Out of In...novation

The true power of Innovation is not just the innovative idea, but what we as a society and an industry can extract out of that innovation. 

Innovation begets innovation and what comes out of amazing innovation is something beyond our imagination. I just watched "The Current War," a movie from 2017 on that tells the dramatic story of the cutthroat race between electricity titans Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse to determine whose electrical system would power the modern world. The flick reminded me of my rant from back in June 2008:

From My 10 Takeaways from ConnectivityWeek in Santa Clara, California, my takeaway #10:

Edison was right!  Westinghouse was wrong! Imagine if Edison had been successful, the fact that DC does not transmit well is an advantage not a disadvantage. It is much easier to generate locally. Imagine that if all the money that was spent on the electrical distribution grid and AC generation was spent on developing DC generation, storage, and renewable energy sources on location our buildings and homes would look more like space stations or Tesla and not conversion abortions we now have connected to a national umbilical cords the electrical grid who's environmental damage you can see from space. Just use Google earth to find the electrical grid damage done to get it to your house.

Our world has evolved to a digital world that is a Direct Current "DC" world. We greet this new DC digital world with the grids' AC powers' wasteful conversion and transmission losses because energy is cheap and inexhaustible? That was what Westinghouse and the politics of the time told us, plus the grid works well for controlling the vote and the people. To this AC power source now in our homes we add the wasteful conversion process to convert AC back to DC power with many tangled wires and copious power supplies to power a myriad of low use energy DC devices.  Can you imagine what Edison would do differently today if he had access to the completed innovation including the internet, cell phones, new battery tech and the LED to work with? Maybe global warming would not be so far advanced?

I sense a parallel to our place in time now to where politics, technology and software companies bigger than most countries with global control are clashing for control of the future. Unusual conclusions are occurring daily, none of which are the best solutions to fuel innovation.

LED technology was discovered in 1907 by British radio researcher and assistant to Guglielmo Marconi, Henry Joseph Round, while experimenting with silicon carbide and a cat's whisker. The timing was there but more innovation was required.

The point is, Innovation is not the end of an idea, it is the start.

In his 84 years, Thomas Edison acquired a record number of 1,093 patents (singly or jointly) and was the driving force behind such innovations as the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb and one of the earliest motion picture cameras. He also created the world's first industrial research laboratory.

Just like the communication industry that was founded with analog devices and a wire distribution system, our installed telephone pole and analog electronic assets became liabilities. Countries that did not have this wired distribution infrastructure were able to leapfrog us in cellular wireless networks that require little infrastructure and provide improved performance for a lower cost.

In many third world countries, cell phones are provided free and are used as the basis for cashless societies. Rapid evolution fed from applying the latest innovations.

Such will be the development of “off grid buildings” utilizing DC distribution. Communication and power will merge into common infrastructure freed from political control of the grid. The presence of the grid allows us to create a hybrid system that will provide a smooth transition to Edison's dream.

So our task is not just to Request Innovation but to control and understand the potential of the innovation and what we can extract out of Innovation. We need to envision where innovation will take us while ensuring the politics of how it gets implemented do not stall us, and also ensure that large players don’t retain total control of any new innovations.

This article by Raj Kosaraju writing on theinternetofthings.eu site discusses How data science is disrupting in every possible way  :

The time has come to be unfolded. The era of data-driven analytics, innovation, change, and decision-making has arrived and is disrupting businesses in most industries that will leverage data-driven strategies to innovate, compete and capture value from wide-ranging, deep, and real-time information across all sectors. The convergence of high volume data, even highly sophisticated algorithms with medium and large enterprises, and vast computational power while data itself will become increasingly commoditized, value is likely to accrue to the owners of scarce data, and storage has led to the greatest technological flux across industries.

This article from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Why AI Is the ‘New Electricity’, draws some interesting parallels:

Just as electricity transformed the way industries functioned in the past century, artificial intelligence — the science of programming cognitive abilities into machines — has the power to substantially change society in the next 100 years. AI is being harnessed to enable such things as home robots, robo-taxis and mental health chatbots to make you feel better.

So how to use AI in your company to help power innovation? Sudha Jamthe has some suggestions in this article, Bringing AI Innovation to your enterprise:

I have been thinking about the increased demand for innovation amidst the covid quarantines to offer the technologies needed to thrive in our remote access and social distanced lives. 2020 has been a testimonial to human resilience and adaptability. The isolation that comes work social isolation has led to leadership at an individual level though many might not see it that way when living alone separated from family and friends and working and doing all that we define as life, albeit remotely using a 2D screen.

Education is key to both understanding the latest innovations and then adopting, adapting and expanding them to beget even further innovation. How the pandemic is impacting Jobs, Training, and Education was a MondayAlive theme for November 30, and some our comments are edited below: 

Anto: Let's talk about jobs. We've been for quite a bit. What I'm detecting is there's a lot of disruption in the job market, likely in the next year. Maybe I should throw this back to Ken, you've kind of been observing this for quite a bit of time. I don't know how many decades but quite a few. Have you ever seen this sort of industry disruptive of job market? Which is both good or bad? Is that a good way of thinking about it?

Ken: I've never seen anything like it. Evolution occurred so quickly of the importance of our remote connections, we were pushing the edge but now it's become forefront and mainstream. Everybody is required to increase their technical and IoT skills. The one big advantage, of course we have is that we have available to us YouTube's and online training technology, which was always there. But we would watch one YouTube, but now we have to watch several YouTubes just to get a sense of what is going on. Because there's so much we need to learn. And part of what we're learning is just how to function in this new world of remote connection.

I find great strength in the view of the younger folks, and try to see it through their eyes. This we've got a few articles on being born connected. And it's just a different way of looking at stuff. We've all came to this industry and we learned controls, the internet, and then we learned IoT, which has always been a troweled on top of what we are doing. For the generations now in the job market, they grew up with this stuff. Clouds and Apps are their tools, they ask how else would you do this?. The next wave younger folks, the Zillennials grew up with a smartphone as a soother. So that's kind of a different twist. So the whole learning episode is not so much looking at our elders, as it is looking back at our younger folks and seeing what they're doing, watching the gamers and how that's drawn virtual thought forward. We're starting to see a lot of the large companies rising out of the video games, which is an interesting thought. So a lot of free thought, in some ways, it's a kinship to the birth of the DDC industry, I grew up with all of those folks. And they were very weird at the time. But then they became mainstream and started companies looking a lot like your :). 

I think what we'll see now is that the COVID generation, the born connected COVID generation will very quickly become the norm, self educating themselves and teaching us how to use the latest innovations. They understand that innovation is never done so they included it in their planning.

Here are a few articles that speak to the changes.

Future Building Operators  by Nicholas Waern:

Will the future building operators be OT-technicians? IT-people? Developers? The users? Or the building itself running AI?

As many people should know by now, I am obsessed with solving problems and I hate inventing the wheel more than necessary. That is why I have been working closer to AI-initiatives the last couple of years. And now that I’m working with Digital Twins and AI in parallel,  By making it easier for people to use AI everywhere… what will happen?

Marc Petock Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Lynxspring, Inc., writes this article In Honor of Alex Trebek  the longtime host of the gameshow Jeopardy:

So, what does this have to do with us? Nothing. It did, however, give me pause and think about our industry and what questions could be asked if there were a Built Environment /Building Control and Automation category on the show.  So, here are a few tidbits to remember in the “History of Building Automation” category…

In this "ControlTalk NOW" video we have a fun chat. Key quote from yours truly:  

Innovation is a timeless ingredient, a necessary part of our successful transformation, needed now more than ever.

In the 2015 film Steve Jobs, there’s a scene where Steve Wozniak asks Jobs, “What do you do? You’re not an engineer, you’re not a programmer, you can’t design anything. What do you actually do?” He didn’t understand what Jobs brought to the table. He saw value in building things and he clearly couldn’t see Jobs build anything.

But Steve Jobs did build things. He built a vision. He was one of the greatest product managers of all time. Jobs did a great job extracting out of innovation his visions. We need to look for visionaries in our companies. So step away from your hectic life. Open your mind, get out of your head, educate yourself on the innovation that is falling on what it was you use to do and imagine what you can get Out of In...novation.