Tomorrow’s World Today® Podcast
It all starts with one idea. Visit the Worlds of Inspiration, Creation, Innovation, and Production as we explore the topics shaping tomorrow’s world. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.
Tomorrow’s World Today® Podcast
Making Makers: Inventionland Education’s Formula for Future Creators
A challenge in American innovation has been growing for years. As manufacturing shifted overseas and fewer students engaged with science, many companies began noticing a talent gap in STEM and STEAM fields.
In this conversation with co-host Greg Costantino, George M. Davison discusses his decade-long effort to address that gap by developing a practical invention education system now reaching schools across more than half the United States.
The approach blends creativity from nature and the arts with structured innovation methods and real-world production skills. The results are clear: students who once struggled find new ways to succeed, top performers take on fresh challenges, and collaboration thrives through three-person invention teams.
Already, classrooms are seeing higher engagement, with some students even licensing their ideas and bringing products to market. Many of these efforts come to life in the Invention Contest, where students showcase their creativity, pitch their prototypes, and gain real-world experience in innovation.
Step by step, this program is helping to strengthen the nation’s pipeline of future innovators. Just as science labs once laid the foundation for new industries, Inventionland Education is preparing today’s students to develop the ideas and solutions that will shape tomorrow.
For more information about the innovations that are shaping tomorrow's world, head to https://tomorrowsworldtoday.com/
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Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of Tomorrow's World Today. Now in this edition, we're going to flip the tables because Greg Constantino who you know because he's on the Discovery Channel's Tomorrow's World Today show with me as co-host he's going to take charge today and he's going to start asking me the questions. So, greg, have at it.
Greg Costantino:All right, George. Well, thanks a lot. I'm super happy to be here and get to talk to you about all of the stuff we're going to talk about today. Tell me about your position with the invention contest and the system.
George M. Davison:Well, that's a decade of work. We started a long time ago starting to think about how we could inspire our youth to get more into the field of science and invention, in particular. In that field and when I was a young person, I really enjoyed the science fairs and I know that most of the kids in my neighborhood really they enjoyed it as well, and it really pushed me over time into the field of science because I like the idea of wondering how things come to be. And so that probably tied back to a point in my life that I saw starting to disappear. And then, in addition to that, all the work that we were doing in building and making products a lot of that work and factory work was being outsourced to places overseas, and when I saw that start to happen, I immediately concluded that, hey, that's a serious problem for the field of invention, because we invent a lot of things in systems inside factories that make things. So if all the manufacturing is going to go somewhere else, the pace of innovation is going to slow down, which in turn leads to less opportunity for our next wave of youth coming up in America. So I said, no, we're going to do something about that. We then went about thinking about well, how could we make an impact to inspire our youth so we can maintain a dominant position in the field of innovation and invention, like we have for the last hundred years?
George M. Davison:And so we developed a courseware system that goes into the public schools K through 12.
George M. Davison:And we have specific breakdowns elementary, middle school and high school and at the very end they have an invention contest that they put on in their school.
George M. Davison:So not only do we take the kids through the principles of how to get there, and we teach them how to develop ideas and how to do good in the world, and that's where you find opportunity. We then realized, well, we have to teach the teachers how to do this, and so we started doing that. And then at the end of the course there's this contest, and then the judges get through a little training system so they understand how to judge, and so you can actually build a methodology of getting through all the kids with their inventions within a reasonable amount of time. So that's basically how it all got started. My role is basically creating and leading this initiative to try and get it to not only be in a regional space around our area, which is where it was first prototyped, here in Pittsburgh and then perfected over 10 years. But now to take it on a national level and eventually we'll see it might go global, because we have some kids overseas now doing it too.
Greg Costantino:Great. Well, let's talk a little bit about how you got here. How did you know? You mentioned the science fairs when you were a kid and how exciting that was to you. What about your personal development and your professional development, and what led you to this place?
George M. Davison:Well, you know, I was blessed when I was younger with some mentors my Boy Scout master. He was just somebody that was full of wonder and curious about a lot of things. He was a builder maker. He'd tear engines apart. He was a guy who believed that if somebody else can figure something out, I can figure it out too. And if somebody else could build this, I could build it too. So life around him was always interesting because he was curious, which then was put into all the kids in our Cub Scouts and then up through the ages.
George M. Davison:But you know other things, other mentors came into play. You know that started to push me into the science field. But when I was in chemistry class I really excelled in that area and I really enjoyed the experiments and doing all the lab work. And I went to college going in pre-med. So I had a very heavy science influence in my earlier days in college and then, with a lot more thought around that, I realized you know, I'm not so sure I want to spend all my time in a hospital. So I started to wonder is this really right for me? Because I was just inside these white starch labs night and day. And so some other thoughts came in I said you know what? We have a long history of business in our family, so over time we just basically combined science and business into you know now what we do today.
Greg Costantino:Right. Did this kind of lead you into this career in inventing? Tell me how that happened.
George M. Davison:Yeah, that is kind of how it happened. When you decide to be involved with research and development and inventing, you basically learn how to sharpen your observational skills and along with that, you really need to care about others more than you care about yourself. So you'll notice, if you go back through time and you look at inventors that are, you know, the Louis Pasteur, the Edisons, anybody and everybody that you might think of as an inventor they tend to put themselves second and they're looking out at how can we help other people, not deal with this problem. And if we could make that problem go away or make it so it's not such a big problem, that would free people up to be able to go do better things in their lives. You know, maybe even in the health field, you know, if you can solve medical challenges right, so it's really I'd say it's a very good life.
George M. Davison:You're chasing noble causes that are there to help others. Some noble causes are smaller right, like if you're just fixing something that maybe you know, maybe it's easier to take out the garbage versus you're solving a huge health issue for a lot of people in the world. But regardless, the mindset is, you know, applicable toward corporate America and you know, they're always trying to make better products because they're competing on that front. And then you've got government, right. You've got all these government labs that are out there. They employ many, many thousands of research and development people and they're trying to also create new things like new forms of energy, new pretty much everything. And so to me, that field, the field of R&D and invention, is exciting, and chasing the unknown has always been attractive to me.
Greg Costantino:Well, you mentioned Edison and Pasteur. Are there any other inventors that come to mind that inspired you when you were a kid?
George M. Davison:Well, I actually yeah, I'd say I'd put them. There's three in particular and they flow in accordance with our courseware, really. And in the invention contest it's inventing and then it's making, and then it's storytelling was one of the most prolific inventors over time with the light bulb and a lot of other ones. And then Henry Ford, when he started to invent a new frame for his car that was much easier to manufacture and that you could assemble a car much more quickly. So that's manufacturing and there's all sorts of patents around that. And then, in the realm of storytelling, walt Disney and Walt was an inventor too. Most people don't know that he was not only a great storyteller, but there are inventions related to Walt as well. So it's inventing, making and storytelling. Those are the three mentors for me anyway Edison, ford and Disney.
Greg Costantino:How do you think this all comes together into what might be your purpose today?
George M. Davison:Well, I think I've been given an opportunity to identify a problem and the youth that we are trying to grow into the next part of the world. Let's say where are we going with science and what are the demands Now? For example, when we do this show Tomorrow's World? Today, I get to be in spaces with presidents and CEOs of some of the largest corporations in the world and I kept hearing the same thing over and over and I finally said I'm going to do something about it. But one person in particular, denise. She's one of the divisional presidents at Caterpillar Corporation and she said to me we can't find enough STEM science, technology, engineering, math or STEAM science, technology, engineering, art and math people to hire, so they're having a hiring crisis. And I found that to be, you know, like, okay, I'm paying attention, right, I'm listening. And then I heard it again and again and again and then I realized, well, we actually have a real big problem if the HR departments of all these major corporations don't have people to hire. So that, lets us look at that and say, all right, that's a serious problem.
George M. Davison:Now, can we chase a noble cause? Where's the noble cause here? We chase a noble cause. Where's the noble cause here. Well, young people are. You know, how can we have really interesting lives for them to live and make a good livelihood for themselves? Well, when corporations are hiring in these departments, they're in demand. These are high-paying jobs, and so that's a good thing. Even on our show too, we've had the nuclear labs, the government nuclear lab people, and you know those are very high paying jobs too in the field of science and invention. So you know, I think overall the recognizing, being able to be in the right position at the right time and recognizing the need for more people in this area was a big thing for us and so our role. I look at it as how can we not only maintain the pace of innovation in this country, but how can we accelerate that pace and stay way ahead of the rest of the world?
Greg Costantino:Right? Well, that leads us right into what I wanted to talk about next, which is invention, land education. Now, how is that working and how is that being utilized across the United States to reach that goal?
George M. Davison:Well, as of now, we're in well over half the country with our courseware, and so we have challenges. The challenges are you know, you're in the field of inventing and making and storytelling. So when you, when you start to look at that space, you say well, how are the teachers in the teacher colleges, how are they taught in order to teach? Well, yes, there is curriculum in the teacher colleges to teach math in all sorts of levels and in English, et cetera, et cetera, sorts of levels and English, et cetera, et cetera. But the art of invention is not taught. So you do have a challenge in identifying who can teach this type of technology and you need to be ready to release the reins, because they have to be skilled in several areas. And then you basically release the reins on the learners Because they're chasing their own ideas in this course, and what happens is you get a shift, and it's a major shift, so that, yes, they're learning math, they're learning science, they're learning English. Well, english isn't storytelling, english is writing, which you need in this course You're going to make in the manufacturing and making of your prototypes.
George M. Davison:You're going to have to do some. You're going to have to use a 3D printer, maybe, or a laser cutter, you're going to have to cut a piece of wood at a certain angle. You're going to do a math, you're going to have to figure out the math right, and then, in the earlier stage of inventing, you're using your observational skills and your thinking skills to try and figure out problems. So the challenge, though, is having really good teachers who can let, go and let, and they're basically a support system to the students, and then they elicit help from other teachers in the school. So it's hey, you know, we're going to have the math teacher to help come in and figure out, maybe some of the angles on cuts we need to make.
George M. Davison:What's the formula, the mathematical formula to do this, so that Sally or Joe can actually make that prototype or model that they're trying to build. And so, and because it's the kids' thoughts and ideas and they're applying themselves, you don't. And because it's the kids' thoughts and ideas and they're applying themselves, you don't have to tell them to do their homework. They do this work, and actually, there's a new problem, and the new problem is you can't get them to stop, because they're working on their idea and they start to see it come to life. So, before you know it, the school bell is ringing and they don't want to go. So then they show up after class or after school and the parents? Some of the comments we hear back from them are you know, I love what my kid's doing and they're like working on this stuff over the weekends where you know before they were just sitting down behind a screen playing video games.
Greg Costantino:Right, right. Well, how does the nine-step process that you've created? How does that work into how you're teaching the teachers to teach?
George M. Davison:So that was part of the system to try and truncate it into these nine basic principles of how invention works. So, after doing inventing I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but we have, I have a lot of inventions in the market and a lot of patents and that type of thing. This is not theory, this is real world application. So I took, I took a lot of the more successful products and I reverse engineered them and I said, okay, what are the repeatable things that we're doing again and again and again and again to get to this outcome? And we took those and we compressed them into these nine basic steps. Of course, there's more than nine steps, but in order to make it comprehensible, we had to put it into that format. But also, you know, I'm not a curriculum writer. So we ended up hiring very talented curriculum writers who came in and then they took all of our work and then they reworked it into pass, all the different state requirements and that type of thing, which was amazing to watch as well.
George M. Davison:There's a real effort that you could see over time from our let's call them the school leadership people in this country to try and you know make education work, and right now it's working and it's just getting innovated now. So before we were more of a like, you used to see all the classrooms and it was all the tables, all the chairs were lined up like this and there was a teacher's chair here in our innovation labs. You know that's shifting now and it's the teacher roams the kids are in. They're at desks that have wheels because they're doing inventing. Sometimes, then they're doing making and then other times they're getting ready to do all their storytelling as they approach their invention contest. So these labs have to be manageable and moved around accordingly, because sometimes the projects have to go on the floor. They move around, there's all sorts of stuff going on, and so a mobile room that is designed to inspire them and support them in their initiatives is another advancement that we've worked on.
Greg Costantino:That's awesome. So let's shift gears a little bit. I have a sort of a different kind of a question. When you're dealing with that many people and they're all working on a different invention, confidentiality is of the utmost importance.
George M. Davison:And that's well documented. Over time. We have things in our courseware, though, that teach them that right. So we have invention lab books innovation, we call them innovation lab books, and they learn the art of innovation, security, right, and then. So they learn about that too, which is kind of fun. But when they go and they release the idea out to their class and then they release it as they do here on the show, it's gone public at that point.
George M. Davison:But they've learned the principles of going through the process like it is inside a private institution In our course, where they're taught that. But they're learning and so our hope is that they're learning and disclosing which is fine for now, learning and disclosing which is fine for now, but in time, as a lot of our youth are moved up into the corporate world and the government world, they've learned the principles of inventing. Because what I've seen over time, you can create the greatest invention in the world, but if you can't figure out a way to get it into manufacturing, that's a serious problem. That idea or that invention is going to stay in the inventing stage forever until you figure out a way to get it manufactured so it can scale. And then, if you can figure that out and then you can tell a story, or if you can't tell a story In other words, if you can't tell a story more than likely you're not going to get the funding you need to launch a company or to push that up into the world to get it out to everybody to benefit them. So I, over time, have seen too many inventions get stuck here and so we learned over 36 years. I've been working at this for 36 years. So what I saw was too many things stalled here because they couldn't get through the manufacturing process properly, and so we would go back into the inventing phase with me.
George M. Davison:So when I'm doing my inventing, I'm immediately looking at well, let me think about that. If I do it this certain way, I'm going to need tooling. And then I'm going to need to, let's say, do injection, blow molding as an example, like a water bottle or something, or something. Well, that's expensive, whereas if I go this direction, I might not need tooling. And so that's part of the conversation going on in the mind as you select a direction on your invention.
George M. Davison:But ultimately, once you get through those two, you have to tell the story, to raise money or to manage the project into a business, et cetera, et cetera. You're going to talk to people about it. So these three things work in concert in order to get the idea either to a board of directors to approve it or to start a company. So you're talking to an investor. So you're going to make public disclosures. What we're hoping is that our youth, when they're in K through 12, they're going to learn this system, and that is more important at that stage, even though we've seen over the last two years in our last couple invention contests, four teams have had their inventions licensed and two of them have now been in the market and selling and those kids are making royalties today.
Greg Costantino:Yeah, that's awesome, and so this whole idea of what you're talking about, those three things working together in concert, kind of leads me to my next question, which is on our show we talk about the four worlds.
George M. Davison:Yes.
Greg Costantino:So explain to me what the four worlds are and how they all work together in the same way that you just described.
George M. Davison:Yeah, I'd be happy to yeah. So in tomorrow's world, today we have the four worlds. We have the world of inspiration, the world of creation, the world of innovation and the world of production. So the first world, the world of inspiration. And if you do a lot of inventing over time and you're a creative person, you will notice that you will withdraw from the creative energy that you have if you don't get outside into the natural world.
George M. Davison:So we talk about how to manage yourself as a human being, and we've studied this over time here at Inventionland, where we've watched fabulous inventors, very creative guys and gals who are working nonstop on solving problems and inventing solutions, and we represent that with the open hand. In other words, they're in sync. Their mind is free and it's coming up with solutions and it's just really working really well. And at times, though, they run into problems, and then that mind's not so free anymore and it's just really working really well. And at times, though, they run into problems, and then the mind's not so free anymore and it's getting locked up. Eventually, it gets to the point where you know you've got like the white on your knuckles and you're not getting any more ideas out of that locked-up brain. And so what we do is we train people on when to recognize that you're like that, and our managers recognize when people are like that and they'll say, hey, you need to go out, go somewhere, go outside, get out in nature, go down by the water and the river, whatever, go, unlock yourself. And so we use nature as an unlocker and we you'll see that, like in tomorrow's world. Today, when they post, they're posting about everything from what's going on in the natural world to how to kick your shoes off and get in the grass, look at the clouds. You will unlock very quickly. And so that is the world of inspiration. You need that in your life. From there you can go to the world of creation.
George M. Davison:The world of creation is all about traditional arts, right? So traditional arts exist in schools, in many of the schools today. Right, that's painting, doing pottery, maybe doing some stained glass clubs and things of that nature. Baking is in there, cooking, gardening, those kinds of traditional arts, right? Traditional arts are very, very important for the creative human being. It's also an unlocker, so that if you're deep down the rabbit hole in working in technology and you want to release yourself, if you haven't noticed, well, it's interesting that I get unlocked when I'm over here and I'm creating a recipe for some kind of new thing that I'm cooking. Well, that's actually not unusual. You're doing a creative art and so it's pulling you out and so, knowing again, it's pulling you back to free yourself, right? So when you're doing traditional arts, it's a creative expression that is wonderful.
George M. Davison:In what you can create, I like well, I used to take blacksmithing classes and lots of other types of art that I enjoy and it brings happiness to me. And then when I decide to go and immerse myself into the innovation arts again, I'm ready. So let's talk about that. That's the world of innovation, and innovation arts can be highly complex. Just, traditional arts can be very complex to master, right? You don't see many Michelangelos out there, but you can enjoy yourself there and give yourself that wonderful feeling which gives you health.
George M. Davison:Over here. You're in this unknown world a lot, you're going to fail a lot and you have to learn. How do I get back up? I just tried this, like this courseware. It was 10 years of incremental modifications to get it perfected to the point where it could work seamlessly for a school out in Kansas as well as out in New York City, right. So you know it took a lot of failure.
George M. Davison:Get back up, listen to your audience. What are they telling you? Where is it working? Where is it not working? And that'll wear you down over time, because we all like to think what we create is just so wonderful, but it's only wonderful when others use it, and it doesn't require a lot of work on their part to use your service or your product.
George M. Davison:And so, making it simple to teach the art of invention and innovation, making it simple to do this in these nine steps, it's all part of that world of innovation that we were talking about, right? And so the last world, which is the world of production. So that is where you convert your innovation into something that can be then scaled and given to the public at a price that they can afford. Ok, so, and also, production, is it's repeatable and sustainable, right? So I might only have a prototype in the world of innovation, and then again, I have to figure it out, get it scaled and then I have to get it funded.
George M. Davison:So, over here in the world of production you're talking about, have you ever gone on a factory tour? Yep, so if you can imagine factory tours in between the world of innovation, where they came up with whatever it was that they created as their product, and then going and building a 200,000 square foot factory. Well, I guarantee you there's probably another 50 inventions inside that building that make this process come together. So you get this thing out here at the end, and along with that, there's another process, and that's the financial engineering of production, right? So you have to become business literate, so to speak. And so that is our four worlds inspiration, creation, innovation and production. And they work as an ecosystem and you manage yourself and your organization accordingly, and if you do that, you'll stay healthy, you'll be happy with your work for forever. You just have to stay inside that realm, right, and because it can get very complex.
Greg Costantino:So I guess, when we're talking about those four worlds, where it leads us directly into STEAM and STEM, and how that educational process makes those four worlds possible and how that all works together, because you have to have all of those, all of those disciplines, in order to make that work. So tell me how STEAM and STEM is important in an American classroom now.
George M. Davison:Yeah. So STEAM and STEM that's been around for probably a decade, maybe even a little longer. It called that STEM and STEAM. But the art of applying STEMem and Steen right. So everybody knows how important science, technology, engineering, art and math are. We've known that hundreds of years. Right.
George M. Davison:But sitting in the classroom and having it pushed at you versus you applying that, it's a totally different learning experience. One is engaging, the other is basically not. Certain students can excel at you know, book smart, stem and STEAM. What I find interesting is A lot of the students who they say are you know, they're not the best learners out there. That's not true. What's true is is they learn differently and they learn.
George M. Davison:My observation and I will prove this out over time my observation is that STEM and STEAM students are nonstoppable when you get them into applied STEM and STEAM curriculums. But they're not going to sit. They're not going to sit all day long and read and make note cards and read and make note cards. No, they have too much energy. They've got to get up and move around.
George M. Davison:But whenever you start getting into a maker, the making and that interesting area for them, they thrive in that environment. You can't stop them. So it's interesting to watch because our kids they tend to learn on a three-person team and it's usually broken into that three pieces inventing, making. So one's more inventing, another one's more making and the other one's more storytelling. So if you think about it, storytelling is marketing, right, you know, the making side is more of you know in a factory they like to get their hands dirty and whatnot and the inventing side is more of somebody who wonders about how things work in the world.
George M. Davison:But when you take those three type of our youthful people and you get them to start working together and brainstorming together and then make a team exercise, come together, what we hear is that a lot of the kids who are your C students are getting the A's in that class and a lot of the kids who get A's in all the other classes, like just the pure math class they're getting the C's in this class. So we're seeing a very unique balance and that's doing something else that nobody expected, and that is we're seeing a more collaborative, friendly environment in those schools, because those kids don't usually connect and now in this course they connect and so then they see each other in the hall and they're communicating. It's just a wonderful like another ecosystem that's been formed that nobody saw coming.
Greg Costantino:Now, how is this going to work as we move into the future, because you mentioned Denise from Caterpillar and the fact that they're having trouble finding the employees that they'll need in the future, but it sounds like these are the kids that are being educated right now in STEAM and STEM.
George M. Davison:Yes, and so my projection is that in another 15 years, when we have enough kids through this course, and then probably more, like you know, 15 years you're going to see a major impact. 25 years we will easily have the scale and the growth of innovation that we want to see inside of our corporations and our government. There will be no lack of innovators at that time.
Greg Costantino:That's excellent. So let's talk a little bit about how you do your own research for maybe a future product that you might be thinking about.
George M. Davison:Yeah, well, it would start with what was the observation? What's the problem? So the research for me, always begins with identifying problems and after that the research begins with well, all right, let's go see what's been done in that field before. So today's a little different and it's changing so rapidly. So, like we use a lot of AI right now right, and we weren't using any AI a couple of years ago but it makes suggestions and it tells you about research that used to take us I mean, it could take three months to gather all the research that we would want to gather on a project. I can get that in 30 minutes now, and the sources that it's drawing from are so good. There's a lot of work involved with getting through it and then you have to refine it, but the other thing that we found there is that it also helps us to come up with more ideas, which we really like, and we also do a lot of patent searches, because the patent searches reveal what other inventors have done in the past, and it's not like you want to do what they're doing, but you could see how they solve.
George M. Davison:They were thinking of solving a certain problem. It might even be a totally different industry. So maybe something that they were working on in the medical field is now applicable toward some kind of a mechanism that holds something during surgery. Maybe that same kind of mechanism might be needed when you're working on a car, and in the automotive aftermarket we could devise a tool. It's totally different, but one's holding something and this is also holding something. But you know, that's interesting, right. And then we would also study nature. How does nature hold something, right? So you would study the hand and you would study animals, seeing how it does things and taking a look at what we refer to as crossovers, things from other industries that might be, let's say, holding something. And you take those, we take those three, we kind of jam them up into the same space and see what we get with it.
Greg Costantino:Right, right. Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the future tech, or well, what's seemingly future technology but we're actually using today, like 3D printing. So how does AI and 3D printing all work together in some of the newer processes of getting an invention created?
George M. Davison:Well, from the connection point between AI and a 3D printer, there are some relationships there already. But like saying to AI, I want you to generate, let's say, solidworks, cad, computer-aided design code to run my 3D printer. You know that is going to get a little sketchy unless you're going to let it just kind of run itself. That's not how we would do things. Maybe in the future, if AI and CAD work a little closer together, we'll see that. But we want to work with AI to generate the ideas. Then our human minds the engineering side of our minds we'll take a look at how we want to design that and we'll work with CAD, computer-aided design to make that. Now we can look at that and we can see the paths of how the 3D printer will make it before it goes. What it doesn't do, which is very dangerous, is that you can make things in the 3d printer right that you can't make in mass production right that's a serious problem.
George M. Davison:a lot of people think that because I made it in 3d printing, I can make it in. You know, I can stamp for million of these things. And that's not the case. And we, we knew that 20 years ago. Our first 3D printers were huge, like you know. You and I could stand inside them. Actually, 20 of us could stand inside them. That's how big they were and they made these little tiny parts Heck. Now they're this big and you can get really decent parts and they're actually strong.
George M. Davison:In the early days it wasn't like that. But that transition early on we said this is the most dangerous thing ever. We used to have to figure out all that engineering and then go look at how it's going to be manufactured. Well, we noticed that some people in our office started actually using the 3D printer to make components that couldn't be made other than inside that machine and we said, oh my gosh, how many other people are going to struggle with this? And so today, you know what I prefer is I prefer to look at telling them hey, if you're going to put something into that 3D printer, you better make darn sure it's going to be stampable or injection moldable or that it matches up with these processes. Otherwise, yeah, you can make a model as a demonstration, but don't make the claim that that will translate to something that's affordable to make. Right, Right.
George M. Davison:So, it's very we have to be very careful with that, so that AI to 3D printing is sketchy, right. That has another level of sketchiness to all this, actually, until, and this does exist today, so things are changing, but you can mass produce 3D printing. Okay, it's a little more expensive, right, but over time you'll probably see that.
Greg Costantino:Okay, well, let's talk about that. What do you think has been the biggest technological advancement in your time with the company?
George M. Davison:Wow, that's a really good question. I'd say that, with the bank of work that we've put in place over 36 years, we have failed enough to know what not to do, and that's really important because it allows us to see better ways of doing inventing. So the inventing process is where I'd say our most important work has been, and then the conversion of that to courseware and then to create a system that is teachable, teacher, trainable, judge, monitored and reward systems. At the end, unbeatable system, will lead to what we know, we created here, be adoptable to our youth, which will, in turn, be embraced by industry because they'll be hiring these people who understand how to think better, how to work with their hands naturally and know how to speak to others about it naturally. So you'll see more innovation get accepted and funded because they will understand the value of inventing, making and storytelling when they go forth to bring it into the world.
Greg Costantino:Do you think that this will all come into play as far as the future of technology and sustainability as we move ahead, as the environmental landscape changes?
George M. Davison:Well, when you start. If you want to push the sustainability, environmental side of things, you know we can push that really hard, and the more you push that, that's an exciting field because there's a lot of innovation, because you could literally look at every single system that exists in the world today and say how can I make that thing, that pump, use less energy? You could chase that quest for 10 years and maybe invent a new kind of motor that will let you do that or some way to create a vacuum in a better way that consumes less energy, and that's noble work. So we're consuming less natural resources along the way. So, yeah, I mean the field of sustainability is just full of opportunity for innovation work.
Greg Costantino:Well, as we get ready to wrap up, I have one big question for you. Okay, what do you think is going to be the next big innovation in your industry? Don't give away any trade secrets.
George M. Davison:Well, if I have my way, that it would be, you know, a national invention contest that really puts on a pillar our youth, so that we can build a mindset, a winning mindset, that we will dominate the innovation and invention space indefinitely. And so, you know, that's what I see in the future. It's going to take a lot of work. We believe we have found certain routes to make that happen, because it's a slow process. To get schools to adopt this process, right, there's a lot of work. You have to teach the teachers, you have to have an innovation lab installed in your school, you have to have equipment. I mean, if you can imagine back in the day, look your question, I'm going to walk you back for a minute. Over 100 years ago, and everybody knows what science is today, right, but at one time there was no chemistry class, right. There were these people over there in Europe, let's say. They looked like wizards and you don't even have pictures of them. We have these old oil paintings of these masters who were messing around with black powder and they were just experimenting, right. Until here in Pittsburgh, actually, this gentleman his last name is Fisher he decided he was going to take the art of what used to be called alchemy, and he was going to turn that into a system where you could do science, experimentation and we're going to systemize this right. So he created the world's first science lab and brought about tools like a beaker from Germany, a Bunsen burner, like all the common instruments that you see in a chemistry lab today. Well, 120 years ago that wasn't around. So if you said to him, what do you think the future holds In tomorrow's world? What are we going to see, mr Fisher? He'd probably think, oh, I'm not really quite sure, but in reality his work is responsible for generating tens of millions of jobs.
George M. Davison:If you think about it, there are entire industries that revolve around the field of science, and Fisher Scientific was the most basic building block of it all. So they had to teach teachers how to teach chemistry and science, and the corporations needed them because they needed to do quality control right. So something comes out of a factory. You got to check it. You got to put it into the lab, make sure it's doing what it's supposed to be doing. That's part of it. Then you have pure R&D, because you want to invent a new product in the lab, right, and so he basically built this infrastructure, which then led others to say, well, we got what. We have a pharmaceutical industry, we have a biotech industry.
George M. Davison:I mean, I could go on and on about how many industries blossomed out of that. I wish I could tell you what our students of the future, what industries they're going to invent. But with this kind of mindset of you can invent anything. You can make anything better if you're willing to think that way and work hard toward that objective. I wish I could tell you what all those kids who are going to turn into adults are going to invent, what industries they're going to create, how many new jobs are going to come about in 100 years? My only hope is that if it can be as promising as what the fishers did back then, we've done our job.
Greg Costantino:Yeah, george, thank you very much. This has been really great. It was a great opportunity to come and turn the tables.
George M. Davison:Yeah, thank you, greg. Well, everybody, that's another edition of Tomorrow's World Today.
