ECONOMICS AND TRADE | Achieving growth through open markets
02 January 2009
Prominent Scientist Says Power to Innovate Lies in Everyone
David Pensak holds 38 patents, travels the world to lecture on innovation
Washington — A man with a reputation as a scientific wizard stands before a class of graduate students at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia.
“How do you plan to turn out profits after you receive your MBA [master's degree in business administration]?” David Pensak asked a student.
“Touch-screen computer technology. It can solve any problem of humanity,” the student answered.
“Very good. Who has a problem to be solved?” Pensak asked the class.
As Pensak relates the story later in Washington, at that point, another student raised his hand. “I lost my girlfriend Saturday night. How can touch-screen technology help me?”
The love-lorn fellow related that his girlfriend broke up with him after they had waited 90 minutes for a table at a restaurant, The Cheesecake Factory, in a shopping mall. The woman, who was hypoglycemic, suffered a sharp drop in her blood-sugar level during the wait, and that triggered a mood shift, which led to a fight and the breakup, according to Pensak.
“Okay, how do we solve this man's problem?” Pensak challenged his students. He teaches that innovation springs from a need, a dissatisfaction or curiosity. The power of innovation is not dependent on the level of education or the rung one occupies on the corporate ladder, he believes.
“The brain is like a rubber band. If you stretch it just a little bit, it will return to exactly the same place it was before. If you stretch it far, it stretches to a new position but with a memory of where it has been,” he said.
In the ensuing brainstorming, Pensak and his pupils came up with the idea of placing kiosks throughout the shopping mall. Each kiosk would be equipped with a touch-screen computer that would enable Cheesecake Factory customers to reserve a table at a specific time and pre-order and pre-pay for their food.
“The kiosks are timesavers and moneymakers for restaurants and shopping malls,” Pensak said.
According to his research, a typical restaurant can serve three times as many customers if they are not taking up table space waiting for menus, deciding what to order, waiting for the food to be prepared and waiting for waiters and waitresses to bring their bills.
The touch-screen kiosks are being tested at the Philadelphia shopping mall where the breakup occurred, Pensak said. He said both the restaurants and the mall are pleased with the kiosks because they increase restaurant business and the amount of rent the restaurant pays to the mall. The touch-screen reservation system was set up by Pensak and two of his students at Wharton. When it becomes operational, they plan to charge 25 cents for each reservation, he said.
Pensak's propensity for innovation has led to 38 patents and made him a multimillionaire. His best-known patent is for an Internet firewall, which he marketed through Raptor Systems Inc., a company he founded and later sold.
After a 30-year career with E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, he travels widely in the United States and foreign countries, lecturing on innovation at universities and corporations. The Creative and Innovative Economy Center at George Washington University in Washington sent Pensak to Jordan, Thailand and Brazil in 2008 to relate his thoughts on releasing innovation energies. The center has booked him for similar speaking tours of India, Brazil and other places in 2009.
In a recently published book, Innovation for Underdogs, he contends that “the mind power behind innovation is quite basic, extremely logical and certainly inherent in any human being living and breathing today.”
He told America.gov that the key step in the development of his Internet firewall was not a technological or scientific breakthrough, but rather the identification of a problem, in this case, the need to protect information transmitted on the Internet. The solution dawned on him when he remembered a cartoon in a comic book, which “showed a buzzard sitting on a branch while looking massively irritated and extremely hungry in the empty desert. The caption read, ‘Patience, Hell, I'm going to kill the first thing that moves,’” Pensak writes in his book.
Riding in the back seat of a taxi, Pensak realized that that buzzard, which belongs to the raptor family of birds, could be reincarnated into a computer program that would systematically and flawlessly eliminate any foreign and suspicious data going into or coming out of any computer system. From there it was a short step to finding programmers to write the software. In honor of the cartoon buzzard, Pensak named his innovation “Raptor.”
One method that Pensak uses to jog his thinking into an innovative mind-set is writing down anything he sees or hears on filing cards. He periodically takes the deck, shuffles it and places cards in pairs, and looks at what turns up side by side.
For example, on one card he wrote, “soldiers are bleeding to death from shrapnel wounds in Iraq”; on another, “a Brazilian viper's venom causes hemorrhaging then clotting.” The innovative insight came when Pensak saw a connection between them.
“If a guy has been shot, you want to flush the wound to clean it, then you want to stop the bleeding,” he said. “So maybe you want to make a swab with this venom in it and rub the inside of the wound with it.”
