Pictures of the Future Fall 2006
Inventors & Innovators – Dr. Raymond Liao
Technology-to-Business-Center, Berkeley, USA
Wireless Factory Flexibility
A lot of people would like to get their first job the way Raymond Liao did. "I had been doing research at Columbia University in New York for five years and had almost finished my doctorate," Liao (36) recalls. "Then a stranger called me out of the blue and asked if I’d like to work for Siemens." Liao said yes, as the job offered him the opportunity to create a product based on the results of his research on transmission quality in wireless communication networks.
However, when the New Economy bubble burst in 2000, network provider investment dropped dramatically, and with it the chances of Liao’s development being used in the telecommunications industry. He therefore began to search for another area in which to apply his skills. He soon hit on the booming industrial automation sector.
There was strong demand for reliable WLAN solutions for factories and production lines. After all, the ability to transmit data for machine control and monitoring systems via radio waves would mean that plant operators could stop investing in expensive cable connections and maintainance of clean surface contacts for moving vehicles—particularly in dusty, dirty or damp areas. Cables were also completely unsuitable for rotating machine parts—and wireless solutions simply made factories more flexible.
But conventional WLAN solutions were unable to guarantee data packet transfer rates in the millisecond range, which is crucial to effective monitoring and control of industrial machines. A command that takes too long to reach its destination can, in the worst case, cause an entire production line to shut down.
"Together with my colleagues at Siemens Automation and Drives in Karlsruhe and Nuremberg, as well as marketing and sales experts, we defined what customers wanted," says Liao. "We found that if our industrial WLAN (I-WLAN) could guarantee the data transfer rates, it would give us a unique selling point that would set us apart from our competitors.
" With this in mind, they went to work. And after only six months, a prototype was ready, with a finished product on the market six months after that (see Pictures of the Future, Fall 2005, Wireless Wizardry ). "We’re now well ahead of the competition in the I-WLAN premium segment and our sales are growing at a rate of 200 to 300 % per year," says Liao, who is now one of the directors of Venture Technology at the Siemens Technology-to-Business Center in Berkeley. He’s also constantly on the lookout for innovative ideas from outstanding young researchers. "It’s like detective work," he says, "but finding applications for innovations is exactly what I enjoy the most about my job. When we find something interesting, we establish direct contact with the people involved. We’re so well-known by now that people even send us unsolicited summaries of their work." In this regard, Liao often feels like a prospector panning for gold—and the nuggets he’s looking for are ideas. It’s even gotten to the point where he’s become the stranger who calls up a talented student and offers him or her a job.
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.