As a physics student innovator, you will fill three roles: (1) a personal role, engaged in a focused creative quest that is your own conception and is driven by your own passions; (2) a team role, working with others to define and achieve a shared goal; and (3) an organizational role, where you will fill perform specific tasks to help an organization sustain itself in making innovation possible.
What level of ability do you need? Doing well by conventional measures like grade point average (GPA) may or may not be relevant: what really matters is how boldly and persistently you work to solve a problem and how astute and independent you are in gaining the knowledge needed to reach a solution. To do physics-driven innovation, you must be able to competently do experimental, computational and theoretical research. But, more importantly, you must be able to define the questions whose answers are essential to solving a real problem. Then you must be able to cleverly combine hard-won R&D results with established know-how to demonstrate a viable solution. Ask yourself this: can you combine wit, tenacity, and understanding to use and expand physics knowledge to meet an actual need?
A physics student innovator can be versatile to the point of virtuosity, capable of picking up concepts and skills quickly and perfecting them on the hard anvil of real problems. Learning to solve textbook problems is like being able to work with sets of tools that are known to be useful in well-defined applications. To innovate, you need to be able to design, shape, and temper new tools for new situations.
You may or may not be naturally attuned to practical methods and designs, but you will fill the gaps quickly and aggressively acquire the competencies you need: you will seek experts to guide you but you will also work a lot out on your own, make mistakes, learn, make more mistakes, and eventually create a highly effective competency that continues to grow.
The same applies to analytical modeling and numerical simulation: you are a physicist and that means your stock and trade is to devise, use, and test precise models. Just as experience gives you maturity in the practical domain, experience gives you maturity in the abstract domain. Here you must adroitly make simplifications and approximations, test outcomes, refine models, and rigorously and mindfully guide the development of a real-world solution.
You must cultivate an unusual depth of compassion and empathy for humans and for life in general. You must have a heightened awareness of people and situations. This may or may not be expected of physicists in general but for you, cultivating your humanity is as important as sharpening your technical skills and deepening your theoretical knowledge.
Conceiving of ways to use physics and creating prototypes require a final stage: conveying the outcome successfully to its intended user. This often will take place within an existing organization, perhaps even within your university or else at an industrial or government lab, a business sponsor, or a community group. Sometimes – and excitingly for some – you might need to set up and sustain a business venture, nonprofit, or some other type of organization yourself.
Whatever the environment in which your innovation is used, you will pursue the knowledge and experience needed to do secure its actual application with the same vigor as gaining new theoretical understanding or new technical skills. In this realm, you will learn to accept uncertainty and risk but you will apply empirical verification and rigor in your decision making.
Your activity will be varied, nonlinear, and iterative. You will accept failures as part of the process. You will learn from customers or end-users about their needs, you will shutter away in the lab or shop to create methods and prototypes, you will repeatedly test the fit between your latest solution and the need it is intended to meet, you will work with strategic partners, you will learn about finance, marketing, manufacturing and distribution, etc. etc. etc.
Ultimately, the merits of your invented product or process will be the same as any good work in physics: the key merits will be the depth of understanding embedded into the work, the elegance of its physical realization, and the far-reaching effectiveness of the solution that it provides.
Do you accept the challenge?