Over-Equipped Engineers can’t Innovate!

Out of nowhere, a prodigy sprouts up from Sierra Leone, uses scrap thrown in the dustbin and makes an FM Transmitter out of it. How on earth was he supposed to understand the working of FM until taking the B.Tech 4^th Semester Course on Advanced Signal Processing? You might say Google, but then I say Sierra Leone. Forget Internet. Or if you are one of those smart kids who googled FM in the 6^th grade, to you I’d say that the architecture on your left is what a Transmitter looks like, and this guy made it from dustbin scrap!

India is predominantly coming out as a warehouse of engineering colleges at a rate of one college per lane per city per state per month. We, the college graduates are doing a very good job at working in the MNCs and making other’s innovations successful. We also do a decent job at making top innovation around the world go viral on facebook! Innovations done by others, do inspire us, but for the amount of resources and opportunities showered upon us to innovate, it is shameful that we are not. I can think of two reasons for the students from the premiere engineering colleges not innovating.

We have too many resources to innovate.

Being over equipped with tools is a big hindrance to innovation. A tool restricts your mind in thinking beyond the known applications. You must do the wrong thing in the wrong way to do the right thing in the right way. An ice cream spoon is one such example. If you use a flat spoon to scoop ice cream, the amount of force you’d end up applying for a given quantity would be much more than that with a hollow hemi-spherical spoon. Watch the video below to understand what the prodigy did when he could not find a power cable and battery. Its too hard to innovate in the state of the art workshops in the premiere research labs of our country.

We have too much knowledge to innovate.

“Don’t take gravity too seriously,” I am sure that’s what the Wright brothers would have told each other. You either know too much to not think of a problem as a problem or you know too much to reason out and shun away an innovative idea as a childhood fantasy. Too much knowledge makes you rigid and incapable of thinking something new. With a blanket of theorems and hypothesis wrapped around your body you succumb to the heat of known facts. Does it really take a Galileo to declare earth round?