Inventors Forum: The Essence of Thinking Different

Summary from The Front End of Innovation Conference, May 2006.

Moderator: Evan Schwartz, Walker Digital Laboratories and Author of Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors

Panelists:

Rodney Brooks, iRobot Corp and Director of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Burt Rutan, SpaceShipOne and Applied Composites

Summary:

Evan: There is a commonality between storytelling and innovation. There are 12 steps in the epic storytelling structure of the hero’s journey, as defined by Joseph Campbell in his book Hero of a Thousand Faces.

These 12 steps define the plot of many epic stories, and also the plot of many films: The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, October Sky and many others.

Burt Rutan lived in an ordinary world. At a young age, he was called to adventure by the appearance of a formation of planes overhead. In October, the young boy, Jake, sees Sputnik in the evening sky and is inspired to venture skyward. Both are true stories, and typical, according to Schwartz, of many innovators. These are heroes who must pass through the many stages of the epic journey to achieve recognition and success. This pattern repeated many times when compared to the lives of innovators throughout history.

Schwartz’s role is to tell the story of innovation’s path, and the people who drive it.

Panelist Rodney Brooks was inspired to pursue explorations of artificial intelligence after seeing the Stanley Kubrick film 2001 where Hal, the intelligent computer, called the shots.

Rodney Brooks defined iRobot ’s mission: Build cool stuff. Deliver great products. Make money. Have fun. Change the world. That mission has evolved from his invention of “trash can” robots at MIT, to droids based on insect models, to humanoid bots in the 90s, to planetary rovers. His view is that an aging global population should be more productive in the future to keep society working. When robots can handle routing tasks, people are freed to do more important things.

The Discussion:

Evan: What gets you talking about a problem? How do you get a plane to market so fast? What’s the driver?

Burt: It’s an extension of the model airplane hobby that forced him to create rather than buy balsa to enter competition. That need was the source of his innovation – first to build a model that would fly, then to build one he could fly in. He worked hard. Eventually one of the aerospace primes recognized and hired him for his agility. His team could build in months what took Northrup years.

Rodney: Focus on innovation while other, bigger companies focus on production. It’s hard to be innovation and efficient at production.

Burt: We tried to keep them separate - set up companies separately. The disciplines represent different cultures. Repetitive work and creative work attracts different people.

Evan: How do you pick the projects you want to work on?

Rodney: We try to focus where the others aren’t. We started with many more projects but now focus on a few.
Burt: We do 6-12 programs at a time. Teams stay small. We build team from specialists. A stress analyst will work same job on several teams concurrently.

Evan: How important is competition to innovation. Storytelling has the protagonist and antagonist. What are you working against? How important is to it be driven by competition?

Burt: We were fortunate enough to have real competition on X Prize. Others were working in wrong technologies.

Rodney: It was clear that NASA was the “them.”

Burt: Government may call what they do research, but with so many pressures, economic, technical failures, they paint themselves in a corner where they cannot do research. No ne planned for next decade.

Rodney: My research group has 15. It’s us against traditional world, thumbing noses at the rest. It’s a little different at iRobot. We don’t have a counterpoint to be going against. It’s a different ocean. We explore mountains no one has ever done before.

Evan: You reframe the problem and see what no one else sees. You had a different approach.

Rodney: We look at what everyone else is doing, and don’t do it. Traditional planning is to look at where a robot wants to go. We reframed it to go where the stuff isn’t. It makes computation simple. An assumption is that “walking insect” robots shouldn’t fall done. But, insects do fall down all the time. They aren’t great walkers. This strategy works for small robots. And it negates the thing that everyone assumes is true.

Evan: Do you ever go in a completely opposite direction?

Burt: We question if system is even needed. Groups of engineers have skills that let them develop complex systems. Unsupervised, they will come up with the most complex thing possible because they get joy from building something only then can figure out.

Rodney: Our goal is not to make something complicated.

Burt: But to totally eliminate an entire system.

Evan: When you’re introducing a product, how do you decide what story to tell? With Roombot, for example, why take the robot concept out of the marketing?

Rodney: We made some mistakes along the way. One may have been listening to marketing people too much. We later changed strategy to celebrate the robot. This happens often in new product space. What do you compare it to? Robots used to be like Rosey, The Jetsons, Terminator. Since then we have realized people are willing to accept them and that robots are worth having.

Evan: What is the story you’re trying to tell with privately funded space flight?

Burt: We don’t need to manage excitement. It happens. I don’t think there is such a thing as getting too excited. We could be eliminating the need for transportation with the Internet. Virtual reality could eliminate all business travel.

Evan: What about joyrides for billionaires?

Burt: We want to move beyond comfortable environments and go somewhere dangerous. But, only the courageous went. The weak died along the way. Colonizers were selected for courage and strength. Look at how quickly humans populated the entire world when boats and navigation were still relatively crude.

Evan: Do we need to go to next frontier to survive?

Burt: The only time we’re really threatened is during a vast die off. It’s solved by colonizing to deflect threats. I think we’re passing through a transition. I think allegiance to politics and religion has nothing to do with our country or geography. (This suggests that Friedman’s concept that the world is flat applies on a much broader level.)

Evan: Rodney, you mentioned the personal computer revolution earlier. How does that apply to robotics? Is that a strategy?

Rodney: Personal robots can be a network distributed thing - personal empowerment through computation. Robotics is headed the right direction.

Audience: How do you keep education exciting?
Burt: Kids excited by reality. We don’t give them enough credit. Classrooms are at a low baud rate where we can’t teach them. It doesn’t work well. What they see out side of classroom inspires them. There’s no greatness in classroom environment. We’ll still have classrooms. We still have Greyhound busses. But the failure is obvious. There are ways of vastly improving the way to transfer information to someone’s brain than to have sit in a 30+ room while teacher deals with lowest denominator. It’s just not effective. Kids see and are inspired by what can and is happening.

Rodney: I agree with Burt. MIT is more inclined toward project management teaching. All classes are available throughout the world. Students go online and read modules when needed. Courses are about teams building things. Learning is self motivated, driven by team.

Audience: Comment on creative effort of young and old people on a team. Is age irrelevant?

Burt: I don’t look at age. I look for passion. What someone does on own time is revealing. I don’t look at grades. I look at hobbies and interests. Career test pilot, Mike Melville (65-year old pilot of SpaceShipOne), was too old to fly commercial jets, but he flies 3.5 g’s to mach 3. He’s also rides bike few hundred miles on a weekend. He’s not old. Age is not relevant.

Audience: Is there a significant difference between management and leadership? What is role for leadership?

Rodney: Leaders have to take risks. Push the envelope. At same time, the must exert some sort of quality control. Successful innovative leaps come when faculty lead and guide, but let the students do the exploration.

Burt: In a team, anyone can be creative. Each person on the team is empowered to lead when the responsibility requires leadership.

Evan: Storytelling chronicles exciting incidents. It causes dreams to be born. What’s the current dream? What is your current long term vision?

Burt: What can I seen in my lifetime? As you get older, this haunts you. What is possible? How much fun can you possibly have? I’ve got 40-45 years left. I’d like to see commercial flights take people to the moon. Once I set as goal, I can easily focus on the milestones to achieve it. I’m also fascinated by the potential of children.

Rodney: Grandchildren.

Agree? Disagree? Please add your comment below.

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