3. Some books about innovation revolve around the idea that a small
number of amazingly smart individuals have had Eureka
moments, leading to extraordinary breakthroughs that changed the
course of civilization.
“We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations,
imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings…But ideas
are works of bricolage…We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve
stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.”
( Steven Johnson)
4. The Eureka moment came when the
great thinker realized that his floating
body “displaced”, or pushed aside only
the quantity of water that would have a
weight to equal his own.
The Decision to start Microsoft, for example, wasn’t based on a
momentous flash of insight. It was based on incremental
developments in a nascent personal computing industry.
5. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the
world’s first satellite, known as Sputnik.
This changed the course of world history
and led the United States, their chief rival in
the Space Race, to mount a massive effort of
its own to put manned craft in orbit and
land a man on the moon.
6. They realized that Sputnik's signal was
higher on approach of the satellite and lower
as the satellite had passed over and was
moving away from them, because of
Doppler effect.
As we could draw the orbit of the satellite of
unknown location, from a known place on
the ground. We can identify the position of
an unknown earth signal by a known
position satellite.
7. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is
a space-based satellite navigation system
that provides location and time information
in all weather, anywhere on or near the
Earth.
The first GPS satellite was launched in
1978. It was essentially experimental, but in
1983 President Ronald Reagan brought the
project to civilian use after a Korean airliner
was shot down after it accidentally entered
Soviet airspace.
8. Adjacent Possible
“It’s the idea that what is achievable today is defined by the
various combinations of events and activities that have occurred
prior.”
Stuart Kauffman
American scientist
For example, in the 1870s, a French doctor, Stephane
Tarnier, saw incubators for chicken hatchlings at the
Paris Zoo and hired the zoo’s poultry-raiser to build
incubator boxes for premature newborns at his hospital.
Other hospitals at the time were using devices to keep
babies warm, but Tarnier was the first to conduct
research showing how incubators significantly reduced
the infant mortality rate, leading to their widespread use
in Paris and beyond.
9. How to develop good ideas?
● Liquid Network
● Serendipity
● Slow hunches
● Error
● Noise
● Exaptations
10. Liquid Network
Being flexible enough to facilitate dynamic connections between
good ideas, but structured enough to support and hold them
● Not so rigid that ideas can’t grow and develop
● Not so much space where ideas can’t reach
each other.
● Free flow of ideas allows ideas to connect,
grow, reconnect with others.
● Liquid networks complete ideas.
11. Serendipity
Serendipity or what Johnson calls “happy accidents”
● You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose you
bearings serendipitously.
● Go for a walk, take a shower/bath – remove yourself from the
problem
● According to NYTimes, web has pushed culture toward more
serendipitous collisions.
12. It took Joseph Priestley, an 18th century scientist, 20
years to conclude that plants create oxygen. (Priestly
first had an inkling when, as a child, the spiders he
trapped in glass jars died.)
The core pieces of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural
selection were articulated in his notebooks more
than a year before he seemed to fully grasp their
significance and published them
13. Slow Hunch
● Hunch that developed over time is more common than sudden
flash of inspiration.
● Have to keep hunch alive.
● Keep a journal or commonplace book and review it to refresh
your hunch.
● Sleeping on the problem actually helps
15. Noise
● Albert Einstein has been considered the patron saint of useful
messiness, and once stated “The cluttered desk signs a cluttered
mind; what does an empty desk sign?”
16. Exaptation
● Defined as using a feature or structure for something other than its
original intended purpose.
● Ex. In Indonesia, Timothy Prestero redesigned neonatal incubators out
of automobile parts because the locals had access to and knowledge of
automobile engines.
