Electronicstalk

There's no escaping the fact that electronics has made an inestimable impact on our lives. Whether we're at home, in an office, a factory or a car, there's an electronic component or system that's playing its part to make our lives easier, more productive or more fun!

But look closely at the role of these devices or systems and you'll notice that they all have one thing in common. They have all, in one fashion or other, replaced a job that was formerly being handled perfectly well by a purely mechanical device.

The most obvious example is, of course, the music player. The cumbersome spinning disks, the needles and the horns have now all been pushed aside by small portable hand held units that store songs in solid-state devices.

In the car, it's the same story. Mechanical throttle bodies have been replaced by electronic throttle controls, which, when regulated by an electronic signal from an engine management system, can offer an alternative, more precise, means of controlling air flow than their mechanical counterparts.

In the factory, it's no different. Look at industrial platform scales. Whereas once they were completely mechanical, today the bearings and pivots of old have been replaced by load cells hooked up to a computer that runs software to make measurements more effectively and more accurately than before.

I could go one. But I won't. I'm sure that you could also think up many other instances where a traditional mechanical device or system has been relegated to the scrapheap when a new electronic counterpart came along.

Now while I'd be the first to admit that electronic systems do offer some advantages over their mechanical counterparts, they are in essence, no more than sophisticated versions of the same things. They simply represent a solution to the same engineering problem using a different type of technology.

And in the future, I'm sure that we'll see all sorts of newer technologies deployed in systems that will send many of our existing electronic products the same way as their mechanical forefathers. But whatever these new products are built from, if they are simply redressing an old problem with a different technology, they cannot possibly be described as truly innovative, can they?

For whatever type of engineering you practise - be it a mechanical, electrical, civil or process - to be a true innovator you first have to find a problem that has no existing solution and then strive to develop one with whatever you can find in your technology toolbox.

And it doesn't matter whether you do that with mechanical components, electrical components or 3D brain cells grown in a Petri dish - because whatever technology you choose to realise your design with - the result will inevitably be truly innovative. Simply because it won't just be a re-invention of the wheel.