I drove up to Delaware to meet my admired professor from the Technion in Israel. He had a stint with Dupont, and was happy to see me. There was no better audience for me to share my latest engineering experience with than Professor Ephraim Kehat. The lion share of my engineering education I got from him and from his friend Mussa Bar-Ilan. Ephraim, as I called him after I finished my master of engineering with him, was wise, perceptive, careful yet forward thinking. This long evening in Delaware I shared with my former professor a stubborn thought that appeared deserving of his attention. At the time I ran a small engineering boutique, specializing in cost estimating of technology projects. The cost was expressed through a cost probability curve that indicated the probabilities for different cost values. I noticed that the more innovation that was packed into a project, the broader and the more dispersed this curve appeared. This suggested to me that the shape of the curve for a technology project may serve as a metric to assess the amount of innovation needed to conclude the project. And if so, then we had an objective way to measure progress of any research and development project!

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The knowledgeable professor quickly observed that there is no known objective metric for innovation progress, only when it is done it has a clear state. But since the impact of an objective metric for innovation load and innovation progress would be so useful, it was worth checking my budding idea to greater depth.

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I was busy running an engineering office, clients to serve, deadlines to meet, to which the professor said: Honor your own creativity, allocate good time to explore this bold proposition.

And then he added: the best place to do that is academia. It was quite a brazen suggestion. I was fifty years of age and my old professor advised me to go back to school! Coming from my admired figure I took his suggestion seriously and soon enough became an old PhD student at the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology.

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The thesis was interdisciplinary, so my mentor assembled professors from two engineering faculties and the department of mathematics to form a qualifying commission. His door was open. I would burst in, laying out ideas, discussing research avenues, enjoying his wise counsel. He was the first to realize that I was hammering a new discipline: innovation science, encapsulating all the innovation wisdom that is independent of the innovated subject matter. Issues like cost estimation, schedule appraisal, breaking "innovation walls", smart resource allocation -- they are techniques which are generic and exert a big impact on innovation productivity (which is different from creativity flow). Along the way there were several points of hardships and breakdown, but the wise professor egged me on until I reached the finish line.

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I used my PhD dissertation as a cornerstone, and pivoted my career towards its imperatives. I became the first user of what I called InnovationSP (Innovation Solution Protocol). Its practice earned me 42 granted patents and many more in the pipeline. I taught innovation science in various settings, reporting to Ephraim my work, asking him and benefiting from his counsel.

Whenever I came to Haifa I visited him and his so kind, so engaging wife, Nitza. I was received like a beloved son. Ephraim aged gracefully. His quiet demeanor, his wise counsel, his broad view point, his engineering depth were so impactful on me. Humility, calm, wisdom. So many good thoughts of advice. I don't know of any man similar.

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The last engineering remark he made to me concerned a capsule-reactor I developed. He asked wise questions, and then said: this will work well if you can find a standard fixed size for the capsule, and handle throughput variance by the number of capsules you engage. This idea is now part of the solution. When I reported to him that I moved on to fields beyond my knowledge per se, just offering R&D impact through InnovationSP he said: they will eat you alive, ignore you, and dismiss you. As usual he was right.

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Nitza, his wife, was motherly towards me when I was a young student visiting their apartment on Mount Carmel. Together with Ephraim, they supported me during my long difficult divorce, and so lovingly they embraced my new partner, Dolores.

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When I saw him last he signaled: I am at the end of the road. He was calm, receptive, serene. This week he passed on. The least that I can do is to post this "in memoriam": he is the godfather of innovation science. My professional life trajectory was marked by this dear man Professor Ephraim Kehat.

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Gideon Samid,  23rd October 2025

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