‘The Fog Was So Thick She Couldn’t See’

“Genius is equally distributed, but opportunity is not,” says Andrew Crowe, founder of the New American Manufacturing Renaissance. “What if we start finding geniuses wherever they are? What can we do? What can we change?”

Though he was posing the question to the entire manufacturing community, Crowe was at the time on the IMTS+ Main Stage at IMTS 2022 across from Dr. Onome Scott-Emuakpor, formerly a senior engineer at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and now the founder of Hyphen Innovations. By way of a response, Scott-Emuakpor talked about how to catalyze the interests of these geniuses-in-waiting, using an old (true) story set off the coast of California in the 1950s.

“There’s a swimmer from the ‘50s. Her name was Florence Chadwick,” Scott-Emuakpor says. “She was swimming [between] the California coastline and the Catalina islands. It’s like 20-something miles. She’s swimming in thick fog and she can’t see. One of her relatives was in the boat saying, ‘You can do it, you can do it,’” he says. “She’s tired, her muscles are hurting, it’s cold and then finally she quits.”

As it happened when she quit, Chadwick was less than a mile away from reaching her goal. “The fog was so thick she couldn’t see,” Scott-Emuakpor says. The message Crowe and Scott-Emuakpor had for manufacturers and STEM advocates is that not everyone gets inspired by theoretical work, equations and formulas — the basics of these fields. They need to see through the fog — showing young people that the real-world applications of the technical things they learn in schools can turn a passing interest into a college major and a lifelong passion. Just ask Scott-Emuakpor. That’s how it happened for him.

“Once I got on the [AFRL] base, touching components . . . I could tie those equations to the final product. I get chills thinking about how excited I got when I saw that,” he says. “It finally started making sense and it got me excited.”

Learn more from Crowe and Scott-Emuakpor as they discuss the importance of mentors and how important it is to be intentional and mindful of diversity when hiring. Check out their discussion, “The Struggle and the Progress of Minority Business Founders” at IMTS.com/WatchProgressMainStage. Watch and learn more on IMTS+.