Transcript

Beginnings: Russ Conser at TEDxSugarLand

[Music] p is all about spreading great ideas but how do great ideas spread I think a lot of people think that ideas come from the idea stor that somehow they just drop out of the sky and land in our laps but my experience is don't pop up fully formed nor are they widely understood as they're delivered most Innovations follow what's called an s-curve pattern from a distance sometimes they look like very steep steps as if suddenly we all had televisions suddenly we all had microwaves but if we look more closely we'll see that the process involves a very slow beginning to inventive ideas that have come to form our world and an idea that we notice today in 2012 probably began more than 20 years ago as an early stage Innovation person what I find Most Fascinating is what happened in between it's that period of the childhood of an idea where like prep's mother they're raising it through a period and trying to impart values on it but it's a child especially the ideas that change the world it's a bit orary it often gets in fights on the play ground and skins its knee from time to time so I'm going to go through a couple of stories um to talk about Innovation planes power and pods to try to impart some of the things that I experience uh in Innovation and uh the formation of new ideas so I'm sure everyone here uh knows the story of the rri brothers and Kitty Hawk that was 1903 for those of you that remember the details of your childhood education um but frankly you know although we celebrate it today I was driving through North Carolina last week and you know see it on the license plate the land of first flight but in reality it wasn't quite so simple at the time it wasn't even commemorative what you see before you here in this quote is a small article that occurred in scientific americ in the last issue of 1903 basically making just small note of the fact that a couple of interesting fellows had flown in Carolina uh in the previous weeks well what was it about the right brothers that allowed them to fly when many other scientists for the hundreds of years of mankind have been trying to fly I think one of the things that made the ripe brothers so special is that they looked at the problem differently and they brought different skills to the game the picture you see before you here is a contraption that they invented that solved some of the critical riddles that allowed them to understand how to fly if you look at it carefully you'll see two big fins on the front of a bicycle they're mounted at 90° from one another and this was their solution to a very poor man's wind tunnel at the time because when they started playing with the early kites they actually flew their airplanes on kites before they tried getting in them in a powered flight type form um and and what they found was that the scientific data that they could find in the journals didn't match reality so they had to go get data when you're doing something new you actually have to go get data and you have to be thorough and you got to do your homework well the wri brothers found a very practical application for the skills that they had in order to uh get new data on air flow over Wings basically the rate at which this wheel would spin as they would ride down the street gave them datea about the relative forces as they would change the angles on that Wing So lesson number one uh in Innovation is sometimes irrelevant skills or seemingly irrelevant skills turn out to be crucial in developing a new idea all right so 1905 this is two years after Kittyhawk right I mean we think today that if it's on a license plate there must have been parades but two years after Kittyhawk this is the fields outside of Dayton Ohio a place called The Huffman Prairie notice the plane looks quite stable right it's much higher you don't have that guy running along beside it that you know looks like he's going to try to catch it if something bad happens to it um but you see two uh people up there in the plane but also look on the ground there's no one there right this is really an uneventful day two years after what we attribute to be the beginning of Aviation well 1905 the same month Scientific American again look at what Scientific American was writing about the right Brothers see rumors were coming out that the right brothers were actually trying to fly and getting some things going but the alleged experiments and that the newspapers United States how's how's this for sarcasm right as alert as they are allowed these Sensational performances to escape their notice that skepticism in 1905 when anyone could look up in the sky outside of Dayton Ohio and see it flying is really remarkable this this shows that ideas are difficult to find belief but not with everybody also in 1905 actually two weeks before the Scientific American article um the January 1 1905 edition of a very obscure magazine called gleanings in Bee culture this was a magazine about uh keeping bees making honey Amos root was the editor of of gleanings and Bee culture and he wrote this uh lengthy story about what he had seen on the fields of Dayton Ohio where he happened to live and notice that he's referring back to 1904 and the first trip that he happened to witness where without a balloon right because everyone thought that to go into the air you had to have something lighter than air that there was a plane that made it all the way back to its starting point so isn't it fascinating that someone who studies bees is seeing something that Scientific American is saying well we're not really sure that exists yet my experience is is that skepticism that gap between skepticism and wonder is normal and one of the things here that allowed uh Mr Root to see this was because he looked at it with a sense of wonderment a sense of magic that he had a different set of eyes he he studied flying things um for for his business and for his life and so he saw things that others didn't so that's lesson two to me is look for people who look at things through different eyes well so Wilbur and Orville thought that they had solved the problem by this time um and they went into sales mode so they said okay we'll sell it to the military right they'll be really advantageous to be up in the air and Orville and Wilbur finally got a letter into the war department to their Congressman this is the response that they got back of course saying well it's not clear that it's been brought to the stage of practical operation so bring it back when it's ready well it was 1908 so now we are 5 years after Kittyhawk when the contract on the left was signed for $25,000 that the US military would buy one of these planes if it met certain specifications now see the picture on the right which is the fall of 1908 where actually the right Brothers met those specifications and of course now notice that there's a lot more witnesses present people had been trained to see in interacting what they would look for and of course a lot of people from the government were there to watch at the time so five years from Kittyhawk to the point where the US military was now going to take on one of the most important inventions in modern history I'll talk about a couple other stories I said planes power and pods this is power Thomas Edison I assume most people here recognize this with his most famous invention the light bulb uh he invented electricity for lighting or invented lighting among many other things and one of his first projects was the Pearl Street Power Station in New York that allowed the light a neighborhood in uh Manhattan well there's some interesting lessons to learn from how this actually played out through the rest of innovation andent this man Nikolai Tesla this is the guy that was little person in that little video that we saw from Ted video this morning um Nikolai Tesla was a Croatian immigrant the United States who was very well educated but seemed more importantly to have an intuitive grasp of electricity that other people didn't have well got to go back um he was successful too he actually hired on in Edison's lab but quickly found uh that he and Edison didn't get along in fact he quit the um Edison's lab when there were some unmet expectations and hooked up with George Westinghouse a name that you're more likely to remember uh today and and was actually successful in building a power station nager Falls that the gentleman this morning mentioned which transmitted power down through New York State as AC power but there was a problem Tesla's AC power was in direct conflict to Edison's DC power Edison saw this as a threat because Edison's power could only be used in neighborhoods and Teslas could be transported across the country so what did Edison do he tried to use logic to help people see the dangers of AC power but it didn't work so being a good uh commercial man and a showman he tried to help people see the uh the errors the danger in AC power so you saw the picture I kind of R ruined it before here's what Edison did to help people see the dangers of AC power on the sidewalks of Coney Island he hooked an elephant up to a bunch of electrodes and electrocuted it this is the tension that happens in the early stages of innovation now this is quite dramatic right it got it in the media Edison made his point but for what it's worth Tesla and Westinghouse didn't stop Edison didn't either Edison realizing that he still wasn't winning the battle with AC and DC power had a very fortunate event when enter a young man by the name of uh or older man actually by the name of Alfred Southwick who was a dentist who sat on the board of Prisons for the state of New York who had this idea uh he had heard that AC power is dangerous we could use this as a way to uh execute prisoners so here you go another fun story from the beginning of Innovations Thomas Edison and his team work with Southwick in the state of New York to develop the technology for the electric chair so the electric chair was basically the result of a demonstration of a competitive rivalry between two early stage innovators a fascinating story about the tension of early Innovation lest you think that these stories only matter in old days or big things I bring before you the story of the iPod um uh in this case here I just have a screen capture of a of a chat room on slash dot which some of you uh may know about from years ago 2001 uh a young man by the name of Tony Fidel had came to Apple with this idea of an easy used digital music player interesting that you see this same sense of wonder and skepticism my favorite quote here no Wireless less space than a nomad which was another competitive thing at the time lame well that's all new now of course we know the rest of the story that it was successful but what you may not know is that if we look in the early stage of innovation the iPod was introduced in 2001 that dark blue line is the Apple stock price and the blue bars are the sales of the iPod it took three years before you could even see a blip on iPods after the invention of the iPod before it became material so if you understood these patterns of innovation at the time where skepticism and wonderment were playing around you could have made a healthy sum in innovation in fact six years later um if you had invested in apple which is longer than the time between the wri Brothers invention and and the first sale to the army with Apple stock today trading at over $600 you would more than six returned your money more than six times so this phenomena of skepticism and time now what happened during that period right Steve jobes didn't go fishing during that period the Apple team was actively iterating with potential customers and products because in reality that initial iPod really was kind of lame it was then on dispas and it looked kind of clunky now and it wasn't until they started with his chain as they perfected the mini and things like this that it started coming out there was an important uh person that was mentioned earlier this morning uh by Dr crowl called Thomas cun and it would only be at Ted where two people would May mention the same scientific historian at the same time uh who wrote that book called structure of scientific revolutions and another key aspect of that same book was he coined the term crisis when when a great idea comes into being there's normally an evolutionary process for technology where people challenge it and review it and only if it doesn't fit that evolutionary path that we try to put it on will it have a chance to reach a point where it's in conflict and people get angry or they get upset or there's a tension or there's a fight or electrocute an elephant or whatever the case maybe see I think that that's a healthy part of the process I think that was cun's message to us and whereas we don't like crises because we're human and they're messy I think it's a healthy part of the Innovation process that we have to go through that process of iterating the product the beginnings of innovation to me are a process of plowing furrows in the mind where we can plant the seeds of great ideas and water and fertilize them this is a process that's very healthy in the overall development ideas uh over time so as you um hope hopefully by now you get the point I'm really not criticizing the fo Edison I'm not criticizing the Army for uh being skeptical of of uh the right brothers and I don't think people were wrong uh Commander Taco there the guy who quoted uh in in the Apple slash dot thing was wrong to call the iPod lame those are all a natural part of the early stage of innovation Innovation doesn't come from STS ideas don't come out fully formed airplanes don't fly right out of the barn uh iPods don't sell millions today we all look forward to Apple's next announcement of a new product right but in 2001 nobody cared and this is a natural healthy process for Innovation so I would say as you look around for great new ideas that might change the world and as we as tedsters or tedison or any of the other things our earlier speaker talked about look for people that are doing unusual things and unusual places with unusual skills something that's different that they bring to the equation than the traditional experts there look for places where the experts may be uncomfortable with an idea and if you see something yourself by the way and you have your own idea when someone comes to you and says that idea is wrong that idea is impossible when it just can't work listen to what they're saying just not the the conclusion of what they're saying usually they're helping you understand something in your system that has to be adjusted AC power really did have a safety problem the iPod did need more memory and an easier to use interface and this is the these are the types of things that allow us to spread great ideas thank [Applause] you