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In "3 Tips for Becoming an Energizing Engineer" I discussed Rosabeth Moss Kanter's take on how the best leaders lead with positive energy. I recently came across research that suggests creativity and innovation may be an organization's most important source of positive energy.

Harvard Business Review contributing editor Bronwyn Fryer posted this interview "How Do Innovators Think? " with Professors Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen. In the Q&A interview the professors discuss the results of a six-year study in which they surveyed 3,000 creative executives and conducted an additional 500 individual interviews to discover how "Innovators' DNA" works.

The study identified five "discovery skills" that distinguish innovative leaders from all the rest:

• Associating: "a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas."
• Questioning: "an ability to ask 'what if', 'why', and 'why not' questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture."
• Observation: "the ability to closely observe details, particularly the details of people's behavior."
• Experimentation: innovators "are always trying on new experiences and exploring new worlds."
• Networking: innovative leaders "are really good at networking with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn"

I think one of the profound discoveries the professors made was that more people possess these skills than we recognize. Professor Dyer said, "We think there are far more discovery driven people in companies than anyone realizes. We've found that 15% of executives are deeply innovative, meaning they've invented a new product or started an innovative venture. But the problem is that even the most creative people are often careful about asking questions for fear of looking stupid, or because they know the organization won't value it."

We Need to Celebrate Invention and Innovation
One of the unanticipated satisfactions I discovered in moving from political Washington to industrial South Jersey was finding my office across the hall from K-Tron's R&D department.  You don't have to be a technology junkie to feel the positive energy coming from a creative group of engineers like this.  K-Tron is a company where a lot of its positive energy has started with invention. In fact, the company wouldn't exist as it does today if it hadn't introduced the world's first digital weigh belt feeder in 1972. 

I asked my long-time office neighbor Jim Foley to describe his process of discovery as he spearheaded one of the latest innovations to come out of the K-Tron R&D department, the new Acti-Flow material flow aid for gravimetric feeders. Getting cohesive or other difficult materials to flow from a hopper is an age-old problem for all process industries. The consequences of bridging or ratholing are especially costly in continuous feeding applications where reduced or interrupted flow can degrade product quality and even halt the process.

Before Acti-Flow, mechanical agitation provided the most reliable way to deal with material that didn't easily flow from a loss-in-weight feeder hopper. Mechanical agitation works but needs secondary motors, gear boxes, added headroom, and presents additional cleaning challenges. These downsides led Foley and his staff to ask if there is a better way.

"Vibrating the hopper is another option everyone's known about for a long time," Foley explained. "We know vibration is good. The problem is that too much vibration is bad. It compacts the material and actually promotes bridging and ratholing. Since constant vibration created more trouble than it solved, the best you could do with it was wait for a mass flow alarm and then turn on the vibrator. "

Making Smart Vibrations
It's a fascinating story, which I'll save for another time, of how Foley and his R&D engineers in Pitman, NJ and Niederlenz, Switzerland took a completely fresh look at all the ways vibration might be employed to make difficult material flow. There were a number of breakthroughs the team discovered.

The most important innovation, and the one that has lead to a pending patent, was the idea that the loss-in-weight controller could control and fine-tune how the vibrator (or any other device) interacts with the feeding system. "It's only because our loss-in-weight algorithm is so smart," Foley said, "that we can make vibration work with us--not against us."

As a result of having a smart controller to manage the vibration, Acti-Flow is able to vibrate continuously at a low-level, optimum amplitude and frequency that prevents bridging and ratholing. "The controller changes the amplitude all the time," Foley said "When material is moving well it runs at the lowest possible level of vibration."  If the controller senses a change, it adjusts the vibration right away before it becomes a problem.

"That's the beauty of it," Foley said. "It's a preventive strike: it lets you act, not react. "

Innovation Gives Life to Organizations
Invention and innovation keep a company engaged with its customers. It gives employees renewed purpose. It keeps sales people excited about their products and services. It gives existing customers and potential new customers confidence that they're dealing with a company that keeps getting better.

If it's a really cool design, or a striking innovation, invention gives us pleasure in simply perceiving the thing itself. Finally, invention gives us all hope in the future.

The Personal Innovation Imperative
You don't have to be an R&D engineer to be an inventor. You don't have to work for an engineering-oriented company to need invention. The truth is, in a global networked world where continuous innovation is sweeping across all industries, all the time, we all have to be innovators. The most important innovation we have to work on is ourselves.

What are you doing to reinvent yourself today?

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