Chapter 1
New Creativity for Renewed Prosperity
The era we are entering will be one of enormous social, political and economic change…
…things will have to change around here, and fast.
Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded
On a recent flight to Orlando, home of Disney World and fantasy, I sat next to a really bright young entrepreneur. Working in the automobile parts supply business, he learned who the buyers are and who the sellers are, pricing, key trade shows to meet important contacts and so forth. He coupled this knowledge and his boundless inquisitiveness and energy with the new marketing medium of the Internet to start an “aftermarket” automobile accessories supplier mainly to the world of Toyota.
He has about 20 employees, is totally self-financed with no debt or government aid, has an adoring wife and great kids, and is generally enjoying the American Dream. He is less than half my age and, I thought, an ideal observer of the enterprise world coming upon us.
I asked him, “Are you developing any of your own products? Will you have some cool addition to the standard stuff everybody is making and selling?” He thought for a minute and replied, “There are extremely few, if any, new inventions anymore.”
You might think we will turn into the Internet marketing capital of the world and leave it to the rising class of Asian engineers who have found stimulating opportunities in their home discovery. For the last few decades, the mantra in business schools and corporate training prcountries to generate the products the whole world will need for today and tomorrow. Creativity will be reduced to thinking up new Corporate Goals statements and new luncheon theme ideas.
But Bette Nesmith Graham didn’t know this. A single mother and secretary in Dallas, she thought there would be a better way to cover up mistakes made in typing. She recalled her long ago artistic experience and looked for a liquid mixture to paint over the typing errors. The first formulations were made up in her kitchen blender.
In 1956 Ms. Graham founded the Mistake Out company, later well-known as Liquid Paper (figure 1a) or “white out,” starting on the proverbial shoe string and working nights and weekends. By 1968 she had her own plant and 19 employees. She sold her company for $47.5 million. Even if taxes and transaction expenses took over half of that, she cleared about $1 million a year.
This is still possible at all levels from the kitchen chemistry lab to the killer app corporate development project or to the multinational research initiative. In 1993, I started my last company on the dining room table soldering parts together mostly purchased at the local Radio Shack. It grew into a small but leading gas detection instrument company which I sold in 2007 at many times my investment.
We are in new times and uncharted territory in the saga of enterprise. The United States and the rest of the western world are facing the possibility of no growth or at best very controlled growth for decades or longer. Major product ideas and resources are harder to find. The dollar is getting weaker, so we can’t buy or outsource everything we need. We must create new solutions, products and services as a major component of future sales.
Entrepreneurs and managers must rediscover ograms has been marketing. This was the way to the top. Information technology has also become an important fast track for rising managers. In most cases, product development and intellectual property accumulation has been a discretionary activity, seriously pursued when extra cash was in great supply.
This book focuses on the mindset and creative process involved to imagine, create and invent in the 21st century. This subject is not generally taught in schools and colleges, and it doesn’t lend itself to a few simple rules for success, but we must tackle it if we’re going to enjoy renewed prosperity any time soon.
While management of innovation has been a popular management development subject, the creative process itself is often not meaningfully addressed. This book will help you identify creative innovators, help you know what is a good creative environment, and help you understand what knowledge resources innovators need to carry out the creative process. This information is equally valuable for the self-guided creator and entrepreneur. I will combine observations of historically creative and inventive people, new findings from cognitive science about the creative process, and ways to use the Internet and computer clouds to greatly enhance success in a creative project.
Whatever the era or product, the successful project or company starts with a creative visionary--somebody who is imaginative and persistent and who has a multifaceted mind.
Would an American corporation in the early 1800’s (or now) hire as their chief designer a financially failing artist with radical political views and an itchy foot for world travel? There was such a person. He did not have a comfortable job, but he had a vision to develop a communication system that could send messages faster than the best steam trains and ships and unhindered by rain, sleet or snow. He was Samuel Finley Breese Morse, a distant relative, who invented the telegraph.
In 1832, while on a sea voyage back to America, Morse began to think about the concept of a telegraph system. He knew the basic principles of electro-magnetism, but not the practical aspect of engineering products and systems. Several European inventors were also working on telegraph systems, but apparently their efforts were unknown to him.
Morse used his creative abilities to see relationships and possibilities. His breakthrough was coding letters and numbers as groupings of binary digits. This allowed the simplicity of sending messages over one wire (the return circuit being ground) instead of several wires that would be required for simple or no coding schemes. The competing European designs required as many as 35 wires.
Public demonstrations of telegraphy happened about 12 years after Morse’s first vision of it. What carried him through those wrenching times was perseverance, the ability to tinker and improvise, thinking about all aspects of the design such as the need for coding as well as transmission, and his ability to bring other people to help when design, manufacturing and other challenges required additional talents and facilities.
Both Bette Nesmith Graham and Samuel F. B. Morse were iconic American inventors who illustrate traits in common that will be valuable to anyone interested in creating new designs and products:
· Unleash your curiosity, quest for knowledge, and propensity for noticing things. No lesser minds than Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein were noted for being passionately curious, using their imagination as their prime lens to see ahead and their creativity to solve problems. Einstein wrote: “The important thing is not to stop questioning.” You should also notice all kinds of things, however unrelated to your quest they may seem. When Willis Carrier noticed the apparently odd behavior of water droplets in fog, he had stumbled into the basics of the novel technology of the Carrier Corporation, world leader in air conditioning.
· Project your mind into imagination space, focusing on all the interrelated aspects of what you are creating or inventing. To create your Eureka moment, you must forcefully move your mind beyond the existing thinking about the subject. You must move out of your conscious world and focus your mind in a new place occupied only by the new creation. This is your glorious imagination space. Some people, very few, keep this imaginative ability through adulthood. Their imaginings lead to inventions, art, designs and explorations of many frontiers never seen before. To start, try to be a child with the almost naïve capability of unfettered imagination. Emotion is part of this creative formula, and that has not been replicated in any advanced computer.
· Bring in experts and specialists whenever and wherever appropriate. A common mistake is to be overly protective about your novel idea. At the earliest possible time you should have your design or composition reviewed by an associate, faculty member, consultant or other trustworthy knowledgeable advisor. Usually you do not have to disclose important details to protect from copying, and very often a reviewer can give you surprisingly good guidance on design or composition improvement.
· Focus on the practical, useful, needed and beautiful. Very often inventions and other creations start out answering to a major need or a broad interest. Then the project morphs into a personal passion with little or no market value. Whether you’re a garage tinkerer or Thomas Edison, ultimately your commercial success depends on developing something which economically fills a real need and which looks attractive to potential buyers. As you develop prototypes, theories or compositions, show them to people in the market for overall attractiveness feedback.
· Be persistent. Don’t give up! In one famous incident, an associate found Thomas Edison at his lab bench surrounded by a sea of experimental storage battery test cells. 9,000 experiments had been carried out with no promising developments. His associate offered condolence, “Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done, you haven’t been able to get any results?” “Results!” Edison replied. “Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work!” For a major invention like the light bulb, this is what’s involved. Even minor inventions seem to take more time than imagined to get to the production prototype stage.
These key parts of creative thinking will be explored in part I of this book.
Where the telegraph initiated the era of wired communications, the iPhone has started the era of the computer clouds (almost infinitely large bundles of data and services available by Internet) in the palm of your hand. The telephone is not obsolete, music radio won’t go away, computers of all sizes will always be here, video games will always have their consoles, and data transmission will always be available through specialty equipment; but now all of these modalities are available together through a personal portable device.
Fast forward to 2005. Steve Jobs, the legendary leader at Apple®, is initiating a great leap forward (figure 1b). He has directed about 200 of his best engineers to create what we now know as the iPhone TM. Like Morse, he is not the first with some version of his product. And like Morse, Jobs can focus on a product vision that combines needs satisfaction, functionality, apparent simplicity, and, in addition, design beauty. The resultant product is a combination of invention, engineering, and aesthetic appeal. In short, it is a bold act of creativity.
The iPhones and similar smart phones are forever changing the way we use computers and communications. There are many competitors to the iPhone, but the design led by Jobs crystallized that this new communications and computing package was not a flash in the pan. It is a basic paradigm shift with benefits for everyone.
In retrospect, the design requirements seem obvious enough:
- Use a powerful operating system that doesn’t hog memory (easier said than done).
- Develop reliable touch screen controls instead of typing keys (also no design job for amateurs).
- Enchant the prospective buyer with a beautiful design with no keys, shiny aluminum instead of black plastic and colorful icons.
- Offer a huge music and apps library.
Apple’s sales of the iPhone have skyrocketed from nothing in early 2007 to 17% of the world market in late 2009. Steve Jobs commented in November, 2009, “We’re making our most innovative products ever, and our customers are responding. We’re thrilled to have sold of 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter, and users have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications from our App Store in its first year.”
Samuel F. B. Morse of course did not have the technology and resources available to Jobs for his design project. Most important for Apple is the role of computers in complex design. The several hundred engineers assigned to the project could not integrate all the subsystems of the iPhone such as the radio circuits, internal power supply, microprocessor, software, touch screen display and mechanical packaging without computerized integration of the subsystem designs. The search for components and design solutions would require intense use of the Internet.
Still, even in the Age of Google, a visionary leader is required, and Steve Jobs is reported to have mercilessly driven his design group, never taking “no” for an answer. There were screaming matches in the hallways, doors slamming and completely burned out engineers.
The iPhone and many other recent developments from tiny pills to giant airlines call for the new tools for creativity, invention and design which we will explore in parts II and III of this book. A common thread among these tools is computer clouds and computer networks. They show up as:
- Use of large research teams in virtual labs defined by computer networks.
- Artificial intelligence (AI).
- Novel methods of analysis of massive data sets or “big data” including, notably, systems biology.
- Collective intelligence involving communities larger than research teams sharing private computer network wikis.
- Designing and inventing with Google and search engines using six basic steps.
These creative tools are required because the most creative challenges are much more complex compared to a century ago. The development of the iPhone requires thinking in a much more complex space than did the development of telegraphy even though both were hugely important in their time. The six steps for inventing and innovating that leverage Google’s comprehensiveness and speed can be found and will be discussed in detail in chapter 10 (figure 1c).
I will illustrate my story by references to thinkers and creators ranging from Leonardo de Vinci to Thomas Edison. We’ll see what Mozart and Einstein had in common. We’ll see what ordinary people can do to enjoy a more creative and prosperous life. There are many examples ranging from Bette Nesmith Graham to various enterprises in my own family to draw from.
We will go back to basics by reinventing the wheel; see how to design the world’s most successful bird feeder; discover that computers can design electronic circuits; see how Pfizer’s scientists collaborate on online shared research ideas; examine Boeing’s new design approach for the 787 Dreamliner; learn that an oil spill challenge was solved by a concrete expert found by an inventor’s outreach on the Internet; and see how MIT is approaching the climate change analysis problem by using an online “collaboratorium” of collective intelligence from many researchers in hundreds of fields.
Hopefully, somewhere in this stream of stories you will find something to enhance your creative life—maybe even make you insanely rich. Maybe there will be ideas here to help your children get launched in creative and remunerative careers. At the organization level the ideas in this book could benefit employees in order to achieve greater profitability for the company or productivity for the organization. There will also be a greater sense of purpose, feeling of satisfaction and improved self-esteem for the employees and other stakeholders.
This book is about the creative process, and how creativity and invention is enhanced by the availability and accessibility of information in the Internet age. This book will help you achieve your creative maximum using all of the Internet and other data resources available. Its observations apply to lone individuals, teams large enough to put a man on the moon, and everything in-between.
This book should also help you think about the education of today’s kids and their kids. The Web mirrors life itself—it can be an opiate, trash pile, candy store or inexhaustible resource. An increasing amount of education should be teaching the new generations how to use it with discernment and how to question its results.
We will explore creativity and invention in this emerging era of Web-based collective intelligence with its almost infinite ability to connect to others and help us imagine and create in new ways. With limitless memory capacity, plain language instant communication, and software that parallels the natural thinking process, computer based systems including the Web, enable humanity to transcend each person’s own educational and environmental constraints.
Recent years have seen an explosion in new understanding about the human brain. New reports are appearing weekly in scientific and lay media. Consequently, how the brain predicts and imagines is becoming clearer. At the same time, more sophisticated technologies are being developed to approximate human thought. Quite likely, any discoveries will have ramifications in cyberspace and for our creativity and invention strategies.
This book will explore the key attributes of the creative mind. What special attributes did Mozart, Einstein and others have? What can we learn from them that can produce exciting thinking today? This takes us to a space apparently off-limits to computers: projecting the mind out of most all of its frame of references and rethinking a problem in the frame of reference of the problem itself. The mind is projected to a frame of reference most suitable for visualizing the invention or creation. This requires a bright mind, but also essential for outstanding performance are years of practice in conditioning the mind for this mode of thinking and aggressively gathering information for areas of continuing interest.
The gorilla in the room is the computer, and it may appear in many forms. Of particular concern, there are computers that think in a science fiction-like area called Artificial Intelligence (AI). Visions are revealed where AI will leapfrog human intelligence, and then little seems to happen. Still, progress lurches forward, and we examine AI as a threat or partner as the case may be.
More pervasive still—at least right now—are the almost infinitely large groupings of computers called computer clouds with libraries of trillions of pieces of data all of which are accessible by the click of a mouse. The clouds are everywhere. They are behind everything from online weather forecasts to harboring Facebook, Amazon and Google.
Advanced use of the computer clouds is for collective intelligence and data search for online inventing. The clouds support the research and creativity required for solving some of our greatest mysteries and problems, all of which seemed to be too complex to deal with before. This book will review these developments and help you develop your techniques for online creativity.