Master Class 5: 'The Art and Science of Invention''

Guest Speaker: Dr Kevin Byron, Enterprise Education Coordinator, Educational and Staff Unit

Date and Time: Wednesday 12 May 2010, 5pm to 7pm

Venue: Bancroft Road Teaching Room 3.01, Mile End Campus (click here for directions)

Summary:

This masterclass will explore what was defined by the previous speaker - Professor John Irven - as ‘the fuzzy front end’ of the innovation process - the place where new ideas arise. New technologies and applications of technologies come about through the harnessing of discoveries of new phenomena and effects, and through combinations of disparate ideas that already exist. Whilst discovery is always a matter of chance it requires ‘a prepared mind’ to be witness to it as the great scientist Louis Pasteur noted. Similarly the process of combining existing ideas, though at first sight less serendipitous than discovery, is dependent on finding the right ideas from many to combine in the first place. So the challenge in this case is in finding those rare combinations of ideas that will produce something bigger than the sum of their parts. In addition to the discipline and critical thinking skills required to do good research, identifying new discoveries and developing applications from existing ideas also requires a good deal of creative skill. Whilst everyone is naturally creative we all have the potential to further develop our creativity, and this master-class will explore the nature and nurture of creativity with a particular emphasis on invention. Tools and techniques will be described that can help nurture creative thinking leading to new inventions, and there will be lots of opportunity to practice some of these tools in small teams in the session. The masterclass will also describe some aspects of the timing of new inventions and an extraordinary approach to invention pioneered many years ago in Russia that has recently gained worldwide interest.

About the speaker:

Kevin Byron received his Ph.D in Applied Physics from the University of Hull and pursued a career in research in photonics for some twenty five years. During this time he was an honorary visiting lecturer at the University of Glasgow, a visiting Fellow at the University of Salford, member of an EPSRC college and was elected to Fellowship of the Institute of Physics. He was also involved with a number of universities in collaborative research work with industry and supervised a number of EPSRC ‘CASE’ studentships. Whilst in industry he received awards for his innovative work with the publication of over sixty patents and received first prize in a national competition for the most innovative use of CAD. Throughout his time in industry he developed a growing interest in education and training and in particular creative skills, and the award of a three year NESTA Fellowship in 2002 enabled him to set up his own training consultancy to pursue these interests. During this period he was also an honorary visiting fellow to The Higher Education Academy (HEA) (physical sciences branch) where he also developed a resource for academics for teaching enterprise skills. In 2008 he joined the student development team at the University of Leicester. Working with the science faculties he developed and presented a number of research skills workshops and resources for postgraduates as part of the roll-out of the Robert’s skills agenda. He has presented his research in creativity at several international conferences in Italy, Canada, the USA, Qatar, South Africa and the UK. He is a co-author of the book 'The Alchemy of Innovation' and also authored two monographs on ‘Inventing and Problem-Solving’ and ‘Counter-intuition’ published by the Institute for Cultural Research. He is currently the enterprise education coordinator at Queen Mary, University of London and a free-lance trainer specialising in research skills, creative problem solving, personal effectiveness and enterprise for higher education and business.

This master class is open to all Science and Engineering PhD students and research staff at Queen Mary. To indicate your attendance, please email impactqm@eecs.qmul.ac.uk with the title or number of the masterclass.