Kamen: Innovation follows a different path

Staff -- Control Engineering, 5/1/2006

San Jose, CA—At the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley, attendees heard what it takes to innovate. Companies and developers need to follow a different path than the conventional product development schedule, which inherently is non-innovative, said Dean Kamen, entrepreneur, technology advocate, and inventor of the Segway Human Transporter.

In his keynote presentation, "Innovation: Rude Realities & Realistic Suggestions," Kamen put a down-to-earth touch on what it takes to come up with true product innovation. "Great technology alone rarely constitutes innovation," he said. Rather, true innovation follows a torturous, convoluted (nonlinear) path involving euphoria, disappointment, surprise—and even a dash of the miraculous.

Kamen founded Deka Research & Development Corp. Its mission is "to foster innovation and creativity while encouraging employees to question conventional thinking." Kamen also is involved in FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an initiative to inspire young people about participating in science and technology.

Also at the show:

• PERC Virtual machine from Aonix has been upgraded with full Java 5 language features like generics, annotations, type-safe enumerations, and the addition of Java SE (and other new libraries).
• Echelon Corp. showed its new Pyxos Embedded Control Network that gets down to device-level objects (or essentially the "atomic" level). Pyxos will be commercially available by year-end 2006.
• Kuka Controls displayed how its technology allows either of two real-time operating systems to coexist with Microsoft Windows XP on one processor without the need for OS modifications.
• Parvus Corp. showed new families of ruggedized mobile IP networking product (DuraMAR mobile access router) and embedded computer systems (DuraCOR rugged computer processing platform), among others. DuraMAR's design supports seamless mobile roaming among different wireless networks.