Manufacturing Leadership Journal

ARLY IN JANUARY, THE ‘FIRST’ INITIATIVE DESIGNED TO INspire young people to get more involved in science and technology will host its annual kick-off meeting near Manchester, NH. Established by serial U.S. inventor Dean Kamen in 1989, FIRST’s multiple youth challenges and school activities range from robotics competitions to junior LEGO leagues.

In 2017 the group expects to attract 46,000 teams, almost a million students, 230,000 mentors, coaches and judges, 3,700 corporate sponsors, $50 million in college scholarships, and stage over 2,600 events across 90 countries.

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For Kamen, inspiring that next generation about the potential of technology is a personal passion. Ever since he left college to start up his own medical products company, AutoSyringe, he’s nurtured a heartfelt belief that solving many of the world’s most critical problems depends on a fresh wave of young inventors able to harness the power of advanced science and rapidly developing technologies in new ways.

With over 400 patents to his name, Kamen’s own record of inventive achievements is legion – from early personal insulin pumps, to advanced prosthetic devices for injured soldiers in cooperation with DARPA, to the Segway transporter, to the iBOT robotic wheelchair, to a radically new approach to water purification with the highly portable Slingshot distillation system that can deliver

1,000 liters of pure water a day in remote and hostile locations.

In our latest Dialogue with an industry
thought-leader, Kamen talks to Executive
Editor Paul Tate about the changing nature
of invention and innovation in a digital world,
how better cooperation between individual
inventors and major industrial corporations
can help transform the future, and about
the importance of helping young people to
grasp the opportunities new technologies and
materials create to help solve some of the
world’s most difficult problems.

Q: What excites you most about your role?

A: I guess what excites me most is a couple of things. I love technical challenges, but working hard at something that has no benefit to anybody else, to me, is wasting time.

I like to look around the world and think about some real need and then imagine how I could solve that need to make peoples’ lives better. I can go off and work really hard at something I enjoy doing – problem solving – by playing with and understanding advanced technologies, but always keeping in mind that if it works, millions of people will get clean water, or stand up and look their husband or wife in the eye, or do their own dialysis at home in their bedroom.

So I work at these things knowing it can help people, it’s a great intellectual challenge, and if you can do it in a way that’s scalable, you can make it your career and get paid to do it so you never need to get a job!

Q: Do you think the whole process of in-
vention and innovation is changing in
today’s world?

A: I think the process of both invention and innovation are changing very quickly, and

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