New Phaistos

Cool for cool's sake is not enough I recently had the honour to participate in a fast-track innovation management course from a prestigious university. This course included many topics: portfolio management, innovation strategy and human factors for innovation, among others. A strong theme throughout the course was to listen to the most important stakeholder: the paying customer. There is much wisdom in this statement when addressed to engineers. Being an engineer by education, I can tell you that engineers see their projects as a craft they take pride in - not a money maker. Consequently, new features are prioritized on the basis of a "cool" factor. The end result of this philosophy is over-engineering, where teams spend lots of energy and time on solving the wrong problems in a wrong way. Think for example a slightly faster train which costs 10 times the expected cost and consumes more power. The technology involved might be breathtaking and involve new materials, propu...