The Fordowner


Book Description




Hot Spot of Invention


Book Description

Preface: Hot spot of innovation and invention -- A milestone in aviation history -- The formative years -- Back to MIT -- Aircraft instruments and the beginnings of the Instrumentation Lab -- From turn indicator to gunsight -- War work -- Directors and gun fire-control systems -- The A1-C(M) gunsight -- The "immaculate interception" and other air-defense activities -- Inertial navigation -- Floated gyros and SPIRE -- SINS : the submarine inertial navigation system -- Professor, prodigious worker, family man -- Inertial guidance for Atlas and Thor -- Titan, FLIMBAL, AIRS, and the MX/Peacekeeper -- Polaris -- Poseidon and trident -- Spy satellites and space planes -- To the moon and beyond -- The road to divestiture -- A heterogeneous engineer







Hot Spots


Book Description

You always know when you are in a Hot Spot. You feel energized and vibrantly alive. Your brain is buzzing with ideas, and the people around you share your joy and excitement. Things you've always known become clearer, adding value becomes more possible. Ideas and insights from others miraculously combine with your own to create new thinking and innovation. When Hot Spots arise in and between companies, they provide energy for exploiting and applying knowledge that is already known and genuinely exploring what was previously unknown. Hot Spots are marvelous creators of value for organizations and wonderful, life-enhancing phenomena for each of us. Lynda Gratton has spent more than ten years investigating Hot Spots--discovering how they emerge and how organizations can create environments where they will proliferate and thrive. She has studied dozens of companies and talked to hundreds of employees, managers, and executives in the US, Europe, and Asia. She has asked the important questions: Why and when do Hot Spots emerge? What is it about certain groups of people that support the emergence of Hot Spots? What role do leaders play? She's discovered a host of elements that together contribute to the emergence of Hot Spots--creating energy and excitement, and supporting and channeling that energy into productive outcomes. In this groundbreaking book, Gratton describes four crucial qualities that an organizational culture must have to support the emergence of Hot Spots, looks at what leaders can do to encourage them, and offers activities and tools you can use in your own company to increase the probability of them arising. In these days when traditional organizational boundaries are becoming barriers to progress, Gratton offers advice and guidance that you can use right now to increase the probability of Hot Spots emerging in your organization.




Places of Invention


Book Description

The companion book to an upcoming museum exhibition of the same name, Places of Invention seeks to answer timely questions about the nature of invention and innovation: What is it about some places that sparks invention and innovation? Is it simply being at the right place at the right time, or is it more than that? How does “place”—whether physical, social, or cultural—support, constrain, and shape innovation? Why does invention flourish in one spot but struggle in another, even very similar location? In short: Why there? Why then? Places of Invention frames current and historic conversation on the relationship between place and creativity, citing extensive scholarship in the area and two decades of investigation and study from the National Museum of American History’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. The book is built around six place case studies: Hartford, CT, late 1800s; Hollywood, CA, 1930s; Medical Alley, MN, 1950s; Bronx, NY,1970s; Silicon Valley, CA, 1970s–1980s; and Fort Collins, CO, 2010s. Interspersed with these case studies are dispatches from three “learning labs” detailing Smithsonian Affiliate museums’ work using Places of Invention as a model for documenting local invention and innovation. Written by exhibition curators, each part of the book focuses on the central thesis that invention is everywhere and fueled by unique combinations of creative people, ready resources, and inspiring surroundings. Like the locations it explores, Places of Invention shows how the history of invention can be a transformative lens for understanding local history and cultivating creativity on scales of place ranging from the personal to the national and beyond.




Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science


Book Description

Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres's work in the context of 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres's philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres's unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he argues, organizes great parts of Serres's work into a promising philosophy of science as well as a challenge to the narrower field of French epistemology, to which it has often been limited. Simons highlights how the concept encompasses Serres's commitment to positive relations between science and culture and his rejection of pleas to purify the scientific self from imaginative and cultural elements. It helps to situate Serres between the distinct traditions of Bachelard and Latour as well as progressing the innovative aspects of Serres's philosophy for current debates in the philosophy, history and sociology of science. Showing how Serres's philosophy can serve as a normative approach to science and technology, Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science takes in themes of materiality, religiosity, modernity and ecology to advance a timely alternative to philosophy of science for contemporary life.




The Eureka Method: How to Think Like an Inventor


Book Description

Fuel your "Eureka!" moments and become a successful inventor Envision breakthrough new products using the proven methods and applied reasoning techniques of today's successful inventors. The Eureka Method: How to Think Like an Inventor lays out a systematic approach to innovation. Discover how to look at social developments and trends to find new ways of combining and improving existing technologies and systems. Plain-language examples of real-world patents, products, and inventors illuminate each point along the way. Find out how to: Gain regular flashes of inspiration based on your understanding of the inventive process Improve and expand existing products in ways that fill social needs Fuse elements from different products into new and useful combinations Discover new opportunities by side-stepping rules and gaming the system "Futurize" your inventions and prevent them from becoming obsolete Identify emerging regulations and use them to your creative advantage Learn about comprehensive patent applications that protect your rights




Building an Innovation Hotspot


Book Description

How can you increase innovation at local levels and build new technology hotspots? Building an Innovation Hotspot outlines the approaches governments, communities and industry have used to stimulate innovation and examines the evidence behind them. It also identifies real-world examples where these approaches have worked and where they have failed. As future industries will be built on new technologies – particularly digital technologies – the final chapters of this book consider how artificial intelligence, blockchain, augmented and virtual reality, and 3D printing might change not just where innovation occurs, but innovation itself. Stimulating innovation will be key to addressing our future needs in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic and in tackling the all-pervasive impacts of climate change. This is an essential book for anyone looking to build their local economy and compete in a more globalised world connected by the next wave of digital technology.




Styrenes—Advances in Research and Application: 2013 Edition


Book Description

Styrenes—Advances in Research and Application: 2013 Edition is a ScholarlyBrief™ that delivers timely, authoritative, comprehensive, and specialized information about ZZZAdditional Research in a concise format. The editors have built Styrenes—Advances in Research and Application: 2013 Edition on the vast information databases of ScholarlyNews.™ You can expect the information about ZZZAdditional Research in this book to be deeper than what you can access anywhere else, as well as consistently reliable, authoritative, informed, and relevant. The content of Styrenes—Advances in Research and Application: 2013 Edition has been produced by the world’s leading scientists, engineers, analysts, research institutions, and companies. All of the content is from peer-reviewed sources, and all of it is written, assembled, and edited by the editors at ScholarlyEditions™ and available exclusively from us. You now have a source you can cite with authority, confidence, and credibility. More information is available at http://www.ScholarlyEditions.com/.




Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation


Book Description

A novel approach to STEAM learning that engages students from historically marginalized communities in culturally relevant and inclusive maker education. The growing maker movement in education has become an integral part of both STEM and STEAM learning, tapping into the natural DIY inclinations of creative people as well as the educational power of inventing or making things. And yet African American, Latino/a American, and Indigenous people are underrepresented in maker culture and education. In this book, Nettrice Gaskins proposes a novel approach to STEAM learning that engages students from historically marginalized communities in culturally relevant and inclusive maker education. Techno-vernacular creativity (TVC) connects technical literacy, equity, and culture, encompassing creative innovations produced by ethnic groups that are often overlooked. TVC uses three main modes of activity: reappropriation, remixing, and improvisation. Gaskins looks at each of the three modes in turn, guiding readers from research into practice. Drawing on real-world examples, she shows how TVC creates dynamic learning environments where underrepresented ethnic students feel that they belong. Students who remix computationally, for instance, have larger toolkits of computational skills with which to connect cultural practices to STEAM subjects; reappropriation offers a way to navigate cultural repertoires; improvisation is firmly rooted in cultural and creative practices. Finally, Gaskins explores an equity-oriented approach that makes a distinction between conventional or dominant pedagogical approaches and culturally relevant or responsive making methods and practices. She describes TVC habits of mind and suggests methods of instructions and projects.