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Short point show
- 1. WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM SPEAKER: STEVEN JOHNSON
Editor's Notes
- What are the environments which lead to good ideas and creativity?
- An idea is a network, a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It is a new configuration that has never formed before.
- How do we get our brains into an environment where these networks are more likely to take place? It turns out that the network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain.
- Timothy Presteros’ company Design That Matters wanted to get modern neonatal incubators in the developing world to lower infant mortality rates. The technology is there, the only problem is that these incubators will not last longer than a year and then there are no resources nearby to fix it.
- So Presteros thought about what were the abundant resources in the environments, and he noticed vehicles. People in these environments seem to be able to keep their cars and trucks running and working, and so he decided to make a neonatal incubator out of auto parts.
- Steven Johnson liked to think of this story as a metaphor for the way ideas happen. More often than not, ideas are cobbled together from whatever parts happen to be around nearby. We take ideas from other people and stitch them together into new forms and we create something new, and that is where innovation happens.
- This means we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like. Rather than sitting alone in deep thought, Johnson believed more creativity happens in chaotic environments.
- When you have an environment called the Liquid Network, which is where you have a lot more eyes, ideas, different backgrounds and interests, you then have an environment that leads to innovation.
- Steven Johnson also spoke about Eureka moments or epiphanies, and how they don’t really exist. He doesn’t believe that innovation simply strinkes you on the head such as the apple did with Newton.
- In fact ideas happen and develop over a long period of time. It starts out small, you build and add on to it a little at a time, and then finally you have formed this new network. Johnson calls this the Slow Hunch.
- The men who created the GPS system we use today began fooling around with with an antenna and amplifier trying to pick up signals from satellite Sputnick.
- After tinkering for a little while more, their supervisors realized that these men were able to pinpoint an unknown location in space from a known location down on the ground. The supervisors asked them if they could reverse it, which turned out to be easier.
- This technology was later used in the Cold War and this technology now allows us to find the nearest coffee shop with out cell phones.