For a job fair at his school, electrical engineering student Jay Lickliter created this interesting business card with a ring of LED’s that light up when the card is touched.

I am not exactly sure of the benefit of this invention but it made me think about the interesting marriage of technology and creativity. Often we tend to think of the the application side as driving the creative side of the process. In other words someone thinks of a creative way to solve a problem or make an improvement then they bring in an engineer or technology expert to “make it work”.

This has been the model for most of the industrial era. After all it makes sense. If you are in a particular industry and serving a particular market segment you are looking for ways to better serve your market and expand your potential business.  So you think of creative solutions then set out to make them. But the flip side includes innovators like Jay Lickliter who simply say, “Gee what if I could complete a circuit when you touch this business card causing these lights to turn on. Would that be interesting?”  Now it is up to the application creatives to think of how to use this technology.

Though is is interesting that the “work” Jay decided to have his card do is make lights flash, it seems that it may be a short hop to having a chip that provides a spoken message or maybe this is a step towards a thumb ID that assures that you are the registered user of an electronic pass key or credit card. What are your creative ideas? Share them here or call Jay about a possible joint venture.