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Cut the constraints and find your inner child

Being creative isn’t always easy, especially working in high tech. After all, the best answer to a technical problem is a practical solution, right? But even if you can’t apply creative thinking in every situation, a little practice and a willingness to think out of this world can offer a whole new perspective.

 

In an industry loaded with constraints, standards and linear processes, out-of-the-box thinking can be a real challenge for many in the high-tech domain. After spending years of learning physical laws, technical concepts and general rules of thumb, it’s no wonder many engineers see the problems to solve with an analytical eye. After all, the best answer to a technical problem is a very practical solution, right? But where does that leave room to be creative?

Like many other engineers working in high tech, this narrative certainly holds true for Roger Amiot, a senior compliance engineer at Fluidwell, a company specialized in the development of sensors, flow meters and other electronics rated for use in hazardous and even explosive environments. “My work focuses on all kinds of certifications, from electrical safety to radiation to explosion safety and metrology,” describes Amiot. “Almost all my professional activities are closely tied to industry safety standards and just by nature, that means I’m very limited in opportunities to be creative.”

20210917 Fluidwell Roger Amiot

But working within these strict standards, Amiot wanted to see how he could push himself to get out of his comfort zone and come up with some fresh ways of thinking. “That’s really why I wanted to enroll in High Tech Institute’s ‘Creative thinking’ course. I’ve met several incredibly creative people and outside-of-the-box thinkers, and I’ve always been interested in the way they could keep an open mind, stay outside of rigid constraints and remain adaptable to trying various techniques,” illustrates Amiot. “That’s completely different than anything I’ve ever done. Being an engineer, my focus has always been on finding straightforward technical solutions. I was really drawn to this course to see how I could challenge the norm and be more creative as a technician.”

'Sometimes asking why, again and again, can lead to the most interesting places.'

Wake-up call

Like any other training, the “Creative thinking” course starts with giving a background into lateral-thinking theories and idea generation techniques. The first two of these methods are concept extraction, which is establishing basic links between ideas, and the challenge method, which seeks to challenge the status quo by continuously asking why. The next two approaches are random entry, which is essentially an association game based on random words, and finally provocation, which is designed to find uncomfortable and unworkable starting points that can then be used as stepping-stones to reach workable ideas.

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“Of the several techniques that were presented to us, I must say, there were some that really worked for me and others that didn’t. For me, the most effective techniques were the challenge and provocation methods,” highlights Amiot. “Sometimes asking why, again and again, can lead to the most interesting places. Especially when others are quick to shoot down ideas. Asking why this won’t work, why is that, and four more times why. Eventually, you get to a place where people come out of a trance and start seeing possibilities. It’s like a wake-up call, which is what this training was for me.”

Go to Mars

The next step: bring these methods to life. Especially for technical minds, it’s practice and not theory that’s king. That’s why participants are tasked to define a purpose and start using these techniques immediately through idea-generating exercises. The goal of this practice is to achieve quantity, not necessarily quality in ideas. Not every idea is going to be good, or even workable, but simply getting them out can jumpstart a creative flow.

So, if the problem you’re trying to solve is how to reduce litter in public spaces, a flying trashcan might not be the most practical solution. But it will certainly catch people’s attention. As course instructor Rex Bierlaagh puts it – sometimes you have to think like a Martian. “Don’t be afraid to go to Mars for a wild idea. Because after you go, you and your colleagues can always bring it back down to Earth.”

20210917 Fluidwell Roger Amiot RRA_9809

“What we learned is that there really is no such thing as a crazy idea because they all have valuable aspects. It’s about creating this open mindset that lacks judgement, rather than our typical critical or analytical approach,” Amiot suggests. But one of the most important factors in creative thinking and brainstorming sessions, according to him, is participation within a group setting. “Having others involved to help harvest, align and group ideas is vital. Martian ideas are great, but there has to be someone to help structure them, and they have to fit within the defined focus. What we saw was when this was done effectively, a number of ideas could be viable with only minor tweaks.”

Personal insight

For many, especially the linear thinkers of the technical world, putting these methods into practice is no easy task. Because of that, implementing creative thinking approaches in real-life scenarios comes with the added layer of difficulty that it’s counterintuitive. But according to Bierlaagh, this feeling is something to embrace. To him, as children, we’re wired to see all the possibilities and potential, and to be imaginative. But somewhere along the way, we lose that and start focusing on limits and boundaries. That’s why one of the aims of the training is to help participants break through these constraints and find their inner child.

“I haven’t been able to apply many of the techniques at work yet. Some of that stems from the type of work I’m in, but also from the work-from-home environment we’re in right now,” comments Amiot. “But I must say, I also found this training to be relevant on a personal level, outside of work. It has given me a lot of personal insight and a better appreciation of others’ perspectives and ideas. We all play many roles in our lives – colleagues, friends, parents, children – which means we need to wear many hats. But seeing how this open mindset can affect creativity and action has really opened my eyes to how I can be a better listener and communicator without being blinded with all the technical constraints that are so prevalent in my life as a technician.”

This article is written by Collin Arocho, tech editor of Bits&Chips.
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“Mechanics are equally responsible for electromagnetic compatibility”

Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) is a topic that few mechanical engineers get excited about. They point to the electronics engineers when the system fails the legal testing process. However, the theme has so many mechanical aspects that mechanical engineers cannot do without the EMC basics.

What do you do when you want to ensure that the electronics in a housing do not overheat? Right, you make a nice hole in the casing so that the heat can get out. Easy. From a purely mechanical perspective, there is little wrong with that approach. Electronical engineers will be less happy with the solution since there is a huge risk that such a hole transmits all the electromagnetic radiation and the device will no longer pass the compatibility tests that are required by law before an electronic product release.

Marcel van Doorn: “The challenge with EMC is that mechanical and electronical engineers often don’t speak each other’s language.”

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Marcel van Doorn, teacher at High Tech Institute and retired at the beginning of this year after a long career at Philips, has often seen things go wrong. “Mechanical engineers never heard anything about electromagnetic compatibility during their education. Radiation from antennas is usually completely new knowledge for them. As a result, they do not realize who their design choices affect electromagnetic compatibility. Electronical engineers have that wisdom, but communication between the two disciplines regularly goes awry. Drawings are thrown over the fence without much explanation and then things are bound to be misunderstood. Regularly, you hear about electronic devices or installations that are disturbed by electromagnetic radiation from nearby mobile phones. Think of robot arms or scooters that tilt, screens that become unreadable, or communication connections that are broken.”

Although EMC is the domain of the electronical engineer, Van Doorn emphasizes that it is also the responsibility of their mechanical counterparts, precisely because many things have to be solved in mechanics. “The challenge is that they often don’t speak each other’s language.” Therefore, Van Doorn has trimmed down the extensive EMC course for electronical engineers to a one-day, hands-on refresher course, which can be followed at the High Tech Institute, especially for mechanical engineers.

 

In harmony

Back to basics, what is electromagnetic compatibility? “It’s a positive word,” says Van Doorn. “After all, it means that devices are compatible with each other, that they continue to function properly in close proximity. That is the goal you pursue. If they are in harmony with each other, one device will not disturb the other. Mobile communications and security services should not be affected by it either, and vice versa.”

“When you used to go to a hospital, you were often asked to switch off your phone,” he continues. “To take no chances, cell phones had to be turned off so that heart monitoring systems, among other things, continued to run normally. Virtually no one did – and does – so now the EMC requirements in the medical world have become much stricter.”

 

No slit, but holes

What exactly is wrong with the aforementioned hole in the electronic housing? “Because of EMC considerations, electronics are often put in a casing,” answers Van Doorn. “This way, you create a Faraday cage from which no electromagnetic field can escape. If you make holes in the housing for cooling or to allow cables to run through, you breach that shielding.” Whether that also poses a problem, depends on the frequencies in the system. “If such a slit is resonant for the wavelength, the radiation simply flies out. It may be difficult to imagine, but then you have created an effective antenna.”

The solution is relatively simple: do not make a slit, but instead go for a series of small holes that together have the same surface area. As a result, the heat can escape to a sufficient extent, but the electromagnetic radiation cannot.

“Once you know it, it’s simple.”

Now that the frequencies in electronics are increasing, from MHz to GHz and higher, the wavelengths are getting smaller and the design correspondingly more challenging. “A frequency of 1 GHz means a wavelength of about thirty centimeters”, Van Doorn calculates. “The rule of thumb is that if you want to reduce the radiation emission level by a factor of ten, the hole in the casing should be no more than one twentieth of the wavelength. In this case, one and a half centimeters. At 10 GHz you already go to 1.5 mm.”

You can apply the same simple calculation to other situations. “An electronic engineer often tells his mechanical colleague that the printed circuit board must be grounded,” says Van Doorn. “In the design, he must then include a connection to the chassis. At frequencies of 1 GHz, that wire again not be longer than one and a half centimeters. So the old-fashioned, robust design has to become more and more refined.”

“In addition, the ground wire and other cabling cannot be everywhere,” warns Van Doorn. “The fields emitted by the electronics board can couple precisely with those cables, which often results in a much more efficient antenna than the traces on the PCB. So position the cable alongside the printed circuit board, and certainly not above it. Once you know it, it’s simple.”

 

'Hear it and you forget it, see it and you remember it, do it and you understand it.'

Dropping pennies

Electronics should tell their mechanics colleagues about things like this, but in practice many development companies lack that communication. The result is that a device does not pass the EMC tests and an expensive redesign is required. The aim of the High Tech Institute training ‘EMC for mechatronic engineers’ is therefore to make mechanics aware of the issues, to teach them the EMC language and to give them a number of simple tools with which to solve EMC problems.

In his training courses, Van Doorn follows the principle of Confucius: “Hear it and you forget it, see it and you remember it, do it and you understand it.” Van Doorn: “Of course I can give an extensive theoretical discourse on all aspects of EMC, but that goes in one ear and out the other. As a teacher, it is important that you make the link between simple theory and practice. During my career I have collected many demos in which all the principles are explained in a simple way. With a spectrum analyzer you can then see, for example, that a large slit emits much more than a pattern of small holes. Because of that very important, practical side, I did not think it was wise to give this course online in corona time. You have to be able to feel it, to get hands-on with the theory.”

Van Doorn encourages students to bring their own product. “During the lessons, we discuss these and in almost all cases there are a lot of points for improvement.” It is really nice if the course is given as in-house training, Van Doorn has experienced. “Then the mechanical and electronical engineers gather around their device and there is plenty of discussion. Suddenly you hear the pennies dropping everywhere.”

Van Doorn notes that there is more and more deliberations between different disciplines. “Through trial and error, companies have become wiser. I do see an improvement there, but things still go wrong very regularly, even between the different sub-disciplines in an electronics department. The major benefit of the course must be that mechanics are aware of the challenges in EMC, that they ask the right questions of their electronics colleagues, and that they close the door before the horse has bolted.”

Mechanics really don’t need to become EMC experts for this, Van Doorn emphasizes. “With a refresher course of one day you can overcome a lot of problems. It doesn’t take much time and it certainly will pay off. So, managers of mechanics departments, send your people and avoid expensive redesigns.”

This article is written by Alexander Pil, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.
Recommendation by former participants

By the end of the training participants are asked to fill out an evaluation form. To the question: 'Would you recommend this training to others?' they responded with a 8.3 out of 10.

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Entrepreneur lesson #3: Customer interest is no evidence of buying intent

One of the largest frustrations of startups trying to work with big enterprises is the enormous amount of false positives. Many startup founders have fallen into the trap of getting promising feedback from individuals from large companies and believe that they’re close to getting a deal in place. This positive feedback may continue for a long time, but the actual contract never materializes. There are many reasons why this happens, not the least that orchestrating an actual contract with an outside party is quite an uphill battle in many companies, but it’s a good reminder to make sure that, as a startup founder, you don’t allow your team to chase ghosts.

With some of the researchers I worked with I’ve experienced something similar. Some research results received enormous interest from companies, large and small, on industrial conferences to the point that we had hundreds of people in presentations and tons of positive feedback. When we then decided to commercialize the technology, the initial interest vaporized quickly and it turned out that although people were interested in the idea behind the technology, there was no willingness to actually buy the solution.

One major factor in all this is the notion of socially desirable behavior. When a startup founder talks to a potential customer, this customer tends to provide feedback along the lines of what the founder would like to hear. This is normal human behavior and one of the reasons why societies work well. If we always told everyone we meet exactly what we thought of them, there would be significantly higher levels of conflict and strife in the world. As a founder, though, you need to be cognizant of this and seek to ask questions that minimize the need for others to tell you what they think you’d like to hear.

Within the startup space, there tend to be two schools of thought. The first group is looking to get people to use their offering and to get to a large user base before thinking about monetizing. This group has a point in that you’re looking to minimize friction for adopting the offering, and paying for something that you don’t even know will help you is a significant hurdle for most. Also, if the offering is monetized indirectly, eg through advertising, in-app purchasing or freemium, the focus on growing the user base may well be the best way forward. The challenge is then often to fund the business until the monetization part starts to work.

The second group believes that buying intent and willingness to pay is an integral part of the validation of an innovative offering. That means that during the first stages of even talking to customers about the offering that you haven’t even built yet, you explicitly bring up price and payment terms to get feedback on that, too. Of course, what customers say can very well be, and often is, different from what they do, but their verbal feedback is at least an early signal. When there’s enough positive feedback and you decide to build an MVP, it’s then possible to test customers’ willingness to actually buy the service by offering the MVP for a fee.

'Verify buying intent as early as possible and based on actual customer behavior'

Typically, I recommend the startups I work with to focus on the second model, ie verify buying intent as early as possible and, where feasible, based on actual customer behavior. Especially with novel business models in established markets, this may not be the right answer, though. Several startups are exploring models where customers pay with their data. That’s fine, but it does require that you have a solid hypothesis on how you can use that data to monetize elsewhere. And, in general, the more complicated the business model and the larger the number of stakeholders, the harder it will be to build a viable business as more things can go wrong and more hypotheses about your business need to be true.

In the end, we all have limited resources and the goal for any startup should be to test the underlying hypotheses of the business as early and as cheaply as possible to minimize wasting time and money on things that don’t pan out. Killing an idea and pulling the plug is incredibly hard and figuring out when to do so is even harder, but the risk is that you keep wasting resources on a business that isn’t going anywhere. The opportunity cost of that can be enormous as it keeps you from moving on to a next business or pivot that turns out to be more promising.

For a variety of reasons, interest from potential customers is far from the same as buying intent. As an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur, confirming willingness to pay by the stakeholder group that you’re looking to monetize, ie the customer, is critical and generally best done as early as possible. This is advice that’s easily complicated by all kinds of realities surrounding the business, ranging from slow-moving B2B sales cycles to multi-sided markets, but ignoring the reality of a for-profit enterprise (that you need to make money to create a profit) is a surefire way to fail. As the famous business professor, Peter Drucker, said: the purpose of a business is to create a customer!

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Entrepreneur lesson #2: Build it and they’ll come is setting yourself up to fail

Entrepreneurs are, by definition, irrational optimists who have strong confidence in what they’re pursuing. Even if all of us can have bouts of doubt, entrepreneurs are managing these doubts and focus on executing on their convictions. The risk, however, is that you start to believe in your own convictions so hard that you fail to be responsive to outside input.

One of the hardest challenges in startups is the balance between building based on your conviction on what the world needs or is going to need and incorporating feedback from customers and the market. Only listening to what customers say will result in too small a delta compared to existing products. And if you don’t offer a 10x improvement in some dimension, there typically is too little incentive for potential customers to go through the pain of switching from whatever they’re using today.

On the other hand, ignoring input from the market and blindly building what you believe is needed is a sure way to fail. People aren’t going to buy from you because of the compelling story you tell. They only buy from you because your offering provides some significant benefit over alternative solutions. Entrepreneurs are by necessity rule breakers and, by and large, tend to ignore market input longer than what’s good for the business.

A complicating factor is that many startups aim to exploit some technology, standard, trend or regulation that has the potential to disrupt an existing business ecosystem. The disruption is often in the early stages, as others will already have jumped on the opportunity, and the startup is basically betting the farm on hitting the market with a sufficiently compelling offering right when the disruption is gaining momentum. That means that collecting relevant feedback from the market is impossible as there is no market yet.

This explains why, according to some research, the primary success factor of startups is timing: being at the right place at the right time. Not very satisfactory for people who try to develop predictable and repeatable patterns for startup formation but a reality that we all have to contend with. Whenever I ask entrepreneurs why some idea or startup failed, in a significant number of cases it’s some event or development completely outside the scope of the startup’s control that knocked the whole company off course.

In my experience, though, the common factor in all companies I was involved in that didn’t do so well is lack of sales. Sales cures all ails, the saying goes, and it really is the case. As Peter Drucker famously said, the purpose of a company is to create a customer. Failure to do so can of course lie in an insufficiently compelling offering, but as often, it’s failing to find the right customer for what you have to offer. The idea that many engineers have, ie that a good product sells itself, isn’t true at all and most certainly false for startups.

'Your initial customers may not at all be the right ones'

My main learning in this context is to make happy customers. Many companies fall into the trap of making customers happy. There’s an important distinction. In the latter case, you focus on the customers you have and try to make them happy. The problem is that your initial customers may not at all be the right ones. For instance, one company I worked with managed to secure a few very large customers who were then continuing to demand such amounts of dedicated attention that this consumed all R&D resources. As a consequence, the company was unable to expand to new clientele but had grown dependent on the revenue these few large customers brought in.

Making happy customers starts with defining the profile of your ideal customer. You then continue to sell to the potential customers fitting your profile. Any customer who, over time, proves to not be the right match for you, you may decide to fire. Or, at least, you don’t give in to requests that deviate you from the customer profile you’re looking to serve.

Being clear on the customer profile you’re looking to serve also helps in aiming to time a market disruption. Although most consider a disruption to be instantaneous, for those on the inside it’s clear that it’s a slow process with a few companies getting into the transition early and the majority following at a later point in time. Finding these early movers, making them your customers and then together with them experimenting your way through the disruption is one of the safest ways forward for a startup; it gives early feedback on the suitability of your offering and gets you ready for when the tornado hits, as Geoffrey Moore calls it.

Startups need to carefully balance a solid belief and confidence in the core idea behind the company and incorporating feedback from the market. Straying too far to either side is a recipe for failure. The best approach is to “make happy customers” rather than making customers happy. That allows you to find those early adopters and work with them. It still leaves you with the challenge of scaling to serve the larger market, but that’s a concern for a later time. If you don’t survive now, you’ll never have the challenge of scaling, so why bother worrying about that now?