To follow is the third in a series of blogs on the value of participating in the TI Innovation Challenge Design Contest.
When thinking of “rock stars” in the computing and engineering world, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs always top the list. Though vastly different in their style and approach, neither could be contained within a “box.” Lucky for us, their inventions – from personal computers to the iPhone – truly have transformed how we live, work and play.
So, where will the next innovation icon come from? While no one knows for sure, a safe guess is that their successors will likely emerge from makerspaces or hackerspaces, do-it-yourself communities where students create, invent, and learn from one another.
An advocate of empowering student creativity, Adam Munich, first place winner of TI's 2013 Innovation Design contest, championed such a space for students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York following his win in 2013. The win not only provided the exposure needed to gain the backing of RIT for a hackerspace lab, it also propelled Adam to pursue his own entrepreneurial venture.
Adam’s winning project, the “Improved Tesla Coil,” is a massive, eight-foot-tall device that operates at 10,000 volts. The coil produces an incredibly high volume of electricity, which in his demonstration of the device, Adam combined with music to create a light show.
Watch a demonstration of Adam’s winning project:
(Please visit the site to view this video)
Following his win, Adam began to see his dreams materialize before his eyes. First, he landed a coveted Thiel Fellowship (created by the co-founder and former CEO of PayPal), which awards $100,000 annually to 20 people under the age of 20 to help them launch businesses. He has since raised a total of $300,000 in venture capital funding to launch Aperture Systems, his fifth run at a start-up (the first was creating original video games written in C source code at the age of 10). Focused on redefining radiography, Aperture’s portable x-ray system leverages modern industry advancements in power semiconductors, lithium-ion batteries and embedded computers, while also including a new, improved x-ray tube that Adam invented.
No stranger to TI, Adam learned at an early age (he is currently 20) how to use TI circuits to build his early design prototypes. His current venture, the portable x-ray system, includes TI voltage regulators and op amps. When he saw the details for the 2013 TI Innovation Challenge Design Contest online, entering was a no brainer.
Admittedly, Adam was not a typical RIT student, setting himself apart early through a variety of mischievous antics designed to draw attention to his ideas. In a YouTube video following his win of the 2013 TI Design Award, RIT President Bill Destler candidly described him as a “pain in the butt,” recalling how he got into trouble by hacking the RIT security systems just to show how easy they were to break into. When Adam wanted to demo his Tesla Coil at the university’s “Imagine RIT” event showcasing student designs, he was told he couldn’t turn it on due to safety reasons. Ultimately, he conducted and videotaped a demo in a parking lot behind the robotics club facility.
“I guess we showed him,” Destler chuckled in the video, adding that, in reality, “he showed us” when he later won the TI design competition, taking home the $10,000 cash prize out of 400 entries. “The awards panel at TI was astonished both at the sophistication of the design and the innovation it showed to actually produce a working model,” Destler said, “and, they were even more astonished to learn that he was only a freshman."
“I think in the wake of this experience, we need to be willing to ask ourselves whether we are getting in the way of talented students like Adam or recognizing their potential and finding ways to support them,” he added.
In the end, Adam says his passion to be an “inventor” is fueled by fun as much as any award or other form of recognition. “I learn by looking at things and taking them apart. My parents did what they could to prevent me from burning down the house. I made my first X-ray machine at 15. They had a ball of fire on their hands – literally.”
To academia, Adam encourages this kind of freewheeling creativity if it is to produce the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
Think you could be the next innovation icon? Now is your time to find out. The TI Innovation Challenge Design Contest 2015 is open; submit your design project using two or more TI analog ICs and a TI Processor by May 24, 2015. Register here for your chance to be the next innovation icon!