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'Innovation In a Flash' Is a Myth
An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times article spells out what most of us probably already knew: real innovation takes lots of time and hard work to come to fruition. The article looks at the origins of new ideas, and attempts to dispel the myth that 'Eureka' moments create change. Comments author Scott Berkun, 'To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn't the magic moment: it's the end result of a useful innovation. Everything results from accretion. I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.'"
You may think my hamburger earmuffs were thought up in a flash. But it took a long time to get the pickle matrix just right.
And that, my friends, is *exactly* why Open Source is so successful and important.
Now let's go manufacturing open source hardware...
I'm an infovore...
Which major IP holder sponsored the "research" behind the article?
I have a patent on innovation :-).
Take Nobody's Word For It.
All the time I have little flashes of realization or inspiration. Being that I'm a software & hardware designer and developer, had I not had these "flashes" I would never have made any of the things I did. The author of this article is selling opinion and personal viewpoint as some sort of psychological "fact". I wish slashdot wouldn't post these stories because it gives the impression this opinion is widely held or fact.
It always involves using stuff that other people have made.
Or, in Microsoft's case, buying stuff other people have made.
I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.
Lucky for us, corporate america is catching on, and they're probably working on a subscription service for that incremental innovation. Because you can't just have un-owned ideas out there, floating around.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Investigation is 10% imagination and 90% perspiration. That's why most investigators smells so bad.
I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.
I speak therefore everything is always incremental? Ok Descartes...
Live according to the Categorical Imperative. If the Categorical Imperative tells you not to live by it... ignore it
Not Newton, but Bernard of Chartres (or John of Salisbury, depending on how your citation system works). Newton just recycled the line as a way to make fun of someone else who got annoyed after Newton had plagiarised his work.
Its just that most often, they come at the tail end of alot of hard work. Everything comes together in a flash, seemingly in one brilliant moment. Those moments are what many of us live for, but in truth, they really aren't the result of our brains exceeding physical and computational limits and suddenly operating at infinite clock-speed. The truth is you were probably working on the problem for some time (possibly unconsciously). Give yourself a little credit for having an efficient background scheduler.
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."
- Hal Abelson
Quite apart from the "10% inspiration, 90% perspiration" adage, most of the big technological advances are widely understood to have come about simply because it was their time - the foundations were in place, the need was there, and one of society's more creative and industrious members put the two together. That's called progress, people.
Meta will eat itself
The mistake is thinking that they arrive without any prior work. They arrive usually not in the absence of previous work, but in the absence of a previous solution. How can you have a sudden idea about a solution unless you've been working on the problem in the first place?
I had one a few years back, when as far as I could tell, a whole years research was about to go down the toilet because I'd hit a brick wall.
I spent several days stressed out of my head over it, and finally resolved to get out and do something else.
Whilst I was relaxing the solution suddenly popped into my head, complete. If that isn't a Eureka moment, then I don't know what is.
I certainly had done plenty of work prior to this event, but I had no idea that solution was possible until that moment, none of my work directly pointed to it that I could tell (consciously at any rate, obviously part of my brain got it). It took seconds to realise it, and an hour to write it down, then four months to instantiate. It worked even better then I'd dared think possible.
This is true, it takes us a while to come up with all the mental material for a "Flash" innovation, but I think the "Flash" is when you suddenly work out HOW all the mental material involved fits together to make an understandable innovation.
Take the original "Eureka!" moment. Before Archimedes got into his bath, he had already formed many ideas about the nature of physics, he wasn't going into the experiance totally blind, however the "Flash" innovation moment came when he made a CONNECTION between the things he already knew.
The human thought process is a very difficult thing to quantify, and I think this article is misleading in the way that it lends to the idea that Archimedes in the space of 30 seconds came up with the concept of density through displacement, when actually, the the water displacment was simply the final peice in a subconscious puzzle.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
I guess it all comes down to how one defines "innovation". If you take the word to mean invention, then the slow, incremental process can be called innovation.
However, I think most people use the word to mean "something radically different", as in a new way of doing something, or a never before seen product. This is the definition that most advertisers want people to have in mind when they describe their product. This kind of innovation is the result of a paradigm shift, which can come about either through Eureka moments, or it can come about when new people come on board and bring a new perspective to a problem.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Intuition is pattern recognition and changing the lenses (angle) from which you look at something, that someone took the time to work out.
The key is, as Schopenhauer said: "to think something no one has thought yet, while looking at something that everybody see's" which is fancy way of saying: Keep changing the perspective (interpretive framework) and using other seemingly unrelated subjects to try and interpret it in terms of something else.
Millions of people have similar or the exact same leads on great ideas everyday but they don't have the time or the fast mind to follow up on them. IMHO it's not that people can't figure it out given enough time, it is who and what you come into contact with that triggers the lead up to deofuscate the idea and THEN the persistence to follow that 'intuition'. Intuition is necessary but intuition
Part of the problem is the education system itself amd it's attempt to rush learning and disavow thinking about things differently in order to pound out 'educated' workers. People that realize there are connections between everything that we can't see and have initiative despite lack of formal education were some of the greatest innovators.
What are you talking about? If Microsoft has taught us anything, it's that innovation *does* happen in a flash. I mean, it doesn't take *that* long to write a cheque, now, does it?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Research can 'appear' to have an instantaneous "a-ha!" moment but in actuality, it has the many years of supportive effort by the researcher. The flood gates of creativity might burst open at some point, but it takes a lot of time to fill that reservoir.
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
(Thomas Alva Edison)
"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once
with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found
the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that
a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labour."
(Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931)
that doesn't promote some sort of socialist mindset? Yes, of course, the innovator is no one. He owes the work of his mind to the society and other people who made his innovation possible. Sure, sure. The individual is nothing and contributing to society is the only noble reason for living. What a bunch of nonsense! Innovation comes from two sources: wondering of the curious and gradually developed vision of forward-planning. The first is instant the latter is painstaking and slow. It is Mozart vs Salieri, if you will. And while the Salieri's make innovation useful, without the Mozarts it would never be possible. Standing on the shoulders of giants is important, but to say that it is all that matters when it comes to innovation is to refuse to acknowledge that innovation takes standing taller than anyone has stood before.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Peter Drucker wrote about this way back in 1984 in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The paperback edition is about 250 pages and he devotes about a page and a half to the 'flash of brilliance' innovations. The rest of the book is his attempt to categorize different methods of innovation and rank them in order of greatest change of success to least change of success. The 'flash of brillance' innovations rank last, of course.
For myself, as an engineer, I would have to say that most "creation" is a combination of both hard work and a series of sometimes small and occasionally large scale eureka moments.
I like the term "grok" coined by Heinlein as a verb meaning "to comprehend a topic or concept completely". Sometimes it is very difficult to completely grok something in the problem domain you are working in. If you are at the frontier of human knowledge (in whatever endeavor that may be... science, engineering, theology, politics, art, etc.) it is very unlikely that there is anybody who completely understands some new theory or concept... which is where the intellectual "fun" of being a genuine scientist tends to be at.
I remember for myself when I was trying to work on a bit of multiplexor code for an MPEG video stream engine (it was actually stuff for DVD-Video, so a bit more complex still), I finally hit upon a eureka moment when I finally figured out how to put everything together and write a small bit of very elegant software to solve the problem. Much of this involved reading and pondering through the specifications and trying to understand the problem domain, and I did write some test code to try a few ideas out. But in the end I scrapped all of the old code and with a "clean sheet" started the whole process all over again from scratch with the core part of the software only being written in about 10 minutes. It took me about 4 months to get there, and to an outside observer (such as one of the investors of the company I was working for) it would appear as though I was just wasting time and money to get to that point. The only productivity for actual code written was in that 10 minutes after I finally got the whole concept down. A co-worker wrote a similar bit of software that was insanely buggy but kluged through in just six weeks (instead of 4 months... a concurrent effort here), but then again it was a never ending process of trying to fix one problem after another in that klugged code. My software didn't have to be touched again when I was through, and was incredibly easy to review for bugs as well (like I said... it only took about 10 minutes to write once I got the concept down).
I could give countless other examples ranging from simple to very complex problems, and I'll say from experience that such moments do happen. But it also takes a whole bunch of preparation that often goes unnoticed, and can tie together completely unrelated fields of knowledge. In the example of the multiplexor above, my "eureka moment" came while I was doing an engine repair in a ten year old car with a bad water pump. I was able to take that thought process of automotive repair and apply it to software development and a 400 page piece of very dry specification language.
Another analogy is watching a beaker of super-saturated chemical solution suddenly "precipitate" leaving a bunch of stuff at the bottom of the beaker. It may take some considerable preparation to get to that point, but once there, the "action" happens very quickly. The human mind often works in a very similar fashion with regards to "discovering" a new truth about the universe. For those who have never experienced something like this happen in their life, you are genuinely missing out on an experience that IMHO is better than sex.