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July 11, 2012 newsworthy

Manufacturing master test

By Carol Coultas

Here’s an opening line that John Karp uses when meeting Maine manufacturers:

“Would you like a chance to get your new products to market up to eight times faster with 60% less risk?”

The question isn’t rhetorical. Since earning a black belt in innovation engineering from the Innovation Engineering Management System, an offshoot of Doug Hall’s Eureka Ranch innovation incubator, Karp has been spending his time helping Maine manufacturers compete in an increasingly global market.

Karp, who is the interim director of Maine Manufacturing Extension Partnership, is only the 22nd person in the country to earn the black belt designation, a testament to his ability to apply algorithms and quantitative analysis tools that can slice and dice their way through a company’s inventory of ideas to find the proposals most likely to succeed. Used by powerhouse companies like Hewlett Packard, Nike and Ford Motor Co., innovation engineering is now available to smaller manufacturers. Karp has already worked with FHC, a neurosurgical products manufacturer in Bowdoin, and CONTECH Engineered Solutions of Saco, which makes products for transportation and infrastructure projects.

Mainebiz caught up with Karp between his MMEP duties and his other role as CEO of Bourgeois Guitars in Lewiston. The following is an edited transcript.

Mainebiz: How did you become an innovation engineer?

John Karp: I learned about the father of innovation, Doug Hall, when reading Inc. around 1990. It was an article on Eureka Ranch, how it was very creative and energy-driven, and I was fascinated; I learned what I could about him. I’ve been in product development for 25 years now and use many of Doug’s ideas. Then, through MMEP, I had the opportunity to do innovation engineering as a consultant ... they sponsored [my participation in] the black belt program.

Was the training extensive?

I attended two multi-day sessions in Ohio preceded by hundreds of hours in homework. It was a total break-out course. The final alone was 20 hours. That’ll tell you how deeply I drank the Kool-Aid.

How do you use it in your MMEP work?

The mission of MMEP is to make U.S. manufacturers more globally competitive and to pursue new products and markets so those companies will be successful. We use ISO, lean manufacturing and other procedures. But in the end, the best production system in the world is not worth that much if the end product is not worth much. Innovation is the key to long-term success. If a company doesn’t have new products in the pipeline, but is instead relying on mature products on the other side of their life cycles, then the company’s future profitability is in jeopardy. We engage a company, sift through ideas, vet ideas and kill off the ones that won’t work. You can say ‘yes, commercialize this,’ or ‘don’t commercialize that.’

Have you seen it work?

Yes. For instance, with CONTECH, we helped them take a very difficult product — I’m sorry, I can’t disclose what it is — to market faster than they would have otherwise. The key was getting them to think outside the box. The great part is this new product can be produced at minimal cost. n

About R&D funding

Gov. Paul LePage's veto of a $20 million bond for R&D this spring was criticized by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers. Many business leaders, well aware that Maine's investment in R&D is one-third of the U.S. average and one-sixth of the New England average, expressed disappointment in the governor's decision.

So it was an obvious question to ask UMaine Chancellor James Page: If he had the chance to sit down with the governor, what would he tell him about the relationship of R&D spending, either through a bond or through the General Fund, to the university system and to Maine businesses?

Page's reply was diplomatic, planting him squarely in the middle of the debate regarding LePage's R&D veto:

“I think everybody understands the value of R&D,” he says. “The question is: Are we getting the right return?

“So in terms of the governor or any political leadership demanding a very thorough account of how these dollars are being spent — whether they route directly to a business or whether they route to a nonprofit or a university, and then whether the seed money provided to R&D eventually returns through businesses to the taxpayer — you could make good cases that both are appropriate.

What is critical is that we have a good solid accountability, because if we are going to continue to ask the taxpayers for more and more money, we have to show that it issues in patents and intellectual property that further more research, or which brings more money into the state in various forms … and in jobs. Are they actually being commercialized and turned into jobs? In a small state like ours, where $20 million is a lot of money, I think we need to be right down at the level of demonstrating that in 'Place A' that spending created 25 jobs and in 'Place B' it created a patent that will create some business opportunities and in 'Place C' it preserved the ability of an industry to stay in its lead position.”

Implicit in Page's answer is the notion that recipients of R&D funding need to do a better job of showing Mainers how there has been a solid return on R&D investment. He cited the composites industry and wind power technology as two R&D areas that seem to offer tangible benefits to Maine industries.

“Take offshore wind power,” he says. “This could be an enormous economic boon, if and when it's fully developed in the Gulf of Maine — of course doing it in a way that protects the fisheries, which are of equal importance to our state's economy. Assuming that is done, the work that has been done and is being done at [University of Maine's Advanced Structures & Composites Center] … that work could drive enormous, enormous investments to the benefit of this state.”

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