My colleague at Tieturi, Arto Santala, has written a series of three blog entries about unit testing in EJB 3 environment. It is in Finnish but you might get the point through the code examples without our language.As an idea unit testing has been known and used for decades but examples in blogosphere focus on simple situations instead of complex cases of real life. When we do unit and acceptance testing in industrial scale, we need to go deeper considerations about maintainability and performance of the test harness.

Innovation is not just brainstorming with fancy techniques. Truly new business ideas need well grown skill, deep motivation to struggle through all the forthcoming difficulties and courage to put enough effort to make it successful.

A stereotype of an inventor is a mad man who works to create a perpetual motion machine. He has limited education to base his inventions but decades of hard work is a kind of substitute of that. Chances of success are limited because it is easier to be creative at the spearhead of science. Motivation is a required because innovation is not just heureka moments in brainstorming sessions but persistent work to try different things, ideas and variations.

Many of the ideas we get are indeed doable, but not commercially feasible or the manufacturing process is not feasible.I believe in intrinsic motivators, but money is not totally out of the table, because we need money to fund the materials and inventor’s time for a long journey of trials and errors – inventors use empirical process control. Many useful inventions are out of reach of individuals, because of expensive equipment that is needed. On the other point view, governments typically overspend because too much money is chasing too few ideas. Just think of ITER.

Courage is important because new innovations break our barriers of thoughts. Something that we believed, was found to be not true. Saying that is not easy. It is easier to let it be. So, employees have no reason to innovate. They get their salaries without and hunger overcomes the desire to create something great. People have ideas but they do not go ahead with them, because that will do harm. Remember that the majority of the ideas are not that great when studied more. And if it happens to be a success story, it is not just fair that your employer gets it for free. You might get a 100 € bonus 🙂

Universities are thought to be sources of innovation. Ph.D’s have the theoretical knowledge to synthesize new ideas but current world is very eager to make sure that the big companies get the results. Tight research funding narrows the focus of the researchers. You must complete your Ph.D in four years. To do so, you take part of a large team that is sure of about the results when they start.

BTW. I found an academic study of this topic. Creativity and innovation in the Systems Engineering process [PDF].