Humanities

Lecture (5)

Innovation II

Where Good Ideas Come

From

Steven Johnson

Some books about innovation revolve around the idea that a

small number of amazingly smart individuals have had

Eureka moments, leading to extraordinary breakthroughs

that changed the course of civilization.

“We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough

innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their

surroundings…But ideas are works of bricolage…We take the

ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we

jigger them together into some new shape.”

( Steven Johnson)

The Decision to start Microsoft, for example, wasn’t

based on a momentous flash of insight. It was based on

incremental developments in a nascent personal

computing industry.

The Eureka moment came when

the great thinker realized that his

floating body “displaced”, or

pushed aside only the quantity of

water that would have a weight

to equal his own.

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite, known as Sputnik. This changed the course of world history and led the United States, their chief rival in the Space Race, to mount a massive effort of its own to put manned craft in orbit and land a man on the moon.

As we could draw the orbit of the satellite of unknown location, from a known place on the ground. We can identify the position of an unknown earth signal by a known position satellite.

They realized that Sputnik's signal was higher on approach of the satellite and lower as the satellite had passed over and was moving away from them, because of Doppler effect.

The first GPS satellite was launched in 1978. It was essentially experimental, but in 1983 President Ronald Reagan brought the project to civilian use after a Korean airliner was shot down after it accidentally entered Soviet airspace.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a space-based satellite navigation system that provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth.

“It’s the idea that what is achievable today is defined by the various combinations of events and activities that have occurred prior.”

Stuart Kauffman American scientist

Adjacent Possible

For example, in the 1870s, a French doctor, Stephane Tarnier, saw incubators for chicken hatchlings at the Paris Zoo and hired the zoo’s poultry-raiser to build incubator boxes for premature newborns at his hospital. Other hospitals at the time were using devices to keep babies warm, but Tarnier was the first to conduct research showing how incubators significantly reduced the infant mortality rate, leading to their widespread use in Paris and beyond.

● Liquid Network

● Serendipity

● Slow hunches

● Error

● Noise

● Exaptations

How to develop good ideas?

● Not so rigid that ideas can’t grow and

develop

● Not so much space where ideas can’t

reach each other.

● Free flow of ideas allows ideas to

connect, grow, reconnect with others.

● Liquid networks complete ideas.

Liquid Network

Being flexible enough to facilitate dynamic connections

between good ideas, but structured enough to support

and hold them

Serendipity or what Johnson calls “happy accidents”

● You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and

lose you bearings serendipitously.

● Go for a walk, take a shower/bath – remove

yourself from the problem

● According to NYTimes, web has pushed culture

toward more serendipitous collisions.

Serendipity

It took Joseph Priestley, an 18th century

scientist, 20 years to conclude that plants

create oxygen. (Priestly first had an inkling

when, as a child, the spiders he trapped in

glass jars died.)

The core pieces of Charles Darwin’s theory

of natural selection were articulated in his

notebooks more than a year before he

seemed to fully grasp their significance and

published them

● Hunch that developed over time is more common than

sudden flash of inspiration.

● Have to keep hunch alive.

● Keep a journal or commonplace book and review it to

refresh your hunch.

● Sleeping on the problem actually helps

Slow Hunch

Fleming's accidental discovery and isolation of penicillin in September 1928 marks the start of modern antibiotics.

Penicillin

Error

● Albert Einstein has been considered the patron saint of

useful messiness, and once stated “The cluttered desk

signs a cluttered mind; what does an empty desk sign?”

Noise

● Defined as using a feature or structure for something other

than its original intended purpose.

● Ex. In Indonesia, Timothy Prestero redesigned neonatal

incubators out of automobile parts because the locals had

access to and knowledge of automobile engines.

Exaptation