Imagine sitting in a cafe watching pedestrians crossing the street, some in business suits and some in casual clothes. Out of the crowd emerges a woman sporting slim-line office attire and high-heels. These shoes are no run-of-the-mill black or brown numbers－one resembles the Eiffel Tower and the other Taipei 101. This is not an illusion; this is an illumination.
These interchangeable heels were just one of Taiwan’s 42 gold medal winners at the 39th International Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva, Switzerland, April 6 to 10, where Taiwan delegates also brought home 34 silver, five bronze and six special prizes, topping all other countries in the coliseum of creative thinking.
The report card on Taiwan’s creativity, both private and public, has been impressive in recent years. In June 2010, Taiwan entries grabbed 24 gold and 25 silver medals at Pittsburgh’s Invention and New Product Exposition. In November, at the Nuremberg International Trade Fair, inventors from Taiwan took another 27 gold and 32 silver.
From 2008 to 2010, Taiwan captured over 100 prizes at the Geneva exhibition alone with products ranging from a portable urine collector that substitutes for adult diapers to a vehicle rollover warning system.
“In Geneva, participants display their ingenuity and glean inspiration from other submissions,” Chen Tsung-tai, head of the Taiwan delegation and chairman of the Taiwan Invention Association, said.
“Taiwan has an exemplary tradition of encouraging elementary and junior high school students to take part in scientific competitions and exhibitions,” Chen said. “The brainstorming exercises help plant seeds of invention in their young minds, and later bear fruit on the international stage.”
The youngest medal winner in Geneva 2011, Wu Tun-che, a 14-year-old from Tucheng Junior High School in New Taipei City, is a science fair regular as well as an avid skeet shooter. He was inspired to build a repeating crossbow that, to his delight, garnered him a special award from South Korea.
Chen was not surprised by Wu’s showing, however. “Perhaps a decade ago, most of the accolades for innovation went to private enterprise, but now that the government is promoting student participation in invention competitions, schools have a 50-percent share of the medal haul,” he noted.
Last year the Ministry of Education began to subsidize transportation costs for students taking part in international events, with 54 already benefiting. “This will stimulate more young inventors to pursue global recognition of their works,” Chen said.
Additional incentives have been provided by government prize money, he added, explaining that an amount of NT$200,000 (US$6,213) to $450,000 is distributed annually to 50 winners in Taiwan’s National Invention and Creation Awards (NICA) by the Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) under the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
Taiwanese inventiveness has blossomed to such an extent that in 2009 local inventors filed more than 51,000 patent applications with TIPO. In 2010, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted 8,238 patents to Taiwanese inventors, putting them fifth by nationality.
Hsinchu-based Chung Hua University is one of the prolific contributors to this creative boom. Under the leadership of President Dawud Y. Sha, who is also an awarded inventor in NICA, the school set up an innovation and creativity center in 1999.
“Finding the solution to inconvenience in life is the start of invention,” President Sha said. This invention workshop, he added, fulfilled his ambition to offer college students a venue for creative exchange.
Carrying out Sha’s vision is the current director of the center, associate professor Juang Ying-shen of Business Administration Department, who invented the interchangeable high heels that wowed Geneva.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs should issue my team a certificate of merit for invention diplomacy,” Juang joked. Geneva’s largest newspaper, 20 Minutes, devoted half of its front page to her work April 7, something she and her students, all novice inventors, did not expect.
Although new to the scene, Juang’s team has nabbed the grand prix “Gold Archimedes” at the 14th Moscow International Salon of Inventions and Innovation Technologies in early April with their “Puzzle Bottle.” They said the idea for the novel container emerged when they noticed one day how messily items were arranged on a drugstore shelf.
“Why not make containers with grooves, so they can fit snugly next to one another, saving shelf space?” they asked, and their flash of genius brought home the medal.
Asked whether the interchangeable heels and fitted bottles had been commercialized, however, Juang said they were still talking with potential producers. But they plan to compete with Puzzle Bottle at the Hanover-based iF design awards.
“Actually, few inventions can be turned into products of commercial value,” Chen said. “But we should apply different standards to ideas from the business community and those from academia.”
On this, Lin Pi-fen, co-winner of the coveted International Press Prize at this year’s Geneva fair said, “Criteria are not fixed. When it comes to product commercialization, as businesspeople, we are always concerned first that there is a market, and then we worry about licensing and distributors.”
She and her husband, whose digital cordless device impressed the journalists at Geneva, are the managers of a Taipei-headquartered technological company.
“Our invention has been patented in the EU, Japan and Taiwan. AT&T has ordered 6 million units,” she added.
“To translate students’ creativity into reality is no easy task,” Lin said. “From invention to sales is a long road.”
“What students need, though, is not monetary profit, but the do-it-yourself experience,” Chen commented. “That’s why we will provide 90 free booths at the Taipei International Invention Show and Technomart for student entries in September—just to showcase their imaginations.”
Creativity can be considered one of Taiwan’s core values. In 2010, the World Economic Forum ranked Taiwan’s innovation capability 7th in the world, and the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland, pinpointed Taiwan as one of the world’s most entrepreneurially innovative societies in its Competitiveness Yearbook.
As Jean-Lu Vincent, president of the Geneva exhibition said in his opening address, “The only inexhaustible raw material that Man has at his disposal is his little grey cells.” Taiwan may be short on natural resources, but its creativity appears to be boundless. (THN)
Write to Aaron Hsu at pj1210meister@mail.gio.gov.tw