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innovation II
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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