Doing Well By Doing Good

Do you look at disaster with the creative eye of an entrepreneur/inventor? You should. Every catastrophe contains the seed of an idea that can change the future – and the opportunity to do good, while also doing well.

The ongoing rash of heartbreaking news stories in which small children perish in hot cars is an example of a problem still waiting for a solution. The numbers are sobering; according to the Department of Geoscience and NBC News, a child dies from vehicular heat stroke every ten days in the United States alone, and 73 percent of those children are under the age of two. An enterprising inventor will come up with a warning system capable of detecting a child (or a pet) in a hot car that will sound an alarm to alert passersby. Perhaps it will even become a mandatory piece of equipment, like airbags. We can only hope it comes soon – perhaps from you? 

Disaster brings out the best in most people; it's our instinct to want to help those in distress, and our inventiveness naturally sparks to creating solutions that can prevent further suffering. I'm an engineer; when I heard the story of Jessica Lynch, the young American soldier whose gun was jammed by dust, I learned that this is a common problem in the Middle Eastern wars where dust is everywhere and machinery is constantly being fouled by it. I came up with the idea of a cleaning round that would clear weapons of this clogging dust. For instance, the M16 rifle uses a magazine that has about 30 rounds. If the very last round was a cleaning round designed to blast and create some pressurized gas that could clean out the drum in seconds, then the cleaning of the gun could be done automatically, saving another soldier from potentially winding up like Ms. Lynch because of a jammed weapon. I’m still working on perfecting that design.

Necessity is the most prolific mother of invention, and sometimes the only good thing to come out of a tragedy is a way to prevent another, similar tragedy from occurring. By turning your inventor’s eye on these challenges, you can indeed do good, while also doing well.

 Adapted from the Amazon Best Selling book: FROM START-UP TO STAR by Ken Kuang, Joyce Zhang, and Eileen Han