#engineering-innovation

#engineering-innovation

Shelton rejects the romanticized notion of invention as unconstrained creativity. He explains that he is not a fan of "blue sky" brainstorming sessions detached from operational constraints. In his view, unconstrained ideation often produces shallow ideas that collapse under real-world scrutiny. Instead, he deliberately over-constrains the problem. Technical constraints. Regulatory constraints. Cost constraints. Operational bottlenecks. Competitive barriers. Existing prior art. All of it goes into the box.

"Each robot that previous world record-holders has done has kind of focused on one new thing," Patrohay tells The Verge.