RadioBanter - View Single Post

November 10th 04, 09:18 AM

(Hans K0HB) wrote in message . com...
(Brian Kelly) wrote

Encouraging innovation isn't tough --- in my engineering group I ask
each engineer to spend 10% of their time (4 hours per week) as "PBI"
time ("Partially Baked Idea"). This is time to pursue personally
selected pet projects unrelated to their primary tasking, even unrelated
to our groups tasking. Once a quarter we hold a one day "off site in
blue jeans" meeting where individuals can grab the spotlight and "show
and tell" their PBI to the rest of the group. The effect on creativity
is marvelous, and also a great tool for identifying "up and comers"
whose creativity might be otherwise masked by the day-to-day drudge of
assigned tasking.

And they get paid for every minute they spend on their brainfarts.

Brian sees them as "brainfarts" and our company sees the program as a
particularly effective source of new product ideas. So much so that
in the past three fiscal years 18% of our new-product revenues had
their origins in the PBI-incubator.

Damned RIGHT they get paid for every minute, and it's money well
spent.

That's all very nice, congratulations on your 18%.

I've worked in any number of commercial engineering enviornments in
which *everything* which crossed the the shipping dock outbound to a
customer was the result of all-hands new product development
brainfarting sessions starting with a completely blank sheet of paper.
No innovation no checkee every time and there's nothing unusual about
any of it.

Since you brought it up let's cut the crap and do some meat &
potatoes. What's any of it have to do with diverting ARRL funds from
their spectrum defense fund into this nebulous "funding" of innovation
in *amateur* radio concept you've proposed? How, exactly, would that
work Hans?

73, de Hans, K0HB

w3rv