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Recently, a famous organization in our industry held a 100th Anniversary Celebration. It is probably right and good that they did so. I did not attend the full affair, only the trade show portion. In fact, I have not belonged to this organization for a long time, for I feel their view is a bit more in the rearview mirror than through the windshield.

If I wanted to find the most innovative ideas today, I think I would go to a kindergarten or primary school classroom, hold up a piece of paper, and ask the children there how they would make it. I suspect if one spent two or three hours with them, one could come away with at least one, perhaps two, ideas that would be breakthroughs and commercially developable. If one was honest, one would put said children's names on the patent(s) and let them pay for their college education via royalties.

The advantage these children have over us older folks is they don't know what can't be done.

Take a group of 40- to 50-year-old papermakers and put them in a room. Ask them to come up with new ways to make paper. If someone dares raise their hand and proffer a suggestion, it will be batted down by the rest of the crowd before they can complete three sentences.

Experience and legacy investments prevent innovation. This industry is certainly loaded with both.

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There are ways around both of these barriers to moving forward, but rare is the company willing to take the risks. Would you want to be on the board of directors of a company whose efforts at innovations obsolesced most or all of your installed manufacturing base? I didn't think so.

So, the first thing one must realize is that innovation involves risks. Most people think these risks are merely the cost of R & D that does not develop anything. I think not. I think the unspoken risk is the danger of being so innovative that your entire asset base is rendered useless.

This happened to warships in 1862. In late 1861, the Confederate Navy slapped some iron plates on a wooden hulk of an old ship, creating the first ironclad. The United States responded with a totally iron design by John Ericsson. When these two ships, the Merrimack and the Monitor, respectively, met in March of 1862, every other naval ship in the world was instantly rendered obsolete, for they were all wood.

The danger, of course, of not innovating, is that someone else will and will hence render you obsolete, all the while holding the patents to prevent you from doing anything about it. Lucky(?) for our industry, no one has done that recently, although Procter & Gamble had a good run at it in tissue in the 1970s.

What others did do, however, was determine, in the cases where paper was used to transmit ideas and information, that the medium was not the message (sorry, Marshall McLuhan) and just skipped this step, moving the transmission of information to invisible 1's and 0's delivered via first wires or fibre optics and now through the air. Our industry has not fully recovered from this flanking maneuver yet.

So, how do we innovate when resistance abounds everywhere? Dr. Pete Ludovice, a chemical engineer and Director, Center for Academic Enrichment at the Georgia Institute of Technology, may hold the keys to some of the answers. Pete is not only a chemical engineering academician, he is a stand-up comic. Innovation is closely related to comic improvisation.

Watch the late night comics on television. They have one simple formula, and once you figure it out (or if you read further than this sentence and let me tell you), you will stop watching them. That formula is this: scour the news of the day, link two disparate stories, and make a joke out of the link. That is all they do--joke after joke, night after night. Simple.

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I try to do the same thing here, especially in the Light Green Machine Institute. A little over a year ago, I came up with the idea of a vertical paper machine, a tissue machine, tucked into a high rise apartment building in a metropolitan area. When I published this, comments came in from literally all over the world. I am still working on this idea, by the way, but for the purpose of this column, the question is how did I arrive at this idea?

Again it was simple. All I did was sit around thinking about paper machines. I do that a lot. That particular day, I was pondering the question, "What is a noticeable attribute of a paper machine?" One obvious answer was they are very horizontal. Next step: "What if we make a paper machine vertical?" The rest of the idea then follows naturally. (1) Where do we have vertical structures? Big Cities. (2) What kind of paper do they need? Sanitary grades. (3) Where can we get the raw materials? From the offices that surround them. That is all there is to it and it is exactly the same process involved in improvisational comic acts.

As an industry we will continue to struggle with naysayers, after all, that is our legacy. However, I, Jim Thompson, now in my seventh decade, am determined to not be one of them.

We will give you a break on the quiz this week. Take the time to ponder how you can do something different and better using the ideas put forth in this column.

How can we promote safety in a better way? Think about that for a while.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

FEEDBACK:

Jim,

I'm not sure this is original but with the dryers vertical they would act like something like a distillation column.

With a down-flow column, the top is a mixture of volatile and non-volatile.

Adding energy strips out the volatile as a hot gas which will rise counter to the flow of non-volatiles. Aside of the column (several positions) it is condensed returning much of the energy and very useful condensate (which is also at a premium anywhere land is costly).

With an inverted U shape the wet end could be at or near the bottom - removing liquid water going up, again working with gravity.

With press section shorter than dryers the first drying could be above the presses - inverted J drying section.

If this approach has been talked of before, you will now that all materials handling could be at or close to the "docks".

Is there value here?

Best wishes
Dene Taylor, PhD

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