Are We There Yet? Innovators Wait for Technology To Catch Up With Their Big Ideas
Innovation is not just about coming up with a better way of doing something and then racing to get something to market. Sometimes it's as much a waiting game.
Take, for example, Australia-based Alive Technologies Pty. Ltd., one of 12 finalists for this year's Asian Innovation Awards, presented by The Wall Street Journal Asia in association with Global Entrepolis@Singapore. The awards honor people and companies who improve quality of life or business productivity.
Founder Bruce Satchwell wanted to take health-monitoring products out of the hospital and into the hands of the patients. Why should such devices, wondered the 51-year-old Mr. Satchwell, be so expensive, sit in wards and clinics and have to be manned by trained staff? Recovering patients would be freed from having to visit hospitals for regular checks, and disasters might be averted if patients were aware of a problem before things got too serious. Not to mention the market for such products among a population growing increasingly aware of the need to stay healthy and looking for ways to measure that.
The key to making health monitoring mobile and affordable, he realized, was to leverage a technology that was in the hands of nearly everyone: the cellphone. "I've had a long history of designing telemedicine products," he says, "but we saw an opportunity in terms of the growth of wireless, Internet and mobile devices, and of Bluetooth as an enabling technology."
Great idea, but the dream took a while to catch up with reality. "Bluetooth was still evolving," he says. "And we had the issue where very few mobile phones had it installed... We really had to wait until we saw there was a need and the enabling technology was there."
Now, with Bluetooth standard in most phones, and other communication technologies like WiFi spreading and prices falling, Mr. Satchwell's dream is coming true. His company's Alive Monitor -- a navy blue plastic gadget no larger than an MP3 music player -- enables the user to measure not just heart performance, but the user's position and activity, logging the data and, where necessary, transmitting it via Bluetooth to a cellphone. The cellphone then uses either the mobile network or, where available, WiFi, to transmit that data to the doctor.
GeoVector Corp. also found itself playing a waiting game. The company, originally headquartered in New Zealand and now with offices in both Auckland and San Francisco, saw a disconnect between the information available to people in cyberspace -- the Internet -- and that available to them in real space -- the physical world. On the Web we're used to finding out what we want to know about something by clicking on it, whether it's an image, a word, or anything that is hyperlinked to the underlying information. Why, the company's founders wondered, couldn't we do something in the real world, "where objects become items you can click on," says Arron Judson, vice president of international operations.
Other companies had seen the same potential, but those solutions involved physically adding labels or tags that could be read by radio frequency identification scanners or Bluetooth-enabled phones, all of which were somewhat cumbersome, required a lot of manual labor and meant the user had to be close to the object in question.
GeoVector was a bit ahead of not only its rivals, but the technology. The company had to wait for cellphones to catch up by incorporating two technologies that are now becoming commonplace -- GPS, or Global Positioning System, where a device in your hand connects to at least three satellites to give you a pretty good idea of where you are, and a digital version of the good old-fashioned compass, which will tell you which way you're pointing. Harnessing those two technologies makes it possible for a cellphone to act as a kind of water diviner: Point it down a street and GeoVector will know where you are and which street you're pointing at to within a few meters. From there it can now start telling you the closest Japanese restaurant, which apartments in the street are available for rent, or details about a nearby landmark.
With millions of Japanese phones now having both of these technologies aboard, it's been a natural first market for GeoVector, which launched with the KDDI network in January. After 10 years of development it's been a long wait. "Our biggest obstacle," says Mr. Judson, has been "the technology catching up to our idea."
In the case of Veredus Laboratories Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, it was about innovation shortening a lethal gap: The delay in testing for the lethal H5N1 strain of the avian flu virus -- of five days or more -- has been a serious drag on combating the disease and preventing it from spreading. Veredus' first innovation was to speed up this process by not waiting for signs of the body's responses to the infection, but by hunting for earlier clues, such as RNA, or ribonucleic acid, whose behavior may indicate a problem before the body starts to produce more visible proteins. "From Day One we can see," says Rosemary Tan, chief executive officer of Veredus, "because the RNA is the first thing to go into your body."
Another approach to innovation is to plunder from other fields. Daniel Cheng, managing director of Dunwell Engineering Co., encountered only resistance when he tried to convince those involved in treating industrial wastewater that the same principles of filtering through a vibrating membrane could be applied to treating much heavier lubricants used to reduce friction in machinery parts, whether they're in vehicles, factories or power plants. "Even the inventor did not believe it would work for oil," recalls Mr. Cheng, so "they don't want to sell it to me. It's not going to work so why bother?"
Seeing a way to cut energy costs and produce better quality re-refined oil, he eventually persuaded them, and invented a method that reduced the cost of building a lubricant-recycling plant to about $10 million from around $80 million.
Such cross-fertilizing of ideas worked too for Franz Konstantin Fuss, associate professor at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University. After a career as a medical doctor in Vienna and Glasgow, Mr. Fuss had become something of an expert on sports equipment and orthopedic implants. So when he started reading about a new landmine-resistant shoe, he was sure he could do better. All the products and patents he could find couldn't guarantee that the wearer would not lose a limb if a landmine exploded. "I thought I would solve this problem completely differently," he says.
He and his Singaporean co-inventor Ming Adin Tan have since come up with their own answer -- a polymer platform sole under which are six spiders' legs, each one containing a small metal detector and a retractable lower half. If the detector senses metal, the retractable half is released, allowing the other five legs to take the weight of the wearer so the mine is not detonated. How does Mr. Fuss feel about the responsibility of developing a tool for such a dangerous occupation? "You can never guarantee the shoe is 100% safe," he says in his disheveled office. "But if you think about probabilities you shouldn't even drive a car."
The old cliché about mothers and invention is a cliché because it's true: Innovation is usually triggered by a need. GeoVector's cellphone diviner, for example, came out of an idea spawned by sailing, when laptop inventor and GeoVector CEO John Ellenby realized that captains on two vessels could not easily share what they saw no matter how near they were to each other. The idea of being able to tag landmarks seen through binoculars so they could be noted by others grew into tagging physical landmarks so they could be found through a cellphone.
This necessity and invention is probably why most inventors are serial innovators: They tend to keep dreaming up new ideas. Extreme examples of this can be found in India, where Prem Singh Saini, a man in his early 30s, has designed nearly 100 different devices, from a "low-cost, mobile phone-operated gun" to a solar-operated rickshaw to an "automatic barking system for substituting dogs."
Mr. Saini dropped out of school after his teachers failed to provide acceptable answers to such questions as "why does the earth rotate?" and has since been fiddling with electronics in his cluttered workshop in Haryana. Now he's solving more prosaic problems, such as farmers having to wait in the fields for power to be restored so they could turn on their pumps.
Mr. Saini came up with a simple solution: switch on and off the electricity -- and thereby their water pumps -- remotely via mobile phone. This not only helps the farmers, but also assists the local electricity providers, who can deter theft of electricity by activating and deactivating substations from their exchange office. His motivation? "Life is very short so we should do something new for the coming generations."
Mr. Saini's inventions are all reactions to problems he sees around him. And the solutions use materials he can find easily. U.S. computer chip giant Intel Corp. also took these two approaches, merging local ingenuity in India with some of its own materials and engineering skills.
Deploying its own ethnographic researchers to the wilds of rural India, Intel learned that the country's ubiquitous kiosks needed a hardy computer designed for places where power cuts, dust, monsoons and poor Internet connections are daily facts of life. "The more basic, the better," says Mark Beckford, head of Intel's Beijing-based Emerging Markets Platform Group.
The Community PC looks a lot like any other PC, but it incorporates features that make it last longer and work better in such an environment: casing designed to withstand dust, varying temperatures and high humidity; a power supply that can switch between AC and DC, can connect to a car or truck battery, and has the ability to charge, and use, an external battery. The Community PC can connect to the Internet using a telephone line or, where no line exists, a special wireless connection.
It may not sound that sophisticated, but Intel has filed several patents related to the PC's design, and Mr. Beckford says many of the features developed for the PC are finding their way into more mainstream products. Not least: a single button on the front of the unit that, when necessary, will restore the computer's hard drive to an earlier point in the event of a crash, power outage or other disaster. Groundbreaking? Maybe not, but every computer could do with one of those.
This approach -- of clustering innovations to create something that is larger than the sum of its parts -- is visible in another Singapore finalist: the Infocomm Development Authority, which has harnessed the Internet to simplify and standardize the way that government, business and the individual interact.
Usually a Singaporean traveling abroad, say, would be required to register with the appropriate government departments separately, not to mention buying an airline ticket and checking up on any relevant health advisories about the place she might be visiting. Now, using a system called GWS-X, all this can be done via the travel agent. GWS-X acts as a kind of rapid Web-based clearing house for government information, not only between agencies but with the private sector. For the public it removes the need to provide the same information to different departments and reduces the wait for government agencies to deliver information to them.
This centralizing of data is likely to bring benefits to a country as small as Singapore, but a country like India has found success by moving in the other direction, at least in something like maternity care. The state of Gujarat has tried to tackle the extensive problem of maternal and infant deaths among its poorer communities by sharing some of the burden with the private sector. Maternity services in five districts are outsourced to private gynecologists, who receive funds to cover, say, 100 infant deliveries for mothers living below the poverty line.
As things get smaller, innovation is often about packing more into less space. China's Suntech Power Co., for example, has mastered a way to build solar cells onto thinner, cheaper silicon wafers. This can only be done if the process can keep breakage of the thinner wafers to a minimum during the production process. Suntech has managed to keep this rate below 2% -- a respectable figure in the industry. This in turn helps reduce cost -- the biggest impediment to wider adoption of renewable energy.
Rakesh Mathur pondered a related conundrum as he walked the streets of Seattle and found that despite being in one of the world's technology hot spots, he couldn't actually find one. Unable to find broadband Internet access for his smartphone he and Webaroo Technologies Pvt. Ltd. co-founder Bruce Husick explored whether it was possible to capture the best of the World-Wide Web and squash it into a phone so the user was not constrained by connections, or lack of them. The trick was to weed out the stuff users were unlikely to ever need so that what was left fit on the average smartphone's memory card. The result: a sort of Internet search without being connected to the Internet, achieved by compressing the Web's million odd gigabytes into 256-megabyte "Web packs" of specific content, tailored to your interests.
Motorola Inc. faced a size problem when it wanted to put the world's first natural-sounding talking dictionary into its cellphones. The company quickly realized there wasn't the space. The problem: most cellphones still have a relatively small memory, and while ordinary text files -- contacts, calendars, SMS text messages -- don't take up much space, voice recordings do.
Somehow Huang Jian-Cheng, director of Motorola's China Research Center, and his team had to find a way of compressing the voice recordings of pronunciations of some 100,000 words in Mandarin, Cantonese and English into a file not much bigger than two megabytes -- about half the size of a single MP3 song file. One approach would have been to include a speech synthesizer -- basically a robot reading the words -- but they quickly decided that would be too, well, robotic.
Instead, they sliced up each word into segments. When this is usually done each word is broken down into its constituent parts -- called phonemes -- but the team realized that wasted space and didn't sound so good. So instead where possible they carved them up into as large slices as possible: "tion" at the end of an English word rather than "ti" and "on," for example. "The longer, the higher the quality," says Mr. Huang.
Sometimes innovation is incremental -- as simple as making something big fit into something small.
奇思妙想 不开技术进步
布鲁斯?赛奇维尔(Bruce Satchwell)希望健康监测设备能走出医院，进入寻常病人家。现年51岁的赛奇维尔想知道，为什么这类医疗设备只能在病房和诊所中使用，并且只能由专业人员操作。康复中的病人往往不按时回医院作定期检查，而等他们感觉情况不对再去医院时，可能为时已晚。如果病人能在家中随时了解自己的身体情况，这种灾难或许能够避免。家用健康监测设备还有另一个大市场，那就是随着人们健康意识的增强，许多人都希望拥有能方便监测自己身体状况的设备。
相关报导
? 表彰那些改善我们生活的创新者
? 入围企业看重身份
赛奇维尔意识到，要使健康监测设备可以随身携带，关键是能借助一种人人都具备使用条件的技术手段，他想到了手机。“我多年来一直从事远程诊断设备的设计工作，”赛奇维尔说。“而无线通讯、互联网、移动通讯设备以及蓝牙技术的发展则为我们开辟了一条新思路。”
这是个伟大的设想，但当初却因时机不够成熟而未能立刻变为现实。赛奇维尔说：“蓝牙技术的完善有个过程，具备蓝牙功能的手机一度很少......我们那时不得不耐心等待市场需求的出现以及相关技术的完善。”
现在，随着多数手机以及无线保真(WiFi)设备等其他通讯工具都具备了蓝牙功能，加上产品价格的不断下降，赛奇维尔的这一梦想正在一步步变为现实。他的公司开发出了一种名为Alive Monitor的健康监测装置。这是一个与MP3音乐播放器大小相仿的海蓝色塑料盒子，它不仅能监测携带人的心脏状况，还能追踪病人的方位、步伐、速度和高度，并把监测到的数据随时纪录下来。一旦需要，这个装置就可通过蓝牙功能将这些数据传送到携带人的手机上。手机随后便可或通过移动通讯网或借助无线保真技术将数据传送到医生那里。
新西兰企业GeoVector Corp.也发现自己要有足够的耐心。这家目前在奥克兰和旧金山分别设有办事处的公司发现，人们在网络世界中查询信息时可以鼠标一点信手拈来，而在现实世界中却做不到这一点。该公司负责国际业务的副总裁阿伦?贾德森(Arron Judson)说：“我们的创业元老们因而就想，为什么不能在现实世界中做到这一点呢？要是电钮一按就知道所找东西的行踪该有多好。”
其他公司其实早就有了类似想法，但它们的解决方案是给要找的东西贴上标签，然后人们借助无线扫描仪或蓝牙手机就能找到它们，但这类方法太费事，需要许多手工劳动，而且被搜寻物品离搜寻人还不能太远。
GeoVector想出的办法不仅领先于其竞争对手，还超前于当时的技术现实。这家公司不得不等待两项技术的诞生，其一是全球定位系统(GPS)，它能使你手机中的一个装置与至少三颗卫星建立起联系，从而使你随时获悉自己所处的确切位置，其二是数字式指南针，它能显示你所指方向的确切方位。具备了这两种技术手段的手机便可以发挥类似水下探物仪的功能。在街道上随手一点， GeoVector就能知道你所处的确切位置，以及离你最近的是哪条街。此后它就可以告诉你离你最近的日式餐馆在哪里，你所处那条街上有哪些公寓正对外招租，还能告知你近旁地标性建筑的详细情况。
鉴于日本已经有成百上千万部手机具备了这两项技术，GeoVector最先在日本市场上大显身手就很自然了。该公司于今年1月与KDDI通讯公司合作推出了这一实物搜索服务，为了这一天，GeoVector足足等待了10年。贾德森说：“我们遇到的最大障碍是，技术进步赶不上我们的思维创新。”
至于新加坡企业Veredus Laboratories Pte. Ltd.，它则是通过创新赢得了宝贵的时间。以往检测H5N1亚型高致病性禽流感病毒需要5天以上的时间，如此长的检测时间对于人们及时防止这一病毒的扩散是十分不利的。 Veredus的第一项创新是加快检测速度，通过检测核糖核酸(RNA)值等生理指标，现在不必等到人体对检测试剂产生反应即可得出检测结果。该公司首席执行长Rosemary Tan说，现在当天就能出检测结果，因为感染病毒后人体最先出现变化的生理指标就是RNA值。
另一种创新思路是“他山之石可以攻玉”。当正昌科技有限公司(Dunwell Engineering Co.)的董事总经理郑文聪(Daniel Cheng)试图让从事工业废水处理的专业人士相信用振动膜过滤废水的原理也适用于处理废弃润滑油时，他听到的是一片反对声。
郑文聪回忆说：“甚至这一技术的发明人也不相信它能用于处理废弃润滑油。他们都不想把相关产品卖给我。既然不会起作用还费那事做什么呢？”
但郑文聪坚信这是一种既可降低能源成本又可生产更高质量再生润滑油的方法，他最终说服了那些人，并想出了一个办法，让建造一座废弃润滑剂回收加工厂的成本从8,000万美元降低到了大约1,000万美元。
这种触类旁通的情况也发生在了新加坡南洋理工大学(Nanyang Technological University)副教授弗朗兹?康斯坦丁?法斯(Franz Konstantin Fuss)的身上。在维也纳和格拉斯哥行医一段时间后，法斯某种程度上已经成了运动设备和骨科植入材料方面的专家。所以当他读到有关一种新型反地雷鞋的材料时，他确信自己可以发明出更好的同类产品。他所知道的现有反地雷鞋及相关专利都不能确保地雷爆炸时穿鞋人的肢体不受损伤。法斯说：“我认为我将以完全不同的方式解决这一问题。”
法斯和南洋理工大学研究生Ming Adin Tan发明的是一种可防止地雷爆炸的反地雷鞋。这种鞋有六个支脚，每个都包含一个金属探测器和一个螺线管。一旦探测器感应到金属，螺线管就分离这个支脚的下部，人体的全部重量就会由剩余的五个支脚分担，这样该支脚就会不向地面施加任何力量，因此也就防止了地雷的爆炸。对于为从事如此危险工作的人发明一种防护用具，法斯作何感想呢？他在自己凌乱的办公室中说道：“你永远无法保证这种鞋是100%安全的。但如果你整天总想着发生危险的可能，你甚至都不应该开车了。”
“需求是创新之母”这种说法早已成了陈词滥调，但它却是事实。例如，GeoVector通过手机搜寻物体的想法就来自于航海实践，GeoVector的首席执行长约翰?艾伦比(John Ellenby)意识到，航行中的两艘船不管彼此靠得多么近，双方的船长要交流各自都看到了些什么也不是件容易的事。正因为当初有了给一方从望远镜中看到的标志性景物作标记，从而使另一方知道你具体说的是哪个物体这一想法，这才有了现在给地标性建筑作标记，以便人们能够通过手机找到它们的做法。
发明灵感来自现实需求这一特性恐怕正是多数发明者都能不断创新的原因。他们脑子里不断有新想法冒出来。这方面的极端例子出现在印度，那里一位叫普雷姆?辛哈?赛尼(Prem Singh Saini)的30岁出头的年轻人已经设计了100多种不同的装置，从“低成本移动电话遥控枪”到“太阳能黄包车”，再到“可替代狗叫的自动吠叫系统，”不一而足。
在老师不能令人满意地回答诸如“地球为什么旋转”这类问题后，赛尼就不再上学了，此后他便开始在自己位于印度哈里亚纳邦的那间小作坊里摆弄起了电器。他现在致力于解决的是更贴近生活的问题，比如说，如果农夫浇地浇到一半突然停电了，那他就必须在地里一直等到供电恢复，否则到时他还得回去打开水泵的开关。
赛尼找出了一个简单的解决办法：通过移动电话对水泵开关进行远程遥控。这不仅帮了农夫的忙，还为当地供电部门提供了帮助，后者可以借助这种远程遥控方式在中央配电室里随时接通或者切断各个变电站的电源，从而遏止偷电行为的发生。赛尼搞科学发明的动机是什么？“生命非常短暂，所以我们应该为子孙后代做一些前人没做过的事，”他说。
赛尼的发明都是为了解决他身边出现的问题，而发明所用的材料也是他可以方便得到的。美国电脑芯片巨头英特尔公司(Intel Corp.)在印度的做法也体现了这两个特点。它把自己的某些材料以及工程技术与当地人的创造性结合了起来。
通过派遣自己的研究人员到印度乡村进行实地考察，英特尔公司了解到，在印度偏远乡村地区放置在网络信息亭的社区电脑要能经受得住断电、灰尘、潮湿以及上网时常掉线的考验。英特尔驻北京的新兴市场平台部门负责人马克?贝克福特(Mark Beckford)说，越简单越好。
虽然社区电脑的外形与其他个人电脑很相似，但其内部设计却使它在上述恶劣环境中比一般电脑更耐用、更好用： 这种电脑专门配有防尘、隔热和防潮的护罩；这种电脑可以交直流两用，接上轿车或卡车的电池也可以用，既能用外部电池驱动还能给电池充电。这种社区电脑可以通过电话线上网，而在没有电话线的地方通过一种特殊的无线连接方式也可以上网。
这些功能听上去可能并不复杂，但英特尔公司已经申请了好几项与这款电脑有关的专利，贝克福特说许多专为这款电脑设计的功能也适用于更主流的产品。比如说设在该款电脑正面的一个按钮，当电脑遭受撞击、遭遇断电或出现其他故障后，按下这一按钮可使电脑的硬盘回复到遭遇故障前的状态。这或许算不上什么突破性成就，但可贵的是这些创新适用于所有电脑。
这种通过集成创新实现1+1大于2的创新方式在另一个新加坡入选项目──新加坡信息沟通发展局(Infocomm Development Authority)的发明上也有体现。该机构通过互联网使政府、企业和个人之间打交道的方式实现了简化和标准化。
举例来说，要到海外旅行的新加坡人通常需要向好几个不同的政府部门登记备案，而购买机票以及查询有关其出访目的国的健康提示又是一件麻烦事。现在，通过一个名为GWS-X的系统，所有这些都能通过旅行社来完成了。GWS-X实际上是一个政府信息的网上交流平台，不仅不同的政府部门可以通过它交流信息，政府部门和私人之间也可通过它相互交流。它使公众不必再向不同的政府部门提供相同的信息，也缩短了他们等待政府信息的时间。
这种集中处理方式可以使新加坡这样的小国受益，而通过反其道而行之印度这样的大国也获得了成功，至少在母婴护理方面是如此。印度古吉拉特邦为了解决其贫穷落后地区产妇和婴儿死亡率高的问题，开始向私人部门寻求帮助。该邦的五个地区已将孕、产妇护理工作外包给了私人妇科医生，比如说，如果一名私人妇科医生承担了100名贫困线以下孕妇的接生工作，他就能从政府获得一笔资金。
谈到把东西做小，创新往往意味着将更多的东西放置在更小的空间内。例如，中国的尚德太阳能电力有限公司(Suntech Power Co.)就掌握了用更薄、更廉价太阳能芯片来生产太阳能电池的方法。尽管在减少芯片厚度的同时会增加芯片的破损量，但尚德公司的芯片破损率却能控制在2%以下这一令同行 慕的水平。这样就降低了太阳能电池的生产成本，而高成本是推广可再生能源的最大障碍。
拉科什?马泽尔(Rakesh Mathur)漫步在西雅图街头时思考的也是一个与之类似的难题。他发现，尽管这里是全世界的技术热点之一，他却找不到一个上网的地方。由于无法使自己的智能电话接入宽带互联网，马泽尔与和他一同创办Webaroo Technologies Pvt. Ltd.的布鲁斯?哈斯克(Bruce Husick)开始考虑，是否可以把互联网上的最精华内容压缩到一部电话里，这样人们就不必为想上网查信息却找不到上网的地方发愁了。他们想出的窍门是，将人们不大可能用得上的网上信息清除出去，而剩下的有用信息就可以被普通智能电话的存储卡装下了。其结果是，通过将互联网上数百万G的信息根据不同用户的个人需要精简压缩成256兆的精选内容，人们就可以在不接入互联网的情况下实现网上搜索了。
当摩托罗拉公司(Motorola Inc.)打算把世界上首部自然声语音字典装入手机时遇到了文件太大的难题。多数手机的存储容量仍然太小，虽然通讯录、日历和短信等普通文本文件不会占用太大的存储空间，但语音文件的存储空间占用量却很大。
摩托罗拉中国研究中心的负责人黄建成和他领导的团队需要找出一个将10万个左右单词的中文普通话、广东话和英文读音录音压缩成一个2兆多文件的方法，这个文件的大小只有一个MP3单曲音乐文件的一半左右。办法之一是给手机加装一个语音合成器，从而以人工智能方式读出这些单词，但他们很快意识到这种方法的人工智能化程度太高了。
他们选择了将每个单词分解成几小部分的方式。采用这一做法时人们通常是将单词分解成几个音素，但黄建成的研究团队意识到这样做太浪费手机的存储空间且还原出来的声音也不够好。他们最终决定，要尽可能降低每个单词的分解量，例如，对于以“tion”结尾的英文单词，他们在进行单词分解时就将tion作为一个整体保留下来，而不再将它进一步分解成“ti”和“on”两部分。黄建成说，单词被分解成的部分越少，还原出来的读音质量就越高。
有时候创新就是“把东西做大一点试试”，其思路就像“削足适履”那么简单。
Jeremy Wagstaff
