Thoughts on Engineering Creativity [Point of View]

This short article deals with engineering creativity. In a recent public radio program, creativity was defined as “the ability to generate innovation which works.” For engineering creativity, I would make it more specific: it is the ability to change the direction of technological progress drastically and beneficially, or the ability to induce an inflection point in the development of some engineering field. I shall describe here a few examples of creative ideas that I encountered in my area (analog signal processing and data converters) during my long career in the field. I shall start with some sobering thoughts about the limited range of engineering (indeed, of human) creativity.