Where do great ideas come from—and how do we recognize their significance when they appear?

Danny Hillis, Applied Minds co-founder and a Scientific American adviser, and I were discussing these questions recently as we prepared for a talk in late October at the Compass Summit (compass-summit.com). “Ideas are a product of society,” an emergent phenomenon, Hillis told me, “which are almost inevitable.” That’s why, he said, our admiration for individuals who have come up with such ideas is “almost giving too much credit.” The idea itself is not enough. A lot of people in a society will have a given notion, he explained. Maybe only 1,000 will try to sketch it out. “Then 100 will try to make something, and 10 of those might actually make something practical. One or two of those might be on the level of an Edison or Tesla.”

In many ways, Hillis and I share a mission of identifying those ideas that just might work. His company, of course, is involved in developing them. As for the magazine and our Web site’s role? “The interesting thing about Scientific American is it lets you understand those ideas,” he added.

We have both watched with interest recent sweeping trends in the idea machine: how interdisciplinary research is a growing area of focus and the rising force of “big data” and increasing computing power. Those topics would be part of our on-stage Compass Summit conversation, and they also underpin this issue’s special look at innovation, the third annual “World Changing Ideas.” The section features 10 out-of-the-lab concepts with the possibility to scale in a practical way.

I’m particularly taken by “The Machine That Would Predict the Future,” by David Weinberger.. The story covers the work of Dirk Helbing, a physicist and chair of sociology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Helbing has proposed a large-scale computing program that would attempt to model global-scale systems and so “would effectively serve as the world’s crystal ball.”

Perhaps you, like me, will feel forcefully reminded of Isaac Asimov’s Hari Seldon, the “psychohistorian” whose pattern-predicting math drove the famous Foundation science-fiction series. Asimov, a long-time Scientific American subscriber himself, read the magazine to keep up with science. Increasingly, it feels as if the reverse is also true.

4 Comments

1. 1. ipgrunt 01:45 PM 11/15/11

   An contrasting point of view to this article can be found in a recent column by Vaclav Smil in the Atlantic Monthly -- The Myth of the Innovator Hero
   
   http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/the-myth-of-the-innovator-hero/248291/?google_editors_picks=true
   
   The paradigm described by Mr. Smil is consistent with my experience in 30 years of product engineering.
   

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2. 2. ennui 03:23 PM 11/16/11

   Maybe the inventor is pre-programmed.
   On my sixth Birthday Party in Holland at my Grandparents house (My Grandmother was a Principal), attended by about ten uncles and aunts ( all Principals and Teachers), I got a book as present: "Inventors of our time". After reading the whole book (I was already a speed reader at that time) I announced that I was going to be an inventor too.
   When they asked what I was going to invent then, being all of six years old, I asked what had not been invented yet. After two minutes, I got the answer: Pepetual Motion and Gravity Control.
   My Mother had told me what Perpetual Motion was but I did not know that it had not been invented yet and what was that "Gravity Control"?
   Oh, with that you could lift something as heavy as an elephant or a whole house and you could fly through the air without sound, not like a noisy airplane or Zeppelin.
   "Hey," I shouted , "that is just what I am going to invent when I am BIG!"
   The whole assembly dissolved into laughter, what made me so angry, that I did not want that "rotten book" anymore.
   So my Grandmother took it back, stating that it was probably too advanced for me.
   It was not, I was angry that they did not take me seriously.
   I emigrated to Canada and found Gravity Control, when I figured out the technology of the Flying Saucer.
   When I got the patent, Dr. Kahn of the Hudson Institute told my Patent Lawyer, Mr. Robert Farkas, that it had been evaluated at $600 Billion, if the USA would have it before Russia. Both gentlemen predicted the Nobel Prize for me.
   I offered it to Nasa, so that the technology could be applied to the Shuttles, that thereupon could fly very economically, without rockets all over our Solar System. They would get the "tapping" of energy out of the aether as an added bonus (I did not explain that in my Patent)
   The Propulsion Engineers in Cleveland, Ohio were: " Not interested!" It would make the Rocket Industry obsolete
   Finally, after the second Space Disaster, they decided to look at the circuitry, did not contact me like I had urged, got the setting of an E-Bomb and caused Billions of Dollars of Damage, with the big Black-out of 2003.
   They blew the big Power Transformer Sation on their grounds to Kingdom Come and the result cascaded.
   Then they advised Nasa Headquarters, that the technology of the Flying Saucer was unsuitable for Space Travel. Nasa refused to pay me my fee.
   The dumb people were told that a Tree was the reason for the Black-out.
   Look at: One Terminal Capacitor Joseph H..."

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3. 3. mounthell 12:02 AM 11/18/11

   @ennui -- excellent satire!
   
   On that topic, I remember hearing someone ask "why don't they invent something people want?"
   
   Most academicians and widget people like Hillis think of innovation as being mere elaboration of existing concepts; look at the silliness coming out of physicists who, with straight faces, wax on about string theory, multiverses, wormholes in space, AI and so on.
   
   Most people have little real insight into the source of ideas worthy of the term "new." It takes decades to slip such new ideas past our estimable social inertia: the sum of thoughtless ways for protecting our established, but anachronistic methods and concepts, those with which people in the putative "innovation" fields are enamored and over-invested in.
   
   Thus, we couldn't recognize a truly new idea if it crawled up our leg and bit us ....

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4. 4. Quinn the Eskimo 01:34 AM 11/18/11

   Genius is not tough to do.
   
   Recognizing it is.
   
   
   
   .

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