Kenneth Pickar
Visiting Professor of Mechanical Engineering

B.S., Queens College, City University of New York, 1961; M.S., Physics, University of Pennsylvania, 1963; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1966

1200 East California Boulevard
Pasadena, CA 91125
MC 128-95

(626) 395-4185
(626) 583-4963 (fax)

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Research

Professor Pickar is interested in the three-way intersection of business, engineering and science. He and his students are working on the development of optimal strategies for technological product development and business formation. Recently, rapid advances in computing and networking are forcing product development cycles to shrink drastically. In this environment, it is critical to understand how products are created, and how to advantageously employ technology in their development. He has become interested as well in how these principles may be applied to people in the developing world where technology is often difficult to support and infrastructure does not exist. In the area of entrepreneurship, Professor Pickar is exploring methodologies to improve the success rate of new companies and to teach these precepts to students.

As there is no simple "royal road" to successful product development or new company formation, continuous updating and evaluation are required to understand the changes as they occur. A fundamental question becomes: which new innovations best optimize the given desired set of constraints - cost, quality, cycle time, performance? The problem is compounded by the fact that the solution may only be valid for a relatively brief period of time in a small corner of the world. A shift in market conditions, for example, will require a new optimization.

In order to understand what constitutes an optimum process, Professor Pickar's research analyzes the design and start-up practices of the past twenty years. Design methods used in this era, stated simply, involve ways of avoiding problems downstream in the product development cycle through the application of preventative actions. These tools are often characterized as design for x, where x could be reliability, market acceptance, manufacturability, environment, cost, quality, etc. Such tools are now widely employed in most businesses, but competitive pressures have increased to the point where they are no longer adequate. In fact, for businesses, where the market is often poorly understood such as those existing in the developing world, these tools, if used blindly, can be counter-productive.
The ultimate goal of this research is to understand how and why this is so and to develop a new paradigm for building products and starting companies to exploit these products.

Professor Pickar comes to Caltech from a distinguished career in industry. After earning his PhD in physics from the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Pickar went directly into industry, working first at Bell Laboratories. Most recently he held the post of Senior Vice President for Engineering and Technology for Allied Signal Aerospace, where he re-engineered the product-development process for a wide variety of applications. His innovations in industry include the first ion-implanted CCD and the first ion-implanted picturephone camera target (at Bell Labs), and the first all-plasma etched IC process at Bell Northern Research. At GE Corporate Research and Development, he managed all Electronics Research, including the 1.5T GE MRI System and the highest performance all-digital medical ultrasound system.