all right thank you very much uh thank you for being here thank you to the organizers for uh having me here today I want to talk to you today uh about three topics uh creativity Innovation and Entrepreneurship we hear a lot about these three different terms and I want to give you my thoughts my definitions and a little bit about what we can do in these three different areas do we think about creativity we think about creativity sometimes also here called ideation when we think about Innovation we think about coming up with something new well that's also creativity we think about entrepreneurship we think about acting on an innovation and so to me I've tried to display that pictorially here where we start off with creativity and then we move to Innovation and then to entrepreneurship and the way in the reason I've represented it this way is because to me creativity is an essential part of innovation Innovation is an essential part of Entrepreneurship and so that's why I represent it in these three circles like this here so what is creativity sometimes you'll hear ideation creativity a whole bunch of different terms but it's essentially coming up with a new idea it can be a new design it can be a new artifact it can be a new uh piece of of Art right it could be several different things but it does not have to address a need so if you look at the U.S patent trade office you'll see a whole bunch of different patents there some of which people have capitalized on they found them to be Innovative they've taken that novelty and they've made something out of it and a lot of them are just there and they've gone no further Now by definition a patent has to be novel so all these patents are novel but not all of them have been acted on not all of them have been reduced to practice well in theory they need to be able to show that they're reduced for practice but are they actually reduced to practice and address a need how can you be creative there's a lot of different ways to to think about generating ideas being creative and creativity when I was undergraduate engineering student the way to generate new ideas was brainstorming a colleague of mine Jonathan Weaver from the University of Detroit Mercy says brainstorming is dead I tell my students brainstorming is dead well I don't believe it's truly dead but there's so many different ways for us to generate ideas today that brainstorming is just one little tool in our toolkit what is brainstorming well in my day brainstorming was you'd go off to a little corner maybe you'd have a group of you and you'd think really hard you know I always thought of that sculpture you know with the guy thinking that was brainstorming all right um were there rules you could set up some rules if you wanted to but you know just brainstorming you were supposed to know what that meant and ideas magically popped into your brain turns out that there are some different tools and techniques that we can think about to be creative to come up with new ideas one of the things I like to do I tell my students all the time is to use existing information there's a whole bunch of things already out there I'm a visual learner so I like to visualize things I like to um look at the literature things like that there um I like to take things apart so for example we take a look at this nice stool and see it has four legs to support whoever's standing there it's really neat wire here I wonder what is that wire for and so what if I was to take that apart and take that thing out you know take that thing off what happens can I figure out how to put this thing together myself can I reverse engineer it and take it apart and then while taking it apart or maybe while I'm putting it back together I can improve upon that and so that's one way to be creative take it apart look at how it works look at how it functions and then improve upon that I like to surf the web I like to look at trade magazines I look at like to look at the big book which is a literally big book with a bunch of different parts and machines and things and I like to think about how do other areas use these Technologies things that are simple like moving something from one point to another I'm in biomedical engineering I deal with biological things and medical devices and stuff like that there but I can think about a construction site and what if we need to move a big pile of dirt from one point to a next when we think about the backhoe we think about how does that work how does that arm work is there something I can use like that in my medical device maybe there is maybe there isn't but that's one way of looking at how other areas are accomplishing similar tasks um think about how nature does it the classic example is velcro man was walking in the Alps one day notice the Burrs from the um from the plants were sticking on his dog they were easy to pull off but they stuck there pretty well took a closer look at that and found that hoop and look Loop structure that was holding those things in so gee this is kind of neat I wonder if we can use this and came up with velcro what do you think about using collaborative methods and it's something we talk a lot about in our in our classes there's a bunch of different collaborative methods I get a couple of them up here we can think about um a rotating design idea so for example in a water bottle nice water bottle it's different than the water bottles that we had five years ago it's made of less material I can tell it's a little flimsier all right it's got a cap on it well maybe we're to take this water bottle and pass it around and when it came to me I would say what's one Improvement I can make to this water bottle hmm well this cap is pretty high do we need it that high and if you look at some of the new water bottles you'll see that the cap size is actually reduced reduces plastic great idea I pass it along to my my colleague maybe they say you know what let's make let's make it out of a different material so that instead of having this flimsy paper on there we can just put that stuff right on it nice and hard we don't have to worry about people taking it off all right so you keep on passing it around and everybody adds a new idea a new thought to that and at the end you say wow this is great what what do we like what do we not like what attributes do we want to keep the other another method for collaboration is we call the gallery method where you put your idea up on a wall and you have your colleagues come by and evaluate that and put little stick notes up there what do they like what do they not like about it how might they improve that right and so these are different methods to to work together and in today's society in science and engineering it's really a group effort and it's important to work together as a group but the most important message I can tell you when it comes to creativity is use the method that works best for you maybe it is brainstorming right maybe it's a collaborative method maybe it's looking at other technologies that are out there but whatever works best for you use that innovation well to me creativity is the first step of innovation but to be Innovative something has to address a need it could be a consumer need it could be a society's need but that is to me that's what makes creativity different from innovation right there actually has to it has to fulfill a need it must be doable you got to take this and do something you can't just think about it but it actually have to be able to make it in order to put it into action and it generally it's going to add value to your idea and so we talk about value added that's what Innovation is to me how can we be Innovative well the first step is understanding what the real problem is in engineering design this is always our first step what is that problem that we're trying to solve here right let's make sure we fully understand that problem and then we can attack the problem Innovation it's the same thing right what must your design do what gaps are there in the existing technology and then how are you going to address those how are you going to fix them opportunity recognition is another uh tool that you can use when you're innovating where are the opportunities just yesterday I was at the international Society of Applied cardiovascular a meeting in uh in Cleveland and it was a gentleman up there talking about changes that are coming to the Health Care laws one of the changes that's coming in the health care law is a hospital is going to get penalized they're going to get a fine essential and have to pay more money for patients that get readmitted what does that mean let me give you an example if a patient has a pacemaker and planted into their body that tells their heart when to contract gives it a little electrical signal telling it to contract if something goes wrong with that pacemaker or with the implantation process and maybe it's an infection or maybe it's the the electrodes are implanted in the wrong area or something happens and that patient needs to go back to the hospital within a a few days that's considered a readmission and now the hospitals are going to get fined for that and they're going to have to pay Medicare some money back that's bad for the hospital they don't like that well this gentleman that gave the the nice talk looked at this as an opportunity can we identify what is causing Hospital readmission in the pacemaker industry for example and then can we fix that and so that our design will overcome that and there's an opportunity and so while the hospitals are going oh we're going to give up all this money here's this guy thinking ah here's an opportunity so when you're Innovative when you're thinking think about where those opportunities are right where is the pain in the environment I started a company recently and I go and give a lot of talks and a lot of pitches and the question I keep getting is what pain are you solving right that's a question people want to know right what are you fixing so I think about my students in the in the research lab what activities are they doing over and over again that they don't like to do is there some way that we can fix that there's an opportunity there right one of the important things to do when you're innovating is put yourself in the consumer or the end user's shoes what is it that they're looking for what is it that they need that's going to help you be more innovative and finally I want to talk a little bit about entrepreneurship to me entrepreneurship is acting on innovation we can come up with something that's innovative it's novel it's useful but that's it that's where entrepreneurship to me takes over let's take that and actually deliver it to the people who need this so whether it's a new cardiac pacemaker we can design these prototypes and we do that here we do it on an awful lot in our classes we come up with some really Innovative designs some Innovative stuff but to take that next step and actually deliver it that's where the entrepreneurship comes in we have to deliver on the Innovation to address the need now these can include commercial entities and generally when you think about entrepreneurship you think oh somebody's trying to make money but that's not necessarily true people are also doing social entrepreneurship and people are coming up with different ways to address needs of developing countries they're not looking to make a dollar they're looking to just address a society need so you can be entrepreneurial and not worry about making a dollar so how to be entrepreneurial think about the goals of your organization if your organization is out to make a profit and remember most for-profit companies that's what they're there for think about that goal if your goal is to address a society's need in a developing country that's the goal of your organization leverage your strengths we each have our own strengths we each have weaknesses we need to leverage our strengths and then we need to bring in other people to address the weaknesses that we have as an organization or as an individual and to me that's very important consider the smaller opportunities while you're working on the big hit and so we recently formed a company and we started out we were going to deliver stem cells to the heart and that was our Focus that's what my research is on that's what I'm really excited about well the company has since pivoted a couple times and we're no longer that's no longer our big hit that's our well that's still our big hit but we're starting much smaller than that now because we want to realize that we can take a small step and still keep the company afloat and actually there's a lot a lot of uh opportunities in these smaller steps so consider working on some of those smaller opportunities while you're waiting for that big hit what's a take-home message well take home message is the big circle I think creativity starts it it goes to innovation creativity is an essential part of innovation Innovation is an essential part of successful entrepreneurship be yourself use the techniques that work best for you especially when it comes to creativity you have a lot of different tools a lot of techniques out there it's more than just brainstorming use what works best for you start small while aiming big you don't always have to go for that big hit generally those big hits take a long time to get there see if there are smaller increments and take a chance thank you thank you