Introduction

This subject was discussed briefly at the end of Chapter 12, but I would like to take it up again here and add a few details because it is an important story.  The story implies that it is possible to make a million dollars carrying forward some of the ideas that have been discussed in this book.  That is only true, of course, if you have learned what you need to know about imagineering.

In the last part of the book you were introduced to folding cardboard boats, and how they performed or failed in cardboard boat races.  You were introduced to folding plastic boats as well.  The plastic material is similar to cardboard in that it is corregated to add strength and lightness.

Let’s talk a little more about the folding plastic boats.  They certainly are easy to build and inexpensive as well.  But perhaps you might suspect that anything so easy to build is likely to be worthless.

As a matter of fact, that is not true unless you believe that a million dollars is worthless.  Here’s the story.

Making a Million Dollars Each

Three young men became aware of folding plastic boats a few years ago, and decided that they had interesting possibilities.  They spent four years working on the design of a folding plastic kayak.  In the process they tried out hundreds of model designs and built more than 20 prototypes.

After they felt that they had achieved an elegant design they started building, and sold about 1400 boats over one year’s time.  Then the three young men took their design and sales achievements to the investors at the Shark Tank program on ABC and found an investor who gave them the $500,000 investment that they felt they needed to expand the program to full scale.

It seems very likely to me that they and their investor will each make at least a million dollars in the next few years.  The design has a lot going for it.  It is extremely portable.  It is good-looking.  It can be sold online and shipped to buyers.  And it could be sold on Amazon. That is a big plus.  Check out their kayak at the ctrl-click links below.  When the first link opens you need to scan down a little to get to the main video.

              An Origami Kayak

              ORU Kayak Among Sharks

 I need to point out that these three young entrepreneurs did not learn about either folding plastic boats or imagineering from this book.  They started working on their folding kayak project about four years ago, about the same time that I got serious about this book.  But the interesting thing to me is that no matter where they got their innovation education from, they have acted exactly as if they got it from this book.

This folding plastic kayak is a perfect example of innovation in action.  A design  that many people would feel is worthless or at least slightly crazy, has been turned into a million dollar product by a very serious trial and error effort.  Try, try and try again.  Notice that the leader of the design team obviously understood his subject.

What Does This Teach Us

What does this story teach us about innovation?  Here’s what I see.  It pays to be a little crazy.  It can pay to use old ideas in new ways (origami combined with strong foldable plastic). It pays to simplicate and add a whole lot of lightness.  It pays to test, test, and test again.  It pays to work very hard, and not be in too much of a rush. And it definitely pays to understand your subject.

These three young men built a better boat.  You could do the same, or you could build a better something else.  Innovation is a capability that can be applied to any problem that would benefit from moving ahead.

Innovation can be used to do many things besides making a million dollars, but if making a million dollars is your objective it can be very helpful.

What is Imagineering?

Imagineering is a word that can be used in a number of different fields but it usually has the same meaning: implementing new ideas using a combination of technical skills and a creative imagination.  But I like to use this term in a slightly extended way.  When I use the term it implies working with appreciable success on innovations, i.e. working in a way that accomplishes results.

Imagineering in this book has the meaning: implementing new ideas using a combination of technical skills and innovation skills. Remember that, as was outlined in Chapter 10, innovation skills include: creativity, conscientiousness, collaborative skills and combativeness  (when needed).

This definition is not really different from the original definition if implementation is given very strong emphasis. It just spells out the necessary ingredients a little more comprehensively. Or, you could say that it just introduces a little more toughness into the definition of  innovative engineering. Anyone who doesn’t realize that this toughness is needed in the real world of innovation has some learning yet to do.

Imagineering as used here means innovative engineering, and innovative engineering means engineering that accomplishes new, important results in spite of Nature’s resistance and the existing competition. At the top level in my definition of imagineering is the lead engineer who can get out in front and lead teams to successful achievement of complex innovations involving multiple inventions and multiple technical skills.

Side Note on the History of the Term Imagineering

The earliest recorded use of the term that I am aware of was by Alcoa in a 1942 Time Magazine advertisement. Arthur Radebaugh,  an innovative illustrator and comic strip artist, began to use the term extensively in 1947. Sperry Gyroscope Company applied the term to me in a 1957 recruiting advertisement, while I was working on ship stabilization. See that use by ctrl-clicking on the link below:

          Disney tried to trademark the term in 1967, claiming first use in 1962. Since that date was a significant number of years later than the actual first use, the trademark was not authorized.  Disney does make a very large use of the term imagineering.  And Disney himself was an extremely competent imagineer.

1.

The Role of Failure in Successful Design

Henry Petroski, St. Martin’s Press, 1982

Overview

This is a very important book because failure is a very important factor in successful innovation.  Since innovation is about new inventions that are not yet fully understood, failures are an almost inevitable part of the process of innovation.  They cannot be avoided.  We can work hard to keep them small and to learn from them.  That is very important.  So we should expect failures and learn how to deal with them.  If we do that failures are a very valuable part of successful design.  We need to test, and test, and re-test.  The object is to have all failures occur during the process of design, and not after the design has been completed.  Petroski discusses and explains these issues in detail.  Since the book has been around for quite a while you can get a copy for a penny plus the shipping charge.

A Book about Bridge-Building Failures

Petroski was very interested in bridge-building, so this book primarily deals with failures in that innovation area.  Therefore the details are not perfect for everyone, but the principles tend to be general.  I think that a good way to use this book would be to buy it, keep it, and read a chapter every now and then.  There are not very many books dealing with the super important subject of failures.

Contents of: To Engineer is Human

1. Being Human
2. Falling Down is Part of Growing Up
3. Lessons from Play; Lessons from Life
4. Engineering as Hypothesis
5. Success is Foreseeing Failure
6. Design is Getting from Here to There
7. Design as Revision
8. Accidents Waiting to Happen
9. Safety in Numbers
10. When Cracks Become Breakthroughs
11. Of Bus Frames and Knife Blades
12. Interlude: The Success Story of Crystal Palace
13. The Ups and Downs of Bridges
14. Forensic Engineering and Engineering Fiction
15. From Slide Rule to Computer: Forgetting How it Used to Be Done
16. Connoisseurs of Chaos
17. The Limits of Design

Five Chapters That I Especially Recommend

I especially recommend the following five chapters because they are the most general, and do not focus primarily on bridge design and failure.

Preface

Design as Revision

Forensic Engineering and Engineering Fiction

From Slide Rule to Computer

The Limits of Design

Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success

Carmine Gallo, McGraw-Hill, 2011

Overview

Since Steve Jobs is one of the most innovative Imagineers of modern times it is obviously worthwhile to try to understand his approach to invention.  One positive side of this is that his innovation methods are not really insanely different but rather are fairly simple and central to the field of innovation methods.  It is Steve Jobs who was insanely different.  Gallo discusses seven key principles in Jobs’ approach to invention.  You can get this book for about one dollar plus 3 dollars shipping.

1. Do What You Love

Steve dropped out of college because he could not see the value of it.  But he grew up in Silicon Valley with a great interest in electronic design.  That area in effect became his substitute for college.  He had a great passion for electronic design, and that became his life’s work.  You are much more likely to be successful when you do what you love.

2. Put a Dent in the Universe

Steve Jobs was not the initial inventor of any of his early innovations.  But he was very good at seeing over the horizon and evaluating what the long term impact of a given innovation might be.  He concentrated on those innovations that were likely to have the most serious impact.

3. Kick-Start Your Brain

Creativity is primarily connecting things.  When you ask creative people how they did something they feel a little guilty because they really didn’t do it: they just saw something.  That’s because they were able to connect various experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.  You need to have a diversity of experiences to maximize your creativity.

4. Sell Dreams, Not Products

The dreams talked about here are the dreams of your customers.  Your purpose needs to be to make their lives better, not just to sell them products.  Listen to your customers, but even more important know your customers.

5. Say No to 1,000 Things

According to Steve Jobs, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.  He said “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do”.  Focus on keeping the innovation simple and elegant, and avoid it being cluttered and confusing.  Try to put the majority of your effort on projects that advance your core purpose and fulfill your passion.

6. Create Insanely Great Experiences

Look outside your industry for ideas on how to stand out from your competition.  Hire with cultural fit in mind, and train everyone to be an expert in that “culture”.  Have fun.  Passion is contagious.  If your employ-ees aren’t having fun, your customers won’t be either.  That sure seems like a good idea.

7. Master the Message

Tell your story early and often.  Make communication a cornerstone of your brand every day.  Make your brand story consistent across all aspects of your program.  Think differently about your presentation style.  Study Steve Jobs, read design books, and pay attention to awe-inspiring presentations and what makes them different from average.  Rising to the challenge requires a dedicated commitment to improvement and an open mind.

Michael LeBoeuf, Berkeley Books, 1980

Overview

This is one of the earlier books on Imagineering, and it is also one of the best.  And because imagineering is almost timeless it is just as useful today as the day it was written.  It is directed to you as someone working toward becoming an imagineer.  It covers all aspects of successful innovation, including creativity, completivity, myths, and teaming.

Since the book is very old it is also very cheap.  You can get a copy for one cent plus shipping costs of about three dollars, but it is worth a whole lot more than that.  The main areas of discussion are as follows.

Redesigning Your Imagination Foundation

The Creativity Gap – where LeBoeuf talks about how the brain takes on creativity and also discusses more than a dozen of the myths and traps that are common in creativity thinking.

Deciding What You Want – Here he emphasizes how important it is to decide what you want, and create your goals.  And he outlines some helpful ways and means to do this.

Generating and Processing Ideas

Understanding and Igniting Your Creative Abilities – with a couple of dozen pages of good advice.

Team Up for Super Imagineering – Here LeBoeuf takes up the value of team work, including teams of two, and teams of more than two.

Ask Questions to Spark Your Imagination – Here LeBoeuf discusses the importance of questions and suggests a good number of specific questions that can be used.

How to Evaluate Ideas – This section provides a lot of good advice on how to evaluate ideas once they have been produced and come to the fore.

Clearing the Hurdles Between Imagination and Realization

Now we are getting into the Completivity side of Imagineering.  LeBoeuf covers a number of topics.  Included are:

Getting People Behind Your Ideas – this is obviously a very important subject, and includes your teammates and your desired audience.

Situational Hurdles – LeBoeuf discusses the problem of hurdles, real and imaginary at great length with almost 20 pages of discussion.

Following Through to Successful Reality

Learning to Use Time – LeBoeuf is an expert on time management, and he provides here a lot of good advice on how to do that—about 20 pages of expert suggestions.

The Word is Action – Here LeBoeuf states in no uncertain terms that to be an Imagineer is to be a man or woman of action.  It takes action and plenty of it to turn your ideas into realities.

I very strongly recommend this book. 

The Tangled Web of Imagineering

Overview

As you work your way toward being an Imagineer, it will be helpful to begin to understand how Imagineering works.  For obvious reasons Imagineering is somewhat more complicated and somewhat less predictable than standard engineering.  These characteristics show up quite well in what I call the Tangled Web of Imagineering.

How Does a New Idea Come Into Being?

One thing is for sure.  What goes on in the world of real invention is significantly different from the highly over-simplified “lightbulb” explanations that we often get in everyday discussions of the invention process.  Let’s take a look at the possibilities.  Click on the number boxes down below.

Consider the Implications of the Tangled Web – No. 5

That Tangled Web shows a lot about how Imagineering really works.  There are the people and ideas that have come before you.  The prior ideas and innovators always contribute a lot to the current innovation.  Then there are your current team members.  And there are almost always current competitors as well.  It is not unusual to have competitors within your team as well as outside.  You may converse with competitors.  You may try to steal ideas from competitors and they may try to steal ideas from you.

You are working on an innovation which almost always has many unknown factors.  That causes the connections and conversations to go in many different directions.  Some of persons involved in the interactions are not involved in the innovation process but are simply decision makers.  And some of the interactions may even be accidental.  All of this tends to produce a very tangled web of innovation, and the better you understand this web the more likely you are to be successful.

Overview

It is very easy to assume that Imagineers are born and not made.  But that is not actually true.  Imagineers are primarily made and only slightly born.  So becoming an Imagineer is not as hard as you might think, and is primarily up to you.

High Imagineering Not Based on High Intelligence Quotient

As you first think about it, it seems logical to assume that to be an outstanding Imagineer you would have to have a very high IQ.  However, this does not turn out to be the case.  Michael Michalko, a highly acclaimed creativity expert, has written an interesting set of notes on this subject titled How Geniuses Think.  In that story he notes that Marilyn vos Savant, with the world’s highest IQ of 228, has contributed very little to science or art, whereas Richard Feynman, considered to be the greatest scientist since Leonardo da Vinci, came up with an IQ of only 122.  Your IQ is not a very important number and in particular it has very little effect on your potential for high success in Imagineering.

Achievement of Imagineering is Primarily Made not Born

A large number of groups have studied the question of whether the top innovators tend to be born or made.  They all conclude that imagineering is primarily something that we develop rather than being born with.  The ratio of what we have to develop versus what we are born with is some-where between three-quarters and two-thirds.

The Elements in Imagineering are a Blessing, Not a Curse

There is a very large number of elements in what it takes to be an Imagineer, both in regard to creativity and in regard to completivity.  That might seem to make Imagineering very difficult.  However, realize that these elements are for the most part small and quite easy to learn.  To be a good Imagineer does take some work, but the steps are mostly small and not that difficult. Imagineering comes in small pieces.

You Have to Want to and You Have to Do It

Of course, all the above possibilities mean nothing unless you want to be a successful innovator and are prepared to put in some effort.  As Walt Disney often said: “Let’s stop talking about it and start doing it.”

Overview

We need to explore the relationship between Imagineering and Innovation in detail, and a good place to start is with the dictionary definitions.  We will start with Innovation, which has two definitions.

INNOVATION

A new idea, device, or method
The act or process of introducing new ideas, devices, or methods

IMAGINEERING

The implementation of creative ideas into practical form

Discussion

These two definitions obviously overlap appreciably, but they are also significantly different.  The difference can be characterized by the nature of the two key words in the above definitions: introducing versus implementation.

         We need to remember that the vast majority of ideas are not successful.  For an idea to be successful it needs to be implemented as well as be introduced.  New ideas can be successful, and a few of them are, but most of them are not.  If we add the term successful to innovation it becomes essentially equivalent to imagineering.  But in the very large number of discussions of innovation and books on innovation the implementation issues are very often not given sufficient attention.  Have you ever seen the word completivity before, or anything equivalent to it?  Did you know that far less than one percent of patented ideas ever achieve actual success in the field?

Literally every discussion or book on innovation covers the subject of creativity in detail.  But creativity is nowhere near enough to reach success in the field.  Completivity involves a lot of very ingenious thinking and hard work, sometimes harder than what is needed for the creativity side.  This will become clear as the discussion continues.

Imagineering is a better term to describe what is needed for new ideas to reach success in the difficulty of the real world than Innovation.

Overview

There are four ingredients that are the most important for achieving Imagineering success.  They are Creativity, Completivity, one or another aspect of STEM, and Teams.  These ingredients are discussed in the following notes.

Elements of Creativity

Everyone agrees that creativity is important.  They also tend to agree that creativity includes many different elements.  Creativity as I see it is covered pretty well by the following elements.

Strong desire to successfully create
Indifference to rules and conventions
High level of observing and sensing

High level of curiosity and questioning
Desire to experience and experiment
Persistence: ability to fail and try again

Tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity
Networking – the tangled web in action
System thinking and whole brain thinking

Playfulness – or craziness, if you will
Powerful, highly-developed intuition
Ability to associate and synthesize

Instinct to simplicate and add lightness
Instinct to find and include synergies

The large number of ingredients of creativity might seem to make it difficult, but actually they make creativity easier.  You don’t have to be perfect in all the elements.  We will discuss this in more detail when we talk about how to become an Imagineer.

The Nature of Completivity

Everyone has heard about creativity again and again.  But it is quite possible that you have never heard about completivity.  What is going on?  Creativity gives rise to good ideas.  Many of these ideas are patented.  But what percentage of patents results in important successful innovations?  Less than one percent.  So there are many, many good ideas, but much, much fewer successful innovations.  The difference is completivity, the process of carrying good ideas out in the world to success.  That is the job of the Imagineer.

Elements of Completivity

To be good at completivity the Imagineer, in my mind, needs to be conscientious, collaborative, and combative.  So besides creativity, that results in a combination of the following elements.  The values of these elements can be tested by looking at the top leaders of the most successful high tech companies around today.  Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the folks at Google all closely match, or did match, these characteristics.

Conscientiousness

Instinctively thorough, careful, and vigilant
Hard-working, reliable, and loyal to the job
Strong desire to do the task in hand well
Motivated to test, check, and recheck
Takes personal responsibility for success

Collaborativeness

Good team player in a multidiscipline group
Highly empathetic to needs of customers
Works well in the tangled web of innovation
Instinctively seeks skunk works environment
Collaborates with competition when necessary

Combativeness

Willing to fight hard for what is right
Willing to fight for the innovation team
Willing to fight when out-numbered

Willing to fight tough competition
Willing to fight inappropriate rules
Willing to fight to fire the boss, if and
when the boss needs to be fired

As was true for creativity, completivity includes a fairly large number of elements.  In the same sense as for creativity this makes completivity easier rather than harder.  Many of the above elements will get further discussion as we go along, so don’t worry if a few seem mysterious now.

The Importance of STEM

To carry an idea through to a successful result you need to build the something needed, and that implies that you have the required degree of STEM capabilities.  But as mentioned before you don’t have to have all the capabilities that might be needed, the work can be divided between you and your teammates.  And that of course is where teamwork comes in.

The Importance of Being Part of a Team

Considering the number of elements that enter into success, it is not hard to see why, in modern times at least, teams play a very important role in the success of innovation.  This has probably been true for the last 1000 years.  Teams do not have to be very large.  Teams of two are very much more successful than one person alone.  One person alone, is usually either unsuccessful or extremely slow, but may often overcome that by joining up with an appropriate team at some point.

America Badly Needs More Imagineers

America has always been one of the most innovative countries in the world, and that has been one of our greatest assets.  But now as companies can reach overseas more and more they can reach for innovations overseas.  And as this happens the innovativeness of the USA, and hence a key value of the USA, gradually declines.  America needs more imagineers to create more successful innovations right here in the USA.  Otherwise, we are a country that is going downhill.  It would be a very bad mistake to give away our highly valuable imagineering capabilities.

Top Technical Companies Need More Imagineers

From a personal point of view you should realize that the top technical companies of the USA, such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., want and need imagineers.  They have them, and are determined to get more of them.  That makes a very big contribution to their value, and also makes them more interesting places to work.

They can get Imagineers in the USA, but also elsewhere

These companies will first try to get their imagineers in the USA, but if they do not find enough of the imagineers they want in this country they do not hesitate to look for them elsewhere.  They will bring them in from overseas.  They have even had the government establish a law, called H-1B, that allows them to provide special visas to overseas applicants with a high degree of technical knowledge, and an interest in imagineering.

There are now more imagineers who come from outside this country than there should be in the top technical companies of America.  This situation needs to change.  You can help to change it by joining one of those companies, but to do that you have to be a competent Imagineer.

STEM with Imagineering is More Fun and More Valuable

Not only does being an Imagineer increase the probability of joining a high level company, it has a number of other values as well.  It definitely will make your work life more interesting and more fun, filled with challenges, changes, and excitement.  It also can substantially increase the value of your work and the size of your paycheck.

Imagineering is an art, so that STEM with Imagineering becomes STEAM, and becomes something that you can get all steamed up about.