Pictures of the Future Fall 2006
Inventors & Innovators – Dr. Osman Ahmed
Siemens Building Technologies, Buffalo Grove, Illinois (U.S.A.)
Bringing Buildings to Life
Osman Ahmed sees his life as the journey of a man who’s always wanted to do something new. That’s why he stopped studying for a doctorate in nuclear technology in the 1980s and began learning about building system technologies instead. "I adapted my career path to a market situation because it was clear that no nuclear power plants were going to be built in the U.S. for some time," he recalls.
Ahmed is convinced that innovations can only be successful on the market if they’re developed closely in line with customers’ needs. One of his early successes occurred with climate control systems while he was working at Landis & Gyr Powers near Chicago. At the time, the systems used extraction hoods (the kind used for work with viruses) that were constantly operated at full power. Ahmed’s team developed a system that automatically reduced power to the hoods during work breaks, saving a great deal of energy. It wasn’t exactly a major feat, but it did demonstrate Ahmed’s ability to develop solutions offering a high level of customer utility.
In 1997, Ahmed first became interested in the area that would become the focus of his career. "I was at a conference when I heard something about micro-electromechanical systems, or MEMS. I thought it had to be possible to use them to regulate building systems as well," he says. MEMS technology exploits the special properties of silicon, which is used to make computer chips and can function as a sensor for measuring pressure or, when covered with certain coatings, to detect various gases.
In 1999, Ahmed was thrilled to learn that Siemens would acquire the company he was working for, as he knew that access to a major corporation’s resources would enable him to develop marketable MEMS products. His idea was to put more functions on chips than on existing devices, which were around the size of a pack of cards. He also theorized that integrated circuits and tiny radio antennas could network such sensors into an intelligent system that would measure and control things like building temperature, analyze light intensity or measure the carbon dioxide in ambient air. "The result was a decentralized, self-regulating control system that registers energy consumption and derives an energy conservation strategy based on collected data," Ahmed explains. "And the associated radio technology eliminates the need for wiring," he adds. A one-year development period planned for the first product begins this fall.
"Development is only fun in a free, independent environment," says Ahmed, a father of two who has studied in Bangladesh, Canada and the U.S. "But it must be a controlled freedom, one that clearly focuses on customers’ needs, not personal technical interests."
Andreas Kleinschmidt
Innovators
How and Why Innovations Originate. Many management books focus on the theory of innovation processes, strategies and methods—but to what extent can such theories explain the origins of innovations? We’ve put together 14 brief portraits that present Siemens inventors and innovators and their experiences. We explored their personalities and examined the efforts they made to overcome obstacles. In the end, we found that there’s no standard recipe for innovation success. Some innovations result from the pure persistence of visionary pioneers who think out of the box, while others are born of a consistent approach that involves analysis and continual process improvement. Still others bear fruit because inventors incorporated customers into the process at an early stage, especially in their own regions, or worked together with external partners. What all our innovators have in common, however, is a propensity to think independently and the need for a culture that permits errors and promotes employee creativity. Above all, such a culture must always consider the utility of new ideas for customers.