“Discovery is seeing what everyone else has seen but thinking what no one else has thought.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

I get around a lot and see many new ideas. I particularly love seeing common, everyday, ideas repurposed into unexpected products or uses.

3D vision systems have come into their own in recent years with many industrial applications. Companies like Fanuc are doing cool stuff such as random bin picking. The Kinect, for the Microsoft Xbox game console, allows the gamer to control the system by moving their arms and body. Someone at Yaskawa Motoman saw this and thought “hmmm…. Perhaps we can use this to control an industrial robot.” They developed a collaborative robot based on the $150 Kinect system.

Ink jet coding systems have gotten better but they still have a well deserved reputation for being messy, sometimes illegible, and touchy to use. About 15 years ago a German engineer, seeing how trouble free his H-P desktop printer was thought “I wonder why we can’t move the paper under the print head instead of moving the print head over the paper?” From this the Wolke ink jet printer, using H-P printer cartridges was born.

Plant people do this too. Cold glue labelers have many parts that must be cleaned immediately after use. One plant mounted a $350 Kenmore dishwasher next to the labeler. Parts are loaded at disassembly and washed automatically. My first comment was “That is not very industrial.” The manager’s response was “So what? If we have to replace it every year, the time saving is worth many time the cost of the dishwasher.”

A pharma plant used Swiffer mops to clean walls and ceilings between runs. Operators loved them because of their light weight. I had the same comment of “Not industrial” and got the same answer: “Great product and cheap enough that we don’t care how long they last.”

Look around you. There is probably something that you are seeing every day but, because it is in a different context you may not be seeing how you can use it in the plant.