Learning to invent

by Bandula Wijay (Ph.D.)

Dr. Bandula Wijay is a prominent American inventor of Sri Lankan origin with over 20 US and international patents to his credit. He has invented many novel concepts including Balloon Angioplasty Catheter Devices and Coronary and Vascular STENTS. Dr. Wijay is the CEO of BinLab, Inc. a cardiovascular research company based in Houston, Texas, USA which develops STENTS. He was the founder and CEO of Leocor Inc. of Houston, Texas, which developed the concept of protected balloon angioplasty.)

Over the years, often someone would ask me "how do you invent"? I have usually given quick answer such as I am just solving everyday problems and the needs of the modern society. But as time passed, I started thinking what really the answer to this question is. In an effort to determine what background one would need to be an inventor or whether you need any background at all, I interviewed nearly a score of inventors asking them the same question the others had asked me.

Why do we invent? Is it purely a business achievement or is it a character in us that gives us the personal satisfaction created by the thirst to belong to a select group of original thinkers? While the answer to this question would depend on the individual, the factor of achievement as the most important got the nod from most of the inventors I interviewed.

In fact good many inventors who are either in academia or are employed by companies, receive only a plaque and pat in the back for their inventions. As such I would eliminate the financial reward as the driving force behind the urge for an inventor to invent.

Inventing is a culture. This starts from the childhood in the inventor's life. Most inventors belonging to the inventive cultures normally demonstrate their inventiveness in their early and formative years of their life, and sometimes as early as in elementary school.

One story I remember is about an invention by a 10 year's old boy, who invented a clever means to dispense one coffee filter at time from a stack of coffee filters, for which he obtained a patent.

If one lives and grows up in a culture that encourages independent thinking and the school system has formulated education as a learning process rather than a teaching process, I believe that the students of this culture will be more apt to become inventors. Just as we see the children who grow up in farming communities wanting to becoming farmers or those who grow up in aerospace and space research communities wanting to be engineers or astronauts.

First what is an invention? And how does it differ from discovery? We know of great scientist of the renaissance period and after, Newton, Pascal, and Einstein to name a few, who had discovered many fundamental properties of nature. Discovery is to discover something that already exists in nature.

Inventions on the other hand are findings that have not previously existed in nature at the time of the invention. The telephone, airplane, fax machine, X-ray machine, television are therefore some examples of inventions. As such, inventors develop new knowledge based on creative thinking and deductions.

Inventors who invent a unique concept, device, or a process have the exclusive right, title and interest to the invention. As such the inventor can exercise that right to produce or use such invention, also commonly described as intellectual property (IP), or transfer such IP to another with or without receiving compensation.

If we examine the process of inventing, inventors generally identify human needs and invent solutions for these needs. The human needs are not normally presented by science but are presented in the study of history, political science, economics, and social science.

The study of these subjects will create baseline knowledge in the young mind that will enable the subsequent scientific mind to invent. Most inventions that made great impact on our lives, the fax machine, computer, satellite communications, and the MRI machine all had an economic, social, and political predicative input.

As most of these inventions came from the space programs in United States and Russia, it developed a culture and the students of this culture who had the right type of education that prepared them to be developers and inventors.

In order to invent one must identify the uniqueness in a set of conditions, data or set of observations and correlate it with the needs of the society. Inventions have to be useful, a requirement of the patenting process.

As such the invention may be a result of deduction from data or observation and must be a workable solution. Interestingly no criteria on the economic viability are placed on inventions. This is understandable as a process not economical today may become economical at a later date.

Can someone look at two pictures of which one is altered slightly, and identify the alteration? This often is the training scientists who become inventors develop, and reminds me of a Sunday classic to identify the differences between two pictures, one by the master and the other by the disciple. I loved to solve this puzzle while growing up in Sri Lanka and waited impatiently for the Sunday newspaper.

This is the life's work for most scientists: to look at a set of data to determine what in the data is special and different and is there a special relationship that exist between the parameters, the input and output essentially.

Application base problem solving in early years is a practice highly endorsed in those cultures that have demonstrated inventiveness. Applied learning is one of the basic and natural habits, essential in becoming an inventor.

The student must learn to go through a thought process questioning - why am I learning this scientific principle? Well, one reason is, it could be in the exam he would take at the end of the year but beyond that the student should also know what are its future applications, what are its relationships to the present social, political needs and benefits to the man.

For one, students in all cultures have a tendency to prepare for their exams, which ultimately determine their livelihoods. The more inventive cultures have adopted unique test methods that would test the students understanding of the subject.

An exam question that require the student to write an essay type answer where the student would provide several explanations in the body of the answer, some correct and some incorrect, and get partial credit for the correct answers while not being penalised for the incorrect answers.

While this method will indicate the percentage of students who have learned the subject as well as the percentage of the knowledge they have learned, it does not provide the incentive to the student to learn the true fundamental understanding of the material.

A multiple-choice question on the other hand has only one correct answer. The student either knows this answer or he or she does not know it. What is more interesting the time allocation for the question which is often one minute. This means the answer to such a question does not require the solution of complex and long equations and even if there are calculations these are of a natured that one can solve mentally.

The essence is the examiner wants to know whether the student has learned the concept. Now correlating this type of learning and the inventiveness of a culture it is quite evident that a good correlation exists between the two. In addition to the inventiveness my experience working with people of different cultures during the last thirty years, my observation of ones ability for application of knowledge to invent was a notable difference between cultures with application based learning and cultures with theory based learning.

We all have learned but forgotten the proof to the Pythagoras theorem. I will leave it to someone else to debate the subject whether learning to prove theorems is important or not for educating a culture. But to become an inventor I have no reason to believe that the exercise is of much value solely its applications are and one's ability to use them are of primary value to the solution of social, economical and human needs. Here is one example of a problem that I found in a high school physics text in the United States.

The problem states that a young bright miss was driving down on a snow-covered road and her car skidded off the highway. As a smart physics student she fetched a rope and collected a few strong men to help pull the car back on to the road.

While the tendency would be to tie the rope to the car and pull it back with the help of her newfound friends, she decided to tie one end of the rope to the car and other end tightly to a strong tree on the opposite side of the road. She then requested her friends to come half way between the car and the tree and pull it perpendicular to the direction of the line between the car and the tree. Please explain her actions.

I found this very intriguing and it was such a pleasure for me to solve this problem and truly enjoy the feeling why we learn physics.

Just about all the standardized exams such as SAT, GRE, MCAT, and LSAT that are entrance examinations to different field of education in the United States, test the student's knowledge of concepts. Those who do well in these exams enter the university to continue their chosen profession.

Depending on how well the student does in these examinations will determine whether the student will attend an elite school or not. While these examinations are not entirely the determinant of the student's abilities they do demonstrate a student's knowledge of the concepts of the subject.

Moreover, the broad education essential to cultivate a productive work force including the inventiveness in those educated in the system is, I believe, the primary criterion that influences the quality of the product - the educated professional.

In fact most of the inventors I spoke with, a good number of whom were immigrants to the United States, agree that in fact they had to re-educate themselves in the broad learning to function and to be productive.

One of the scientists I interviewed brought up this question: how would you as an engineer (as I am basically a chemical engineer) develop a medical device used in the heart unless you have some idea of the biology of the heart, economics of the health care system, and social and political driving forces that make such a device acceptable in the market place? Or would you just design a device just for the fun of it and sooner or later lose money as no market potential or political acceptance exist for such an invention?