Post Learning Journey Reflection: 3M (Part 3)

In my third and final part, I will be responding to the questions discussed by the engineers and plant managers from 3M.

Let’s start with the first one.

What are the innovations you have experienced with since childhood?

Well, the innovation that I definitely got to see for myself would be the mobile phone. When I was a toddler, I would remember how my father would use a pager and most of the family members did not even have a mobile phone back then. They figured that if a mobile phone was going to be like a brick and even heavier than our house’s phone unit then there would be no point.

Things really started to change when Nokia came about. It was a brand that offered a phone that was simple to use, had reasonable battery life. It was the killer product because this time, it already had the killer app, the phone function. Soon, we began to see everyone have it.

Fast forward to 2007 when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, mobile phones took a great leap forward as well. Steve actually envisioned that the mobile phone would eventually become a device that would meld a music player, internet browsing and a phone. That was what culminated into the iPhone we see today.

Now, as I look back, I am really struck by how the phone has changed. From its development as a need for easy communication, the phone has actually become almost part of us. It has become somewhat an external organ we possess. It helps us send out text messages; it helps us keep track of our schedule by functioning as an alarm. I am sure most Blackberry people would even say that they cannot live without their Blackberry.

Of course, I wasn’t born in the era of the car which in itself is a truly remarkable innovation as well. From books I have read as well as the Internet, I chanced upon this quote by Henry Ford, founder of Ford. He said this.

“If I had asked my customers, what they want. They would have said that they wanted a faster horse.”

How true this statement is. Most consumers actually don’t really know what they want. Take the PDA or Palm Top as an example. It used to be seen as a great and awesome device, kind of like the iPod. But look where it went, it eventually got rendered obsolete because its functions were soon available in phones. It is at times like this, when one realises that true innovation that can have longevity as a product is extremely difficult as well.

Let’s get back to Ford.

Ford was a revolutionary in terms of how he pioneered the assembly line style of manufacturing a car. He made it so easy and so cheap to get a car assembled quickly. It is partly due to him that we see cars zooming past us daily on the roads and expressways.

What’s more, Ford’s innovation doesn’t end there.

A Ford Model A

His car designs also revealed his mind and insight towards his car manufacturing. Most of Ford’s models were actually easy to repair. Jay Elliot, an ex-marketing executive of Apple Inc. was a great fan of Ford’s cars because Ford produced such clear and simple instruction manuals that would teach you how to replace a part. All this would not have been possible if Ford had not put in effort towards designing a car that had such a simple instruction manual.

So it turns out that innovation isn’t so simple. It actually takes time and great focus.

What are some interesting project ideas / areas of research or even hands-on experiments that you think can be explored in future learning of sciences & math in the school?

One interesting area of research which I think can be embarked on would be adhesives. After all, 3M is a company which specializes in adhesives. We could begin working on how to develop green adhesives that make use of waste materials. That would be an environmentally friendly solution towards creating useful products.

We could also research on the use of flexible circuits and see whether the flexi-circuits can be used for more applications, perhaps even in mobile phones or to create flexible devices.

The 3M plant that we got to visit

Resources

- http://solutions.3m.com.sg/3MContentRetrievalAPI/BlobServlet?locale=en_US&lmd=1302203019000&assetId=1273680527699&assetType=MMM_Image&blobAttribute=ImageFile