Technical people are routinely challenged to innovate. But how can a technical person be creative enough to innovate? Understanding how our brains were designed to work and following a matching process will help anyone become a successful innovator.

Innovate The Way You Were Designed To is an eye-opening look into the world of design and innovation from the perspective of first understanding how our human cognitive powers work when it comes to creative thought.

Filled with anecdotes from 30 years of past experience, this book gives concrete examples of experiences from the design and development world. Learning about the author’s path from art to medical device design puts a perspective around the basis for the book, and creates a strong connection between the intentional use of both sides of our brains and successful innovative outcomes in our design engineering innovation attempts.

Utilizing our brain’s inherent ability to create by understanding how it operates is the key thesis to the practical, step by step, process laid out in the book. The process is broken down into practical phases that act as a simple framework for any development project, with safeguards, best practices, and tested methodologies that will set the readers up for successful innovation projects of their own.

The encouragement from this book is to get out there and use your inherent abilities to innovate and contribute to making this world a better place in your own unique way.

Tom KraMer is the managing principal and a product design engineer at Kablooé Design, a Minneapolis MN based product design and innovation company.

For over 30 years Mr. KraMer has been involved in research and development for many types of products , and after his first 18 years of product design and development work in the field spearheaded the formation of the D3 (Design Driven Development®) process, which Kablooé uses to help direct its customers through the development process in an innovative way. Tom has led Kablooé Design innovation projects for fortune 500 companies as well as small start-ups. Kablooé has in turn helped develop atrial fibrillation therapies, coronary intervention devices, drug delivery devices, prostate surgery devices, and many other unique and innovative medical and non-medical devices.

Tom has been providing these product design and development services for product companies since 1990. He began to push Kablooe’s portfolio deeper into medical device design in 2000, and medical devices now represent over 70% of Kablooe’s project work. Tom has personally done hands-on design work, prototyping, innovation development, research, testing, and engineering-for-manufacture and has a personal passion for user-centric devices. He leads the charge for user-centered design, innovation, research, human factors and ergonomics at Kablooé and has personally directed usability research, focus groups, ethnographies, and human surgeries at the University of MN and hospitals in Minneapolis, Detroit, Pittsburgh and others.

Mr. KraMer holds an Executive Certificate in the Master of Product Development at Northwestern University and a BFA in Industrial Design at MCAD. He also holds a certificate from Stanford University for Cardiovascular System in Health and Disease, and spends much of his professional time teaching and lecturing about the human centered D3® development process and innovation training at worldwide trade conferences, for training organizations, and for corporate teams and universities nationwide.