Home : Volume 33 : Winter 2007
Curious Justin: Innovation drives student's life

Among Beck's inventions is the Dual Monitor Laptop, a second liquid-crystal display screen he developed with Chris Meyer (left). The screen clips onto a standard laptop and provides more viewable area for the laptop user. (Large image)

When Justin Beck speaks, ideas pour out in a stream that might faze even the most creative thinkers. Many of those ideas—like his web-controlled Christmas lights or a robot that follows colors—may not travel any farther than his own dorm room. Others—like his computer-driven fireworks display—ignited Beck’s curiosity, but thankfully didn’t burn down his house. Still other ideas have failed outright … and then there are those he hopes someday will turn a profit.

Whatever the outcome, Beck regards each of his ideas and inventions as just one step in a lifelong learning process. “I was a very curious kid,” says the Waunakee, Wisconsin, native. “I got in a lot of trouble for my curiosity.”

He certainly wasn’t welcome at his mother’s hairdresser, where, during one appointment, the cash register caught his eye and he proceeded to investigate how it worked.

Eventually, Beck, whose girlfriend, Kristen, calls his approach to life “multitasking by high-frequency switching,” learned to channel his curiosity into more positive pursuits. As a sixth-grader, he began programming computers and by the next year, he’d built databases to administer math quizzes and track student in-class participation for some of his teachers.

Justin Beck (Large image)

In high school, he worked with an adult mentor to start a business based on a fully developed web application that tracked free classified ads. “It was basically a Craigslist,” he says.

He taught his Waunakee High School teachers how to use computers and other technologies. He was a member of the school broadcasting club, president of the chess club, and co-founder of the tech club. He and friend Jason Malinowski built a computer cluster; in essence, a supercomputer. “We had collected the high school’s old computers and hooked them together in a network,” he says. “I was going to run one of my database research applications on it, but that actually never did happen. Learning how to do it was kind of the goal.”

Afternoons, evenings and summers, Beck also interned as a computer programmer at the Cuna Mutual Group in Madison. “I had my own cubicle, I had my own desk, I had my own projects,” he says. “I saw what the adult world was seeing, and that’s where I decided to be an engineer. I felt that I really needed the technical and design skills to be able to solve other people’s problems. I loved solving problems.”

Now a sophomore electrical and computer engineering and computer sciences student at UW-Madison, Beck regards his formal college education as merely supplementary to what he’s learning in the real world. From his course lectures, he extracts nuggets of gold that he can apply to his latest projects.

He and a couple of friends are developing a yet-to-be-disclosed invention to enter in the annual university undergraduate innovation competitions, the Schoofs Prize for Creativity and the Tong Prototype Prize. (For the 2006 event, Beck and friend Chris Meyer developed and entered the Dual Monitor Laptop, a screen that clips onto a standard laptop to provide the user a larger viewable area.)

Beck and Malinowski now plan to launch a new company. To help them learn more about issues like business plans, patents and marketing, the two also have entered the annual UW-Madison G. Steven Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition. In preparation for the event, they are attending eight competition-sponsored seminars on topics that include legal aspects of a business, financial projections and how to sell the product.

They and other friends have formed an inventors group. Just for fun, says Beck, members brainstorm ideas and design tangible solutions, including “MiniReck,” their small radio-controlled car with a tiny camera mounted on top. They plan to exhibit the car at the biennial Engineering EXPO (April 19–21, 2007), then develop it into a miniature space vehicle that can photograph Earth and transmit signals to its terrestrial operators.

In addition, Beck, Meyer, Malinowski and students Nate Glasser and Ben Tesch have founded UW Innovators, an organization that pools talents to help inventors develop their ideas. “Anyone who has an idea, but doesn’t have the means to implement it, can at least shoot it out there,” says Beck. “Other people who find it interesting can come in and help them out.”

Through these groups, as well as through his outreach (he has given talks about innovation and about his inventions) and mentoring activities (he is a robotics mentor for a fourth-grader), Beck preaches action, action, action. Build your idea, he says. Refine it. Build it again. Share it with others. “As one person is innovating, it rubs off on everyone,” he says. “They don’t even have to talk to each other—the energy just rubs off.”

The process of innovation not only drives his current life, but also hovers over his future. Although he’ll always have the companies he’s driven to form and the products he and others develop, Beck also hopes to join Google as (what else?) an innovative engineer. Eventually, he’d like to lead his own innovative team—the kind that generates creative, efficient, cost-effective technological solutions in a vibrant, supportive environment. “The more innovative a team is, the better products they’re putting out, the better services they’re offering, and the happier they are,” he says. “Innovation feeds everything—and I’ve made it a personal challenge to be constantly growing in that area.”

What, as they say, a great idea!

Content by perspective@engr.wisc.edu
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Date last modified: 29-Mar-2006
Date created: 03-Feb-2006

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