On our California road trip, we knew that to find innovation, we’d have to stop at Stanford. About 30 miles south of San Francisco, the private university partners with all sorts of industries to cook up new ideas. Many of those ideas come from students, past and present. Google’s algorithm to comb the web was designed by two Stanford grad students, and leaps in anesthesiology, DNA research, and software development have been made by other Stanford eggheads.

But never mind the next world-changing idea. Most innovation happens incrementally, over long stretches of time and among teams of patient researchers.

We caught up with one of them, Ben Tee, a budding electrical engineer researching self-healing skin. Tee and his colleagues are developing a