Engineering innovation highlights 2006 Congress

Benedict Bahner
ASME News Online

CHICAGO — Innovation was the topic that permeated the technical programs and special events that made up the 2006 ASME International Congress and Exposition here last month.

The Congress, which drew 3,000 engineering professionals to the Chicago Hilton and Towers from Nov. 5–10, featured more than 2,100 technical presentations and 250 committee meetings — many of which addressed the conference's theme of encouraging innovation within ASME and the engineering profession.

ASME President Terry Shoup stressed the need to make innovation a Society priority during his introduction of the keynote speaker at Congress last month.

Nowhere at the conference was this more of a focus than during the keynote presentation, "The Google Story: Success Driven by Innovation," which was given by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David A. Vise.

In introducing Vise, ASME President Terry Shoup asked ASME members in the audience to make innovation a "Society priority." Innovation, he said, was "a topic that is of the utmost importance to each of us as individuals and especially to ASME as an organization."

Earlier this year, Shoup continued, IBM conducted a global study on innovation. One of the conclusions reached at the end of the study was that "the inherent nature of innovation has changed today. It's no longer some great invention. It is not about the individual. It is many individuals. It's multidisciplinary. It's global. It's collaborative."

Shoup added that ASME's strategic management sector agreed with IBM's findings. In its recent environmental scanning process, which identified areas of opportunities for ASME and the profession, the strategic management sector recommended that "we make innovation a Society priority," and that we become a "facilitator of innovation networks," Shoup said. "The new ASME can be a key player in promoting multidisciplinary collaboration on a global scale. The new ASME has the potential to foster an innovative culture in the profession, to support learning, and to advocate for the resources needed to create progress."

During his keynote speech, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David A Vise pointed to Google as a case study in successful innovation.

During the keynote that followed Shoup's comments, Vise, author of the book "The Google Story," discussed the role of innovation as it applied to the success of the Internet giant. Google believed, for instance, that the size of project team was an important component in how creative and effective it would be. According to Google, he said, the optimal size of a project team was either three or five. The number should be small, so that everyone on the team would feel included. The number should also be odd so that voting on how to proceed on the project wouldn't result in a deadlock, he said.

"It takes an odd number of people to innovate," Vise added. "Innovation also requires speed and traction." He noted that in that spirit of innovation, Google co-founder Larry Page routinely takes new ideas presented by the company's technologists and puts them into the site's beta-testing phase before the technologies have been perfected.

Google also provides its employees with something it calls "20 Percent Time" — one day a week where technologists can work on something that interests them personally. Innovations resulting from 20 Percent Time have included G-Mail and Google News.

In addition, the company offers its employees three free meals a day, gives them access to washers and dryers, and lets them bring pets to work. "All of these keep people working into the night," Vise pointed out.

Just after the end of the keynote session, the excited crowd went off to explore the Exposition floor.

Immediately following the keynote, Congress attendees experienced engineering innovation firsthand at the Exposition. The show floor featured more than 30 exhibitors, including Autodesk, Comsol, MSC Software, National Instruments, and Veeco Instruments. Engineering publishers at the Exposition included ASME Technical Publications, Begell House, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, Taylor & Francis Group, and Wiley.

The ASME Pavilion on the exhibit floor offered visitors an opportunity to meet staff and ASME volunteers from areas including Codes and Standards, Communications, Institutes, ASME.ORG, the ASME Foundation, ASME Solutions, the Society's European office, and Membership.

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