A few months ago, I heard a news program on NPR about the Khan Academy and how it was started accidentally by Mr. Khan to help his niece with her math homework. Since he lived far away from her, he captured his helpful hints via YouTube and shared via the Internet. One thing led to another and now Khan has found himself the creator of something big.

Since that NPR special, I’ve had a few chances to visit the website. There are over 3,200 videos on a wealth of subjects. I found myself touring around and clicking on things like art history, science, economics, history and even SAT prep, and getting progressively more excited by the proposition that this is a tipping point to excite kids to continue to be curious about math and science as they get older.

The Khan Academy concept reminded me of Professor Fornetti’s ExploreRF YouTube Channel, which offers training courses and webinars in RF and microwave related subjects, and of course AWR’s own AWR.TV portal. Our numerous video tutorials and vignettes are meant to accomplish the same for RF/Microwave education as Khan is for mathematics.  Both aim to excite current and future users to learn more about the wealth of capabilities in AWR’s software as well as the fundamental mathematic theories it solves.

AWR continues to be committed to helping university students learn more about RF/microwave design. To that end, we recently ran a contest to see if our strategies of supporting university engineering courses, awarding free software to engineering graduates, and sponsoring the IMS and EuMW Student Design Contests were having a positive impact. We were excited to find many success stories, two of which we have recently published. One design student at Istanbul University of Technology (read the story here>>) actually taught himself how to use Microwave Office through our documentation, extensive library of examples, and, most importantly, our AWR.TV videos. His journey resulted in a low noise amplifier design that won the Turkey Graduation Design Competition and was a finalist at the IMS Student Design Competition. Another student from Vienna University of Technology (read the story here>>) was able to design an X-band transmission analyzer from end to end thanks to several master’s degree courses that offered the use of Microwave Office, as well as attentive technical support. His design won the IMS Student Design Competition. Details on both of these stories can be found in the success stories included in this newsletter.

Read the rest of Khan Academy- I’m a Fan!

I was pleased to be invited to participate on the Women in Electronic Design panel at DAC 2012 this past June. The theme: “The Mechanics of Creativity—What does it take to be an idea machine?” Design is an inherently creative process, but how can we be creative on demand? How can we rise above mundane tasks with flashes of brilliance, discover secrets of technical and business creativity and calculated risk taking, and share stories of innovation?

The organizers, moderators and panelists included Karen Bartleson, Director of Community Marketing at Synopsys, Holly Stump, High Tech Marketing, Lillian Kvitko, Director of Data and Resource Management, Microelectronics Group at Oracle, Dee McCrorey, Chief Risk Guru and Innovation Catalyst at Risktaking for Success LLC, and myself.

Creativity is not a topic electronic engineers talk about very often, so I worked through a number of questions beforehand to prepare…

Read the rest of The Mechanics of Creativity

Earlier this year, I posted a blog, Are You a Do’er?, which was inspired from my participation at the Business of Software Conference late in 2011.  There was a wealth of content presented at that conference and of course it inspired another thought thread that now lends itself to a blog topic.

The theme… Road to Where?  Are you, or I, or perhaps both of us, on a road to nowhere? Are we caught up in the innovation race to add more features and functionality to our software/hardware/whatever product that we lose sight of what’s important to the user base?  This was the talk of a few folks at the conference, but one person in particular, Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, argued in his talk (here is the video) that we need to shift our focus away from adding more and more features into what is already a well-functioning product and keeping up the innovation race with our competition, and instead figure out how to bridge the divide between consumption and non-consumption. Prof. Christensen, who is also quoted in the book, Mastering the Complex Sale by Jeff Thule, asks what can you do to pull in new users/customers that for whatever reason have not found their way to your offering (product/service)?

Now I imagine I have a few of you interested in debating this with me and thinking, “Hold on a minute Sherry, are you saying to forget about your current customers and simply focus on the ‘haves’ vs. the ‘have nots’?”  Well, not at all! Prof. Christiansen goes on to explain that most customers today are bombarded with so much information about a product and service that we, by human nature, simplify it for sanity sake so that when it comes to a comparison of features/functionality, we are able – in a timely fashion – to reach a decision.

Read the rest of Road to Where?

So did you?  Stop waiting and start (fill in the blank) ?  The reason this part 2 blog took so long to write is that it took me this long to actually start surfing.  While I had great intentions to get going with this new adventure, I must confess that it took me much longer than I would have liked before I actually jumped in and did it.  Yes, I surfed.  I stopped waiting and started surfing.  (See my photo here for proof 🙂 )

Enough about me, now what about you?  Have you challenged yourself in 2011 yet?  I mean started something that you never thought you would ever try? For me, it was surfing. For some, it is skydiving, running a marathon, or climbing a mountain.

How about this for a collective challenge? AWR’s new ad campaign, “Stop waiting and start designing,” entices you to try our software or share your design successes with us. We even sweeten the deal with an incentive to win an Apple iPad 2…1 of 12 being given away during AWR’s fiscal year 2012 that starts April 1^st.

So, let’s make 2011 not only known as the year I actually surfed, or you ran that marathon, but let’s make it the year we all stop waiting to try AWR software and start designing with it. From April 2011 through March 2012, we will be giving away an iPad each month to one of you who take up our challenge.

Stop waiting and start designing. Get ready to jump in and visit www.awr-startdesigning.com.

AWR’s current ad, “Ideas Grow Faster in the Right Environment” graces the front of our 2010 AWR Magazine (6mb PDF) this month. There are many interpretations stemming from this visual (pun intended) that can be explored. But for now and for the purpose of this blog, the sprout portrays AWR’s corporate culture: innovation, spawning new ideas, the right environment for creativity, growth into new markets, seeds of change…

Rather than recreate that cover story here, I invite you to download the magazine online and read it for yourself. Instead, in this blog I’m going to sprout out in another direction. .. academia and university outreach.

AWR recently gave root to a new growth opportunity for our software in the academic community. At the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) Annual Conference in Florida this past March, I announced in my ECEDHA Perspectives interview AWR’s Graduate Gift Initiative, which provides qualified* 2010 graduates a free, fully-functional, one-year term license of Microwave Office and Visual System Simulator (VSS) software suites – inclusive of AXIEM 3D planar EM software. The goal of the initiative is to give graduating electrical engineering students a career head start by providing hands-on exposure to AWR’s high-frequency design software.

This initiative is a follow on to our Preferred University Program, which works with universities worldwide to provide students with access to RF/microwave software tools. These programs have been launched in direct response to industry and academia expressing the need for students to have hands-on experience with these tools prior to graduating and entering the job market.

And, most recently, AWR has announced the donation of free licenses of our software as the prize award to the winners of the IMS/MTT 2010 Power Amplifier Student Design Contest.

What better way to sow seeds of change and spawn the growth of new ideas, new engineers, new technologies, etc. than to enrich the academic environment by providing the software engineering students need to learn and grow from the classroom and into their first job? Our students of today are the future of the industry—we need to empower them with the best and latest tools so they are prepared to flourish.

Blogging: My first experience at blogging came with an invitation from editor David Vye to contribute a guest blog on the Microwave Journal website. It was like a jump into the deep end of the pool!

I had never blogged prior and certainly not imagined such a prominent place on the MWJ site, but knowing David for many years, if he was willing to ask me to try it, I was willing to give it a go.

Now that I am a self-anointed expert blogger after six months of contributions to Microwave Journal and a recently-launched blog on our own AWR website, I thought I would share some insights I’ve gained from my experience.

First, I think you must possess at least three traits in order to be a good blogger:

1) You need to be outspoken (geesh, I guess I am not afraid to have an opinion or share my thoughts/views/perspectives on things).

2) You need to be entertaining (a VC friend told me he likes that I do not take myself too seriously on these things—that has never been me and so my own personality worked well here—I am a bit goofy on occasion or so I am told ).

3) Be relevant. This was the hardest one. Week in and week out how do you try to convey something that will be relevant and interesting to hopefully more than a handful of readers? Pulling from friends, colleagues and life experiences was key. I like to have a lot going on in my life and this has helped me to find inspiration on more than one occasion.

In the end, I started to blog about technology life, or rather, living in the career world of technology, if I have to give it a catch all. I was surprised by the response. The first month on the MWJ site, my blog was the most read. The trend continued as I continued blogging. People would comment, e-mail me, stop by at an event to say hello. What a great feeling! To find out that you have connected with people in the same career field as yourself and that you are able to meet new people and make new connections as a result. I was also amazed to realize that I was not only presenting myself in a multi-dimensional way, but that I was conveying a personality for AWR, too.

Blogging has turned out to be both fun and functional. So much so that I have taken the blog to AWR and have gotten others to join in and blog along side me. For those of you like me who have uncovered that work life is not a separate life of its own, but rather a life that blends, merges with our own personal lives, social lives, etc., blogging was one of the first ways (and albeit interesting too) to convey this complexity and connectivity.

All of you out there who are nodding their heads as they read this, start blogging…you’ll find it rewarding on many levels!