A legacy of disruptive innovation

In Australia last month, I picked up a copy of the magazine "The Monthly." I confess I'd never heard of it before, but one article in particular caught my eye: Tablet or Toilet?. In the essay, historian James Boyce makes the case that maybe the current revolutions based on computer technology aren't as transformative as we think, but more mundane inventions (e.g. the toilet!) have had a much bigger impact on human life over the past 150 years. I recommend you read his article. It's pretty compelling!

In my world of civil and environmental engineering design there is a lot going on now with new ideas, tools and automation to make our designs quicker, cheaper and hopefully better. I thought it would be fun to think about some of the innovations that have shaped engineering over the past 150 years.  I'm not an expert on engineering history, so I'll be leaning heavily on my old buddies Google and Wikipedia for help (hey, maybe I should use the Encyclopedia Britannica for nostalia!). Here goes...

Surveying

OK, so I thought I'd look back in history and find that the theodolite - mainstay of surveyors throughout the 20th Century - would have been a relatively new invention, but according to Wikipedia it was invented by a fella called Leonard Digges in the 1500's!  Now according to Encyclopedia Britannica their use for surveying didn't really take off until the invention of log tables in 1620, but what the heck! I guess these disruptive inventions are WAY older than I thought. Maybe it's time for a new disrupter...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) aka "drones" are in the news a lot these days. In my own firm, we actually have a group focused on inspections using drones. Pretty cool stuff. Their application for surveying is a no-brainer.  They can produce accurate surveys in a fraction of the time.  Here's one example.

The other cool innovation is LIDAR/laser scanning which enables existing structures to be captured in digital format and translated straight into models and drawings. Now couple this with UAVs and we're in Sci-Fi land already!

Drawings

Aha, now this time I am in the 150-year window.  Back in the 19th Century the advent of blueprints enabled engineers and architects to make copies of drawings more easily and with greater accuracy. To make these drawings, though, required massive teams of draftsmen in their drawing offices.

Fast forward to the end of the 20th Century and Computer Aided Design (CAD) emerges on the scene to make the production and reproduction of drawings simpler (bye-bye drawing office, hello CAD-Tech).  The next step was to produce 3-D "models" instead of simple drawings, from which drawings and other information can be pulled.

Finally, we can now link these models to all sorts of engineering, costing and other design information in "Building Information Modeling" (BIM). Bippty-boppity, BIM! One model to rule them all!

Process Design

And now to my fun area of design: selecting and sizing wastewater treatment processes.  Wastewater treatment technologies are roughly 150 years old, so it's interesting to think about how process design has changed over the years. Even up until recently, hand-calculations to size major process units were not uncommon.  Certainly spreadsheets enabled these calculations to be done more efficiently and effectively through the 80's and 90's.  There are many examples and even books written on the topic!

One of the major limitations of spreadsheet calculations for poop plants (sorry, I mean water resource recovery facilities - tough to break old habits), is that treatment facilities are quite dynamic, with fluctuations in flows and waste constituents over daily, weekly and seasonal patterns.  It's tough to do spreadsheet calculations on dynamic systems.

New kid on the block: http://www.dynamita.com/the-sumo/

A major breakthrough in the tools used to design these dynamic facilities is process simulation.  I could go on for pages and pages about process simulators because they're one of my specialties.  Instead, maybe I should put in a plug for one or other of the books I helped to pull together on the topic (no royalties for me though, bah!). From innovative tools in the 1990's process simulators such as GPS-X,  BioWin and SIMBA have now become the mainstay for all our design work.

Future Disruption

OK, no self-respecting blog on innovation and disruption can resist taking a wild stab in the dark on future trends, so here goes!

Big data?  Hmm, not sure: we have a lot of bad data.  Analytics? For design...not really.  Artificial intelligence?  Ooh, now you're talking. So, starting from a UAV scanning an area, or existing treatment plant, to producing a BIM model seems like a pretty short couple of steps. The pieces and parts are there already; we just need the smarts and rules to link them up.  But wait, we need super-smart process engineers to run the simulations, right?  For now, yes.  But even this piece can be automated (we're not as smart as we seem). To see the future, check out this cool tool developed by Organica. My understanding is that it's not fully automated yet, but not far off.  The day may come when I can hang up my slide rule, burn my log tables and let robo-engineer do all the hard work!

Patent paralysis

OK, so I may have a different perspective on patents than others. This is due largely to the fact that a couple of the professionals that had the most influence on my growth as a poop engineer had a less than positive view of patents.  To protect the innocent and to avoid accusations of slander I’m not going to name names, but one individual had his idea stolen by a large firm who then patented it and tried to stop him using his own idea. Thankfully it mostly failed and time has healed most of the wounds.  The other individual was an innovator beyond compare and his ethos was to keep developing new ideas and applications to stay ahead of the game. He didn’t have the time or inclination to “waste” money on patents.

At this point I should also give the background that my little world is mostly the design and upgrading of publicly-owned poop plants.

So, with this background, let me set out why I think patents can be a bad thing.

Why I don't like patents...

1. They stifle innovation

The very purpose of a patent is not to enable someone to produce something, but to prevent anyone else from doing it except you in order to have an advantage. If you patent an idea, no-one else is going to do it, and in our little poop-plant world that stifles acceptance and further development. In other realms where you’re mass-producing consumer goods or medicines I can see this is OK and fair, but in my space it’s really tough to get anyone to innovate, so patenting an idea can kill it pretty fast. I don’t think many equipment vendors get this.

2. POTWs can’t specify “one-of-a-kind” technology

Hand-in-hand with stifling innovation, or partly the cause, are the rules that prevent most public utilities from specifying unique technologies. This makes it VERY difficult to do anything new. On the other hand, having just 2 or 3 vendors competing in the same space can be a major boost. I actually spend quite some time comparing technologies and my job is made a whole lot easier if there is more than one of a type.

3. No-one likes lawyers

Now don't get me wrong, there are many fine and upstanding lawyers in the world, many of whom have been good friends of mine over the years. And we definitely need lawyers to help us uphold the law.  BUT in the litigious culture of the Western World (sorry, I mean where the "rule of law" prevails, yawn), as soon as you threaten to bring in lawyers, we all get a bit weird. Engineers in particular get very uneasy around lawyers and their word games.  Heck, we're straightforward thinking, problem solvers. Please don't try to trip us up with what we mean when use certain words or opinions.  I've read a couple of patents and the language in them is awful lawyer-speak, seemingly preventing anyone from doing anything anywhere, ever. 

Overcoming Patent Paralysis

OK, so I've bad-mouthed one of the main mechanisms for encouraging and protecting inventions since the 16th Century, so do I have any suggestions for a better way forward?  I'm not a lawyer (phew, you say), so perhaps I'm not qualified to comment, but here are a few ideas for alternative ways of driving innovation through new ideas and inventions without using patents to stop it...

A. Stay ahead of the game

I mentioned this already, but early in my career I worked for a company that developed some amazing online instrumentation including online respirometry which, to this day, no-one has ever come close to matching.  I didn't appreciate it at the time but the ideas produced in that small firm were way ahead of their time and I believe that they only patented one mechanical item out of all the ideas and innovations they produced.  The ethos of my boss was to just keep ahead of the game. It turns out he's still 20 years ahead of the game!

B. Go open source

This is a radical idea, but one used by Elon Musk.  Don't prevent others from using your ideas, but let them have a go too, then compete to win.  Particularly if your ideas are radical and maybe in a whole new domain of their own.  Opening up your ideas to others will help spur research and more ideas from which you and the others will all benefit. Isn't this how research is supposed to be done? Rather than hiding your ideas or locking them down so no-one else can develop them further, consider opening the black box and learning from your competitors.

C. Copyright, don't patent

Did I mention I'm no lawyer, so I probably can't comment fully on this, but there are protections under law for published materials and ideas that are covered by copyright.  I think there are some weird loopholes in US patent law that allow you to pinch ideas for the 1st year after they're published if you have good lawyers (the experience of my other colleague I mentioned earlier), but still, if you have an idea and publish it, then you have some protections, I think.  Doing this, plus considering the "open source" approach is really what research should be about, I think. But only if you want to encourage innovation!

OK, so equipment vendors and those of you who've patented a gazillion inventions, let me know why I'm off base as usual!