On Topic: The evolution of frugal innovation

My grandfather, Ralph E. Miller, after various careers as, among other choices, a chicken farmer, gas station owner and airplane maintenance worker (where he learned about the importance of timing and, not coincidentally, where he lost part of a finger), eventually settled on a long stint at one of the many steel mills facilities that sprawled like rough, low-lying mountain ranges across western Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio.

If he'd carried business cards, they would have read 'jack of all trades.” His job, specifically, was to report for duty each morning, personal toolbox in hand, and then go to whichever site within the massive plant his bosses might dispatch him. Once there, my grandfather, whom I'm fairly certainly didn't graduate beyond high school, would light yet another cigarette, look over whatever dangerous, soot-covered, often hot-metal-spewing thing that was broken - quite often some mechanical device he'd never seen before - and then, well, fix it.

Or, at least, cobble something together to get it working again.

He carried this roll-up-your-sleeves approach into the rest of his life, too, and viewed most everything as hardly ever officially broken but simply in need of a few days of hard time in his basement shop.

One stifling hot Sunday he had me drag a late-model car bumper back into shape with a pulley system he'd rigged together and, on another afternoon, insisted I reconnect his TV antennae that was perched at the very apex of his four-story house - convincing me for all time that, despite what I might have believed, I wasn't truly afraid of heights. Or no more frightened by heights than I was of him.

(He was so convinced that you only required the proper amount of contemplation to construct or rejuvenate practically anything that he often insisted automobiles shouldn't have radios - they distracted you, he insisted, from being in tune with your car's engine. And then there was the roll-your-own-cigarette contraption he devised, hoping it would slow down the amount of tobacco he smoked, but, as it turned out, he was too clever a tinkerer for his own good.)

This notion of taking what's in front of you and fixing or improving it has evolved some since my grandfather's days - now to aid us we have astonishing technology, easier-to-use tools and, on occasion, common sense. But the idea of innovating with what's at hand seems to be enjoying a rediscovery.

Today we call it frugal innovation.

In their book, 'Frugal Innovation: How to Do More With Less,” Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu contend frugal innovation has inspired big companies to adapt to different markets - in research and development, finance, sales and even human resources. General Electric, for example, came out with less expensive medical products to sell in developing countries where buyers have shallower pockets.

The authors then note how these variations on existing themes can be applied in this country, too.

Costco now carries a blood-pressure monitor for under $35. American Express, long viewed as the credit card company for corporations, has debuted an account for Wal-Mart shoppers.

And then we come to 3D printing. You've read about the small houses being 'printed” in China. Office buildings are next up.

Just days before Christmas a four-and-a-half-inch plastic wrench was generated by a 3D printer aboard the International Space Station using designs emailed from Earth.

And now comes something heralded as 3D bioprinting, opening a whole new can of amazing possibilities.

As I understand it, 3D printers can take bits of wood and excrete what's called re-engineered tree product. That new kind of wood can be used to build houses.

The best news, though, is the printer requires only small amounts of wood to do its job. So instead of our continuing to plow through this planet's old-growth forests to erect ever more structures, 3D printers could rely on youthful short-cycle trees - the trees needn't be big to supply the printers that, in turn, create larger end products.

From one idea springs an abundance of possibilities.

I can only imagine what Ralph E. Miller would have done with such a device. Or, goodness knows, what he'd talk me into doing.

' Michael Chevy Castranova is enterprise editor and Sunday business editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; michael.castranova@thegazette.com