Two weeks ago, The Barbarian Group had a special guest: Adam Rasheed, a member of GE’s Global Research’s Advanced Propulsion Advanced Technology Program. There Adam works mainly on pulsed detonation engines. I referred to Adam as a rocket scientist (and do in this interview), though he informed me that it’s not really what he does (he was kind enough to humor me in his answers). This interview took place in person and over email, so hopefully it hangs together. For the first half of the week, Adam joined us out in Wisconsin, where we were visiting GE Healthcare as part of our GE Adventure project.

Noah: So, what do you do?
Adam: I’m a research scientist working for GE’s research center on Pulse Detonation Engines.

N: Can you explain what a pulse detonation is?
A: Pulse detonation engines, or PDE is a technology we’re looking at to improve efficiency of airplane engines by 5 to 10 percent. We plan to do this by changing the way we burn the fuel in the core of the engine. It has a potential impact of saving more than $7 billion a year in fuel costs for the airline industry.

N: And, what about this project you’re working that brings you here?
A: GE has a program for researchers called Technical Career Path, or TCP. Each year, a number of researchers/technologists are presented a TCP Excellence Award. As part of that recognition, we are encouraged to broaden our experience by studying something out of our core research area… I chose to study how organizations innovate and create, and I wanted to do this by embedding myself with a company known for being creative in a field very different from GE.

N: What’s your favorite book?
A: I really like reading – so I have lots of favorite books. The aerospace part of me really liked The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe) – it’s an awesome book. I also really liked Life of Pi (Yann Martel) and A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth).

N: Are people impressed when they realize you are a rocket scientist? [Note: Again, rocket scientist is a bit of a misnomer, but Adam humored me.]
A: Well… no. I don’t know that anyone cares – but maybe because I tend to meet lots of other engineers and scientists – and everyone is working on really neat things. I am usually more amazed by stuff that other people are working on. The truth is that I am a bit of an idiot – most of the things I do don’t actually work – but eventually something does. I guess, also, I am not really a rocket scientist. My interest as an aerospace engineer does tend to be in shock waves and high-speed flows, so my focus during grad school was in orbital reentry and hypervelocity aerothermodynamics – which is just a fancy way of saying I studied how things like the Shuttle heat-up when reentering the atmosphere. I did experiments for the air force and for NASA – it was a lot of fun. Now at GE, I am part of a team of folks working on Pulse Detonation Engines which also has a lot of gasdynamics and shockwaves, but the application is aerospace propulsion. Its all plenty of fun – but it’s not really rocket science.

N: Why does rocket science have the reputation it has?
A: Probably because it’s hard! Seriously, modern rocketery is relatively new and the technology was developed very publicly with lots of media footage during the early years of what became the Apollo program. The nation and the world watched as an entire fields of science and engineering were almost started from scratch. When things worked, it was great, but when things failed – it tended to result in a spectacular explosion – and everyone can understand an explosion. It isn’t really any more complicated than other fields of science, but it is unforgiving and small errors lead to pretty big and bad consequences in a very visual manner. Sometimes, I think the perception of rocket science is unfortunate, because people then think its really hard – and it discourages students from pursuing engineering as a career. It’s a lot of fun – people pay you to break things.

N: What are your views on Innovation?
A: I am really still figuring this out. Innovation is good. Everybody should do more. The thing I find odd is how the term innovation is not really well defined, but everybody wants be innovative. And contrary to popular belief, its not new – human beings have been innovating for a long time. I would say using fire was a pretty good innovation. Also wheels… I really like round circular wheels. Square wheels are not so good.

N: What are you looking for on this trip?
A: I am specifically looking to understand more about the creative process and more importantly, how to transform an idea into a useful widgets, services, products – whatever – anything that adds value to a customer, or on a bigger scale to society. I figured by hanging around folks in a completely different industry, I might learn something different. I live in a really cool world of engineers and scientists – but we’re all trained to think in very similar manners. For this trip, there’s a few sort of key questions I am interested in. The first is how do you empower people to develop their ideas. It seems there are certain ingredients – part culture/environment, part access to tools, part necessity/urgency. The second is how do you know which ideas to pursue further. In certain industries, its easy to just try a whole bunch of things and see which one works. This can be done if each trial is relatively cheap and can be done quickly. Unfortunately, that’s not really practical for large-scale infrastructure – like a powerplant or a new jet engine. This kind of ties into my third question – is how can any of this be embodied in large company like GE. We’re committed to technology and spend a lot on R&D – the question is how do we get the best ideas out to help society.