9:11 a.m., Jan. 9, 2009----David Pensak wonders what the world would be like if humans didn't need sleep. For starters, he says, the real estate industry would completely collapse. Who needs a six-bedroom house when there's no reason to sleep?

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Pensak, adjunct professor of business administration in the University of Delaware's Lerner College of Business and Economics, has spent his whole life wondering about “what ifs?” Now, he's encouraging everyone to do the same with his new book, Innovation for Underdogs: How to Make the Leap From What If to Now What.

Innovation for Underdogs attempts to teach readers how to innovate. Pensak says the first step is to realize that anyone can do it. He says adults should look to kids as role models.

“Kids are the most creative and innovative creatures on the planet,” he says. “Gradually it fades away as people try to accommodate what teachers want, and later what bosses want.”

Pensak is an accomplished innovator. He created the Internet firewall. He has 38 patents and applications being prepared in fields ranging from agricultural chemistry to solid state physics to business-process modeling.

He holds a doctorate in chemistry and retired from DuPont after a 30-year research career. Now, Pensak splits his teaching time between the University of Delaware, the University of Pennsylvania and George Washington University's School of Law.

In his classes, Pensak says he challenges students to consider a problem. He tells them the first decision to make is what the solution should look like rather than what it actually is. What it should look like, he says, is probably similar to something that already exists somewhere in the world.

To explain, Pensak shares his own experience with the Internet firewall.

Pensak says he developed it with inspiration from birds. Birds known as raptors, like eagles and buzzards, eat live prey. They are predators. He realized that to keep computer users' personal information safe, he'd need to develop software that would systematically attack any foreign or suspicious data trying to make its way into or out of the computers it protects, just like a bird would attack a scurrying mouse.

Pensak named his company Raptor Systems.

Pensak says his teaching centers on encouraging students to ask questions. And when the students raise their hands to ask those questions, to consider what the world would be like if things were a bit different -- if, for instance, each hand had six fingers.

Article by Andrea Boyle