk without the spider.
SOUND OF A TOUR OF DAN WIDMAIER’S LAB
DAVID: Nylon is extremely extensible and Kevlar is extremely strong. Spider silk fits in this niche space where it’s both extremely extensible and extremely strong. Because spider silk is so strong, it can be used in many of the spaces that Kevlar is currently used in, including bullet-proof vests, sails, kites, parachutes
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
But, we don’t yet have spider-silk vests or kites, because it’s proven quite tricky to make the silk in the lab. With their new company, David and Dan are trying a different approach, bringing together two cutting-edge realms of science. First, there’s genetic engineering. Using genetic tools--
WIDMAIER: DNA Sequencing, DNA Synthesis,
-- they’re experimenting with putting the spider silk gene into bacteria, which would then act like tiny factories to make the silk. And second, they’re borrowing from the emerging technology of microfluidics.
WIDMAIER: Microfabrication and make what we call microfluidic devices.
Those devices, as the name implies, are able to precisely control very tiny amounts of liquid. In this case, the engineers are using microfluidics to create a gadget to stand in for the spider’s spinneret—to take the soupy silk mixture and spin it into a fiber. But how? Well, exactly how nature does. Sort of.
WIDMAIER: When I say “do it exactly how nature does it,” I don’t mean make spiders. I mean make the same protein solution that spiders make and spin it using the same process that spiders use to spin fibers from that protein.
SOUND OF A TOUR OF DAN WIDMAIER’S LAB
DAVID: If you come to the other half of our lab, you see actual spiders and with these spiders.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
They’re in the process of pulling this off. At the moment, they’re still experimenting with what bacteria to use as their silk factories. And in the meantime, their engineering work is coupled with a bit of animal husbandry…
SOUND OF A TOUR OF DAN WIDMAIER’S LAB
DAVID: I spend my days taking care of these spiders as well as studying their silk
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Industry has known for a long time that spider silk could replace plastic and – potentially – make someone millions. So Dan and David aren’t the first people to try and make silk without spiders. The most famous failure in this area was an attempt to make spider silk using an approach that seems counter-intuitive at best.
(Sound – GOAT BAYING)
They tried to create spider silk in goats’ milk, and gave up after several years of trying. Bad news for them, but good news for Dan Widmaier.
WIDMAIER: As an engineer you want to try it, see what works, see what doesn't work, use that information to reformulate your approach and then try it again.
While Dan was in graduate school – in addition to reading everything he could about spiders – he worked on ways to re-create the spider’s protein solution by putting silk genes into bacteria. He engineered salmonella—the same kind that causes food poisoning—to do something useful instead: to create, and spit out, the building blocks of silk.
WIDMAIER: I was engineering a secretion system that’s normally used in salmonella or other pathogens to make people sick, but it’s got this neat feature in that it can secrete protein from inside the cell all the way outside the cell in one step, and we are using spider silk as our secreted protein of choice.
The thing about using salmonella instead of goats is, the bacteria make silk a lot faster. That meant David could try and then fail and then try and fail again quickly; without having to wait months and months for more silk. Working with bacteria, he says
WIDMAIER: Is still the best understood and quickest way to go through these cycles.
Each of those failures brought more learning. He was able to do something every engineer does: Continually look at your system and correct flaws in it as you’re going. If you’re using goats, with their long waits in between cycles, he says
WIDMAIER: It doesn’t allow a lot of feedback in the process. You know, as an engineer, that’s something you want.
But Dan and David aren’t popping any champagne corks yet. It’s still early days for their new company, and taking an innovation to market is always a perilous process. The gap between lab bench and commercial product is where many promising technologies fail. It’s so well-known among entrepreneurs, in fact, that it has a name: “the valley of death.”
WIDMAIER: Something in that step from technology to commercial product is the tricky one
But still, Dan Widmaier and thousands of other innovators brave that valley because it’s the fruition of their original spark of insight. Chad Mirkin explains:
MIRKIN: If the technology is only part of a paper in Science or in Nature, that’s a very minor impact compared to a technology that’s ultimately used by the masses, that cures a disease, that enables the diagnosis of lots of diseases.
Maybe they innovate to change lives. Maybe it’s for the thrill of creation. Maybe, it’s a way to leave a personal mark on the world. Whatever the reason, it’s in the final stage of bringing the innovation to market that that goal is realized.
MIRKIN: The first and most important thing you have to do is to take a step back and say, "Let’s assume everything works as planned in terms of the technology development. What do we have at the end of the day? Will it make a difference? Will we be able to make a lot more off of it than the money we put into the developing it? And what’s going to be the longstanding impact?
So the search goes on to find inspiration. Make something new. Bring it out into the world.
FADE IN SOUND OF CHAD MIRKIN’S SUBGROUP MEETING
QUESTIONER 1: Once the MRI you're looking for binds, that somehow causes like a hair pin structure to form.
MIRKIN: So that it brings it close to the gold surface.
QUESTIONER 1: Right.
MIRKIN: Which would be spectacular.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
For engineers like Chad Mirkin, it’s that final step that’s the reason to innovate in the first place.
MIRKIN: These are all technologies that touch almost everyone’s life around the world and to me, that’s a very gratifying thing and I think a very worthwhile goal.
FADE IN SOUND OF CHAD MIRKIN’S SUBGROUP MEETING
ANDREA: I was like, "Wow. This is really cool," and I think it's a neat kind of combination of two things that our group is doing.
MIRKIN: And if you put it all together in one package, you might have a winner.
ANDREA: Yeah. Exactly. So, I thought it was pretty exciting.
GRAD STUDENT 2: That's good. Any other questions? All right. Thanks. (APPLAUSE)
MUSIC UP FULL
“The Mind of the Innovator” was written and produced by Richard Paul. It was edited by Joanne Culbertson, Cecile Gonzalez, Lisa Raffensperger, and Cliff Braverman. We’d like to thank Mara Martini, Andrea Luthi, Josh Cutler and Lu Shin Wong at Northwestern University …. Martin Steinertat Stanford University and Ari Epstein at MIT for their help in making this program possible. Our music was composed and arranged by Lenny Williams. This program is a production of National Science Foundation Engineering Directorate. The National Science Foundation -- Where Discoveries Begin. For the National Science Foundation, I’m Laurie Howell.
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