When innovation is being discussed, it is often associated with some new technology and a revolution that changes the process. There are workshops that link creativity with innovation and also make it seem like that it requires some unique and expensive technology to implement. Whatever the case might be, one thing is clear that innovation brings great improvement to the process, quality of life and does revolutionize the standard way of doing things.
One great example is Eli Terry’s innovation in clock design. Clock design and making used to be a very difficult art. First you had to cut your gears very precisely – remember, no matter how accurate your cutting machine is to make gears out of wood/metal, there are some tolerances. These tolerances can add up when you finally assemble everything into a design. So the design has to have some slack. However, if you have slack then your clock keeps time with some slack and then customers do not buy your product because it has so much inaccuracy in keeping time.
The way most manufacturers responded was to make the things with greater and greater accuracy so that they could eliminate most of the errors. BUT, and this is a big but, accuracy at these tolerances require expensive machines, rejection of inaccurate parts and attention to detail – all of which comes at a huge cost. This made the clocks very expensive.
The critical element in clock making was the depthing: a process of holding all the gears in place and then placing them gently on the main clock plate, very carefully and painstakingly. A critical piece is the escapement mechanism (that can be seen on the video below).
Eli’s innovation was to move the escapement wheel outside the whole mechanism so that it can be easily changed/adjusted and also make a pin that would allow this escapement wheel to be adjusted.
This changed clock making.
Now, your tolerances could be much easier, the clock could be adjusted as it got old and made the manufacturing easier. Thus increasing the “slop” made the clock making a less precise operation but one which could be adjusted.
Thus, innovation can also be defined as small changes that have big impacts irrespective of the process, technology or money required for implementation.
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