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Most recently renowned for the Segway Human Transporter, Dean Kamen holds more than 150 patents on such other revolutionary inventions as a shoebox-sized dialysis machine, a stair climbing wheelchair called the IBOT Mobility System and his "Project Slingshot," a water purification system that was named a runner-up for "coolest invention of 2003" by Time magazine. The founder and president of DEKA Research & Development Corporation, Kamen is a tireless advocate for science and the need to bring first-world technology to the third world. Chief Gartner Fellow and group vice president Daryl Plummer spoke with Mr. Kamen in his New Hampshire office about the differences between invention and innovation, and Kamen's dream of changing the world. Interview conducted 30 October 2003
I was a comic book artist for a short while, so I was interested to find out that your father is Jack Kamen, a comic book artist. D.C. Comics... Dean Kamen: Oh yes. Do you have any of the old ones? Plummer: No, I don't actually. My mother threw out a lot of stuff when I left home. Kamen: Let me make it worse. My brother and I had the whole collection of original Mad magazines, signed by Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, the publisher and the editor in the early days. Stacks of them. My mother throws them away. She threw them all away. They're gone. So I have been buying all the original artwork that he did in the old days of comics, and every time I get one, my father says, "They paid me $25 a week to make those. I wasn't even good back then." Plummer: Did having a comic-drawing father drive you into this business? Or did you have to overcome that to get in? Kamen: Until a few years ago, my answer — and I believed it to be true then — was that I can't draw a straight line with an edge because I don't have my father's skill. I didn't get any of my perspective or drive or inspiration from my father. I love my father, but we couldn't be more different. Then, a few years ago, a woman from Vanderbilt University who studies industrial psychology asked to talk with me about my organization. And she says, not as a question, but as a matter of fact statement, "So, I assume you do what you do mostly because of the influence of your father." I said, "No, he's an artist." And she said, "Well, that's what I mean. That what you got from your father is that essentially he's an entrepreneur. He's a self-employed, commercial artist. He doesn't work for anybody. He works for himself."
So she goes on for five minutes basically explaining to me that I am what I am because I got this influence from my father, which made complete sense to me. But until she said it, I would say to you, "No, I'm not." I now will tell you that I believe that in a weird way I am like my father. Plummer: What did you dream of growing up to be when you were a kid? Did you want to be a fireman, a baseball player, a rap artist, what? Kamen: I don't remember ever thinking I wanted to be the fireman or the policeman. I just remember thinking school was humiliating and intimidating and frustrating. I hated school. I hated every aspect of school. I don't like people telling me what to do. I didn't like teachers judging me. There was no part of school that I liked. And I just tried to get through it each day and get away. Plummer: But you are obviously a well-educated man. Kamen: I always say to kids that I never did well in school. And it's true I never graduated from college, so it's true I am un-degreed. But I don't believe I am uneducated. I worked really hard at getting an education. I spent more time and effort thinking about things that are important than most kids do. I just didn't think about them in the context that fit into the boxes that they want to measure you by. So I think an education is not only important, it is the most important thing you can do with your life. Plummer: Let me take you in a slightly different direction. In Atlanta, where I live, we see a lot of Segways — in the Hartsfield Airport, on the streets with the police...
If every city was like Atlanta, Segway LLC would be happy right now. Plummer: How is it working for the people who are using them? What feedback have you have been getting? Kamen: That I'd love to answer. If we have any unhappy clients, they're certainly very happy about it. How many products do you know where after the people buy the product, they start Web sites and fan clubs and write music? The cult around the Segway HT is unbelievable. Plummer: Are you able to keep up with demand? Has the demand changed in the last few months? Kamen: Unfortunately we're very able to keep up with demand because it's an extraordinary technology, but changing people's attitudes, getting legal acceptance, getting people to really adopt it and see that they can save time and save money and save the environment, it's going to take more time than we thought. Plummer: How has the recent recall affect what's going on there? Kamen: Like any recall, I think you just get through it. I think we came out of it stronger than when we went into it because people did the right thing. We found a way to improve our product and we did, and we did it at no charge to the user. Plummer: Where do your ideas come from, Dean? You say the Segway came from the IBOT — the wheelchair that can walk up stairs — but what drives the introduction of a new product? Is it just innovative technology ideas? Kamen: Never. New ideas in technology are literally a dime-a-dozen, or cheaper than that. Technology is moving so quickly that computing is now essentially free. So what you can do with technology now that you couldn't do before is come up with new things which we could call inventions.
So it's not new ideas necessarily. Kamen: Here's an example. When I get a new patent these days, the patent number is 6 million something. When I got my first patents, they were numbered 3 million something. So in my career, the number of patents has doubled, just in the US, and I can assure you, there have not been 3 million innovations since I started working. To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not three million innovations; there are three million inventions. Plummer: What is that the difference between all those patents and a real innovation? Kamen: A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention. An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, "If we adopt this and make it part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work." And the number of inventions that ever become innovations — I don't know if it's one in a million — but it's pretty damned small. Plummer: Technology is giving us a great opportunity to change society, but I wonder about the difference in impact. I have a wireless headset; it's a wonderful thing. I have a TiVo; it's a wonderful thing. Such inventions have a big impact in the first world, but to the third world, that stuff is fairly useless. Kamen: You picked a good example. I consider the high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate. However, due to Moore's Law in recent years, all the inventions related to data transmission have fallen far short of what their impact could be as innovations if they were properly applied.
How is that? Kamen: I remember when the first Pong game came out. People were glued to their sets doing this eye-hand coordination, watching this thing go up and back. I'll call that a video game. The fact is, it was a crude box, a crude little puck, and it kept you mesmerized for hours and you probably did it with a few thousand bytes of RAM. Today, we go from hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes on a video game that will have almost lifelike characters running around. But in reality, when you do the same eye-hand coordination exercise you did on Pong, instead of pushing the pong up and back with ever-more realistic graphics — the mindless violence of this thing ripping the head off of that thing and squirting blood has no extra value in either making the game an eye-hand coordination challenge or amusing. It's not an innovation. But suppose instead of multiplying the bandwidth by a hundred in the past five years, you left the bandwidth alone, and you figured out how to get the Internet to a hundred times as many people so the four billion people living in Africa and Asia and places where they have no access to information and knowledge, got access. That would be an innovation. I think in some cases inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important. Plummer: Your new water purification machine, to bring clean water to the world, however, is an important use of technology, isn't it? Kamen: If you asked me right now what I'm working on that is a potential innovation, our water purification machine would be one. And the innovation of our water system may be as much the scale at which it happens, as what the technology itself is. We have developed a piece of hardware you can put in an environment where it can be at the point of need and it creates, in real time, the value for the individual end user. If we are right, that little water machine will be a really big innovation. Plummer: You were talking about the Pong games and now you're talking about water purification. A big difference is that the first-world technologies — like Pong — are lifestyle technologies, and the third-world technologies are lifeline technologies. Does that jibe with your philosophy? Kamen: I'll steal that quote, if you don't mind. I'm saying, instead of building vacation homes and second BMWs and trinkets and jewelry, let's make devices to give people water and electricity and education. It's not a question of can you afford them; you can't afford another day without them. If there is a productivity tool and we're using it, and somebody else doesn't have a productivity tool, how are they going to compete? The day the bulldozer was invented, the idea that you're going to make a living with a shovel ended.
I don't see a rush by anyone to help the third world catch up to the first world's standard of living. What do you think is the answer? Kamen: I don't have a good answer. I just can tell you that it is a real problem. We can't live anymore in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, we're all doomed. As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources, except it won't be just gold we're fighting over. It will be water and air. This is not a happy thought. Now look at a different world. You have a good idea. He has a good idea. You give him your idea, and he gives you his idea. Now you have a world where a lot has changed. Each one of you had one idea. Now each one of you has two ideas. I know how to cure cancer. He knows a way to make an engine that doesn't pollute. She knows a way to grow food in sand. You put all the good ideas together, and everybody wins because everybody has more ideas. This world is going to get uglier. We are not going to stop terrorists by taking away nail clippers from grandma at Hartsfield Airport. There are a few billion people out there looking through the window from the outside in, seeing what we have, and they have nothing to lose. We're not going to solve this problem by trying to keep them out. That's nonsense. The solution to this problem is to give people hope. Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That's what technology can do. Plummer: This is a daunting scenario to paint. You said that you wanted to change the culture of America, but you're really talking about changing the culture of the world. How do you expect to do that? Kamen: First we finish F.I.R.S.T. [For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology]. We get F.I.R.S.T into every school in the country. Plummer: The way I understand how your F.I.R.S.T. Robotics Competition works, teams consisting of kids and professionals build a well-designed robot from a kit supplied by F.I.R.S.T., and then thousands of regional winners compete at the finals to see whose robot best succeeds in performing predetermined tasks. The overall idea being to show children, women and minorities that science and engineering are real opportunities for them. Have I got that right? Kamen: Yes. When I started F.I.R.S.T ten years ago, I kept saying, don't you realize our culture is cheating most kids out of having the right perspective by the time they're ten or twelve years old? The goal was make this stuff — science and engineering — fun and exciting. So I wanted a high school gym. I wanted cheerleaders. I wanted some bands. I wanted it to be a competition. I wanted to compete for the minds and hearts of kids.
The next year it was 40 teams and the next year, 80 teams. By the fifth year, it was so big, there was no venue left in the state of New Hampshire to run the event, and we didn't know where we're going to go. Plummer: What happened then? Kamen: People started saying to me, "Dean, you can't grow it anymore. What are you, nuts? There are 20,000 more high schools out there." So I called a little place, you might have heard of them, Disney? And they have a place called Epcot. I got ahold of the senior guy. "Look," I said, "it's not a science fair. It's the most exciting thing you'll ever want to do. We're going to put it on stage, and it's going to be great." We convinced Disney their corporate contribution would be to host the event, which they did for five more years. After last year, Disney said, "Dean, we're doing this five years, it's such a great event, we will do it again, but you can't make it any bigger. Physically, we can't, not even Disney can make a three-day event any bigger than this." So I start calling around, and we find the guys that own another little place you might have heard of, called the Astrodome in Houston. So we convince these guys to donate the Astrodome for three days. It went off great. It was fantastic. The sponsors loved it, the teams loved it, the kids loved it. But now I think, what do we do this year, 2003? By May and June, we signed up more teams, and it looks like we're going to head for 900. It looks like we're going to have 26 cities now, what the hell are we going to do? I get a call from a guy in Atlanta that knows us for a lot of reasons. Atlanta's been great for Segways. Six guys fly up here to New Hampshire from Atlanta. I'm head of the downtown business association, said one. I'm from regional development, said another. I'm from the Chamber of Commerce. I'm from the State Department of Economics. I'm the guy that ran the committee that pulled together the proposal to bring the Olympics to Atlanta.
Plummer: F.I.R.S.T. seems to be one of your successes. What about failures? As an inventor, you're going to be faced with failures every now and then. What's your biggest failure? And what is your biggest worry? Kamen: My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about. My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. 30 years ago I thought ten years was a really long time and I have a lot of ten years left in me. Now I see ten years as a pretty short time and I don't have a lot of ten years left in me. Projects that I'm on now look like big projects, they might take ten years — water, electricity, IBOTs, F.I.R.S.T. Plummer: When you go home at night, are you depressed about all this, or do think there's hope? Kamen: I look at the fact that two-thirds of the human population of this planet does not have reliable access to water or electricity. And it's that same two-thirds, it's that same 4 billion out of 6 billion people that have very little money. At least I can say, here these are productivity tools — generators and water-makers. But we must find a way to deliver them. When we fail to get there quickly, at least I can say to myself, that's because it's a really big problem, and nobody else got there yet. So we'll keep trying. If you're going to fail, you might as well fail at the big ones. That's what keeps us going.  |
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