SIEMENS

Where do ideas come from? That’s a good question,” says inventor Charlie Coushaine in his office at his home in Rindge, New Hampshire. Spread out in front of him are thumb-sized halogen bulbs for car headlights, light- emitting diode (LED) lamps for cars, and LEDs for key chains, for the kitchen, and even for the shower.

“You definitely have to have an open mind for new ideas,” says Coushaine. But for him, this is obviously not a problem. He’s one of the most productive inventors at Osram Sylvania, a Danvers, Massachusetts-based subsidiary of Osram, the German manufacturer of lighting products. For almost twenty years, first at the company’s site in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, and later in Massachusetts, he has developed halogen lamps and LED bulbs for vehicles and for domestic use. Among his creations are the first standardized halogen lamp for car headlights and a turbine-powered light that can be used in the shower.

Coushaine majored in mechanical engineering at Northeastern University in Boston in the 1980s. After receiving his degree, he first worked for a company that focused on automation technology. In 1988 he joined Sylvania, which was acquired by Siemens subsidiary Osram in 1993. There, his first assignment was to design high-speed automated equipment for putting light bulbs together.

But in 1993 the company was looking for volunteers to design a new mechanism for aiming automobile headlights. Coushaine answered the call — not because he was no longer interested in automation technology, but because he felt compelled to try something new. “Every now and then you have to take some risks,” he believes.

The greatest success that resulted from this career change so far is probably the development of Joule, an LED taillight system — and the world’s first standardized LED system for the automotive industry. Coushaine worked together with a team to develop this highly successful system. Its individual components — a reflective cavity, a semiconductor crystal, wire bonds, a leadframe, and a socket — are configured for maximum efficiency and output. “This systematic approach was the greatest innovation for Joule,” says Coushaine.

Like all LEDs, the Joule system produces a very intense beam, lights up instantly, has long life, and saves power. But because it was also standardized in line with the “plug and play” principle, it could be employed in a wide range of car models. Today the second generation of Joule taillights, which provide more luminosity in smaller bulbs, is in large-scale production. They are being used in a number of automotive models all over the world, including the Ford Mustang and models from Audi, BMW, and Volkswagen. In 2007 Coushaine and his team received the Osram Innovation Award for Joule.

Coushaine’s expertise in the LED field was well known within the company even before he received the award. A couple of years before the completion of the Joule project, a colleague from the marketing department asked him whether he could design a self-adhesive LED lamp that customers could attach at any spot they wished in a car’s interior. Customer surveys had shown a potential market for such a device. Coushaine said yes, even though he actually had no time to do an additional project. Nonetheless, he managed to design the lamp on weekends. His homemade concept design became the “Dot-It,” a small round light that can be turned on and off by briefly pressing its surface. Millions of units have been sold worldwide to date. Coushaine worked on it for several years parallel to the Joule project. “I’m always working on several projects at the same time,” he says. In 2006 he was granted the Osram Star Award, primarily for his clever design, for which he holds a patent.

Creative Brainstorming. After its success with “Dot-It,” Osram Sylvania created the “New Ventures Group,” which designs lighting products for residential use, and asked Coushaine to join. For Coushaine, this meant that he would have to switch gears to the design and development of LED products for the consumer market. “As a result of this change, I now work for only two or three months on most projects. It’s much more playful — I can let off steam creatively,” he says.

He usually begins by designing a model on his computer — often at home — and then discusses it with his team. The draft is then sent along with detailed functional specifications to contractors in China, who build the device and often include changes to the original design. “That’s not surprising. They are manufacturing experts, and they regularly come up with design changes, which we are open to as long as the specified functionality does not change. They are even listed as co-authors on some patents,“ Coushaine says.

With his creativity running freely, Coushaine has come up with some surprising solutions, such as a table runner with LED lighting, folding LED flashlights, and an LED lamp integrated into a shower head. The latter was a response to the fact that in many homes the shower area is insufficiently lit. Coushaine’s solution produces electricity by means of a tiny generator driven by a turbine. The turbine in turn is driven by water flow, which is hardly impacted by this function.

An LED Lamp with a Loudspeaker. In this fashion, Coushaine has come up with 159 inventions so far and has been awarded 184 patents and 59 protective rights families. And the ideas keep coming — for example, for an LED lamp with an integrated speaker that can wirelessly receive music like an MP3 player. “Retail chains have already expressed interest — you could, for example, play different music in men’s and women’s dressing rooms,” he says. Other ideas include battery-operated wind chimes lit up with LEDs and a device that sterilizes cutting boards with ultraviolet light.

Where do all these ideas come from? “They come from everywhere,” Coushaine, who was named a 2010 “Siemens Inventor of the Year,” says with a smile. “They are formed during conversations at the dinner table, in the bathroom, during informal chats with colleagues — and of course they also come from supervisors and customer surveys. But nothing works if you don’t have the courage to try something new.“

Even when Coushaine goes hiking, he generates new ideas — and he goes hiking often. Coushaine has a passion for Geocaching, a kind of GPS-guided treasure hunt that is open to people of all ages, in which various objects are hidden and their coordinates are published on the Internet. But merely finding the hiding place is not enough. Once you’re there, you have to find the little treasure chest itself — which may be concealed in a tree or under a bridge. “We’ve hidden a box close to our house as well. The theme of the box, which is filled with small items, is of course ‘light,’” Coushaine confides.