Business Opportunities Weblog

April 11, 2008 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

Popular Mechanics:

He’s certainly best known for inventing the Segway in 2001, but before that Dean Kamen had already come up with a stair-climbing wheelchair called the iBOT—not to mention lightweight medical devices to grant mobility to cancer and diabetes patients. He’s been developing breakthrough technologies for improving lives in the poorest parts of the world ever since, racking up 440 patents and a secure status as one of America’s top engineers.

But his own proudest accomplishment might be founding FIRST Robotics, a competition in which teenagers build robots charged with performing complex tasks under pressure.

I understand that you’ve been traveling to quite a few regional competitions for FIRST. What are your impressions?

I’ve flown literally 26,000 miles around the world in the past few weeks. I went up and back to Israel, which is 6000 miles in each direction. Then I got back for two days, and flew 5000 miles to Hawaii. And I’ve been to at least a dozen other regionals in the prior weekends all around the country, in San Diego, Florida, Michigan, Okalahoma, Kansas. I can’t make to most of them, anymore—we have nine or 10 or 11 per weekend.

You started FIRST in 1989 to attract kids to science and engineering. Since then, we’ve seen the rise of Silicon Valley, and geek culture has become cool—or at least mainstream. Do you see the situation as improved?

There are little pockets of geek culture, as you mention—in Silicon Valley, for example—but unfortunately the general trend is very troubling. Women and minorities, in particular, are even further removed from the exciting opportunities in technology. Our culture convinces them at ever younger ages that science and engineering are not in fact for them. For many kids in this media age, literally all of their role models come from the worlds of entertainment and sports.

I think it’s pretty clear that in a free society—and ours is about the freest you can find—you get more of what you celebrate. Sporting competitions seem to be what we obsess over, frankly. So if we can put engineering, science, technology into a format of healthy, fun competition, we can attract all sorts of kids that might not see the kind of activity we do as accessible or rewarding.

Read more.

Photo by Popular Mechanics.

In Creativity, Innovation, Profiles | 1 Comment