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How ideas are born
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Ah, behold the new Malcolm Gladwell piece at The New Yorker - “In the Air.” It’s about a company called Intellectual Ventures (I.V.), which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a group of really smart people - physicists, surgeons, computer men, et al. - who do nothing but come up with ideas, with solutions, with inventions.
The original expectation was that I.V. would file a hundred patents a year. Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three thousand ideas. Wood said that he once attended a two-day invention session presided over by Jung, and after the first day the group went out to dinner. “So Edward took his people out, plus me,” Wood said. “And the eight of us sat down at a table and the attorney said, ‘Do you mind if I record the evening?’ And we all said no, of course not. We sat there. It was a long dinner. I thought we were lightly chewing the rag. But the next day the attorney comes up with eight single-spaced pages flagging thirty-six different inventions from dinner. Dinner.”
Gladwell also talks about multiples, or the idea that the same thing can be invented at the same time by two different people in two different places. It happened with steam power, with the telephone, with the microchip. How does this happen? Gladwell says, Maybe the ideas are out there, waiting to be discovered at a certain time and certain place. The ingredients are there for all the same people. We just have to cook them. Fascinating, and so well-written.
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Don’t blame racism
Absolutely fascinating…
As a fabricator and maker of things, stuff like this captures my attention like nothing else.
Here’s another cool innovative article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/technology/03koller.html?ref=science
Here is another cool innovative article:
http://tinyurl.com/4gzzvh
I’ve heard speculation that ancient Egyptians somehow migrated to Central America. The reason some believe this is because they both have pyramids. I think it is more likely that the pyramid such a good logical idea that two smart people on different continent figure out how to make one.
And their similar religions? And the fact that their papyrus boats are similar?
How do ‘multiples’ happen?
One idea is that no idea appears ex nihilo, out of nothing, except the ideas of God of course.
But the ideas of man are always the solution to the next problem. Several people working on the same problem at around the same time come up with a similar solution.
Kbells: read “Voyage of the Kon-Tiki”. Two guys sailed a raft from Asia to South America to prove this theory, that a journey like that could be possible with ancient technology.
xion post 6,
and indeed as you note the previous ideas provide some of the foundational perpsectives to derive the next idea.
Now of course if ancient Egyptians brought the pyramids to central America, how come they did not bring the use of the wheel in the Egyptian chariot with them?
It is a peculairity of the new world that apparently the wheel was only used in toys but never in any practical machine for moving material.
My last thoughts: is this organization focused on developing the ideas, or in submitting patents which they can sell latter if someone else needs the idea as part of a separate development. The liklihood that this organization can develop 500 ideas a year seem s far feteched. yet development of the idea and making it practical has typically been considered an important aspect of taking out the patent. The usual term is, I believe, redcuing it to practice.