.Dust

Just think about innovation.

If we look at the def­i­n­i­tion of inno­va­tion on Merriam-​Webster online dic­tio­nary, here is what we get:

1. : the intro­duc­tion of some­thing new.
2. : a new idea, method, or device.

It’s quite sim­ple, isn’t it.

Some­how when we think about inno­va­tion we always think to some sci­en­tist work­ing in his lab full of expen­sive equip­ment. We feel like inno­va­tion is not sim­ple at all.

Yes­ter­day night I was cook­ing some past. I do like cook­ing and I have a few cook­ing pans on fire. One to boil water for pasta, another with some eggs in it, and the last one fry­ing some bacon for Car­bonara pasta.

I was cook­ing on autopi­lot and when bacon was ready I did not notice the han­dle was too close to the other pan and got very, very hot.

I hurt myself, noth­ing serious.

The main pur­pose of the han­dle on the cook­ing pan is to avoid these kind of prob­lems, but it did not work since the han­dle was too close to another source of heat, the other cook­ing pan.

The orig­i­nal han­dle con­cept works for the major­ity of uses, but it could not avoid me to get hurt by heat. Since its orig­i­nal design, it did not change much. There are some fancy cook­ing pans with ther­mome­ter on the han­dle to check food tem­per­a­ture, but that’s more related to the food than to the safety of the user.

Yes, you know that han­dles can get hot and you should always use some­thing to han­dle those pans. This is a ratio­nal thought. You have to think about it and not always you think, spe­cially when you have three pans run­ning at the same time.

There can be inno­va­tion in cook­ing pans? Obvi­ously, yes.

We can think of:

• Hav­ing pans made of effi­cient mate­r­ial that will opti­mize energy spending.
• Dif­fer­ent shape of pans for dif­fer­ent food type.
• New non­stick material.
• Method to make cook­ing faster and better.

As you see, there is lot of room for inno­va­tion in pans. Most of the things I have writ­ten will take a lot of effort into development.

I was just think­ing about an easy one.

I was just won­der­ing why nobody has ever thought of hav­ing han­dles that can change color if they heat.

The usual nice look­ing black if every­thing is fine. Yel­low if it’s hot, but still man­age­able, and red if it’s really hot.

Any­way, Car­bonara pasta was great.

Related posts:

1. Inno­va­tion and Senior People
2. Sources of uncon­ven­tional innovation
3. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Innovation
4. The four dri­vers of innovation
5. The quest for Web innovation