SAIIE Presentation 2009
An innovative Industrial Engineer – duh!!!
By Paul J Whitehouse
The reason many become Industrial Engineers, is to apply personal traits, my premise is Industrial Engineers ARE all potentially innovative!
We’re NOT all equal! The billion neurons, from 46 chromosome inputs plus our upbringing creates uniqueness. A quick test indicates hemispheric preference and reflects whether natural abilities give a predisposition to being innovative; link to humour will be made. You may exercise your body, but what mind exercising is done?
A critical aspect to innovation is the environment in which you exist. How creative are you allowed to be? Great, a boss with an open door, but if the mind is closed???
Timing the application of innovation is critical, requiring consideration; do you become innovative about a product in the final life cycle stage? But beware, having developed the black & white TV screen and miss the next step, i.e. colour, and then flat screen technology.
Innovative about what?
Your focus?
How will you get it? No time to be creative about everything. Amazing how little we are concerned with the question and how consuming we are to develop inappropriate solutions. If Gautrain is the answer, what was the question? With the right question innovation is then effective.
Process gives us focus, enabling us to discern cause and effect; don’t develop solutions for something turning out to be a direct effect of something else – developing elegant solutions for the wrong problems! Band-Aid effect!
Value Engineering an effective methodology, giving clear cause & effect delineation, identifying the most critical causal characteristics. We will apply the methodology to see ease of use and how to address traditional thinking. Having applied innovation, we objectively select the best solution.
Finally we see how a participative approach maximises resources, and value adds users.
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