I use this blog to gather information and thoughts about invention and innovation, the subjects I've been teaching at Stanford University Continuing Studies Program since 2005.
The current course is Principles of Invention and Innovation (Summer '17).
Our book "Scalable Innovation" is now available on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Scalable-Innovation-Inventors-Entrepreneurs-Professionals/dp/1466590971/
Twitter is having trouble competing for users against Facebook and Youtube because it has failed to scale human relationships beyond the threshold of 150 individuals. That is, the social networking niche of "less than 150" is already occupied by Facebook and for Twitter to become successful, the company has to make it easy for each user to organize and curate information dynamically from thousands of people who are not in the immediate network. Moreover, since connections and information on Twitter is more (10X!) dynamic than on Facebook, the degree of organization of information streams has to be at least 10X more sophisticated as well.
Youtube has met its content scalability challenge by enabling users to create and share playlists, channels, and subscriptions. Every user on Youtube is a developer who produces new ways to access contents at a collection or stream level, rather than at single video level. In Scalable Innovation we call it scaling at the aboutness" layer. So far, Twitter can't find a way to enable its users to become developers. All they can do is propagate gossip, which worsens the information overload problem for everybody who gets over the "150 individuals" threshold.
To summarize, Twitter needs to find a way to help people become better Information Sapiens because the Information Neanderthal niche is already occupied by Facebook and Youtube.
tags:scale, innovation, control, aboutness, twitter, social
Matt Ridley’s brilliant and ambitious new book in which he explores his considered belief that evolution—in biology, business, technology, and nearly every area of human culture—trumps deliberate and intelligent design.
The Facebook patent I briefly discussed yesterday points to a business and technology revolution, similar to the one that made Chicago a major commercial center in the United States in the 19th century. Back then, the proliferation of railroads helped move grain and cattle from small, scattered farms to large grain elevators and slaughterhouses. As the result, Chicago merchants benefited enormously from the new economies of scale. Similarly, Facebook enjoys enormous economies of scale by aggregating and processing huge amounts of scattered pieces of user preferences data.
Furthermore, Chicago merchants developed a new standardization system that
...partitioned a natural material — a steer or a bushel of wheat into a multitude of standardized commodities, each with a different price, each with a different market (Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon).
The new partitioning system allowed the merchants to sell their commodities to those consumers who were interested in a particular grain variety or beef cut and willing to pay the right price for the right commodity.
Similarly, Facebook has the ability to partition their user social graphs (and even individual users like you and I) into a multitude of parts that can be sold to advertisers and content providers for the right price at the right time and in the right place. The only difference is that instead of the Beef Chart of the 19th century they have the User Interest Chart of the 21st century.
If you believe Wikipedia, the story of the PC begins in the 1950s with IBM 610, a Personal Automatic Computer (PAC).
Rule #1: Don't believe Wikipedia when it comes to understanding innovation. Wiki editors know how to compile a myriad of data points — and I love them for that! — but they don't understand that for technology innovation the scale is all that matters. IBM 610 was a one-hand clap in the world of computer projects. Very few people heard about it, and even fewer people, if any, used it for practical purposes.
The first real Personal Computer was Apple II conceived by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1977. Steve Wozniak put together the computing hardware part; but Steve Jobs turned the kit into a real innovation when he thought about incorporating the power supply and keyboard into one box. With the addition of the floppy drive, the box turned into a breakthrough innovation.
Rule #2. Don't believe people when they apply a modern technology term like "Personal Computer" retroactively. The Personal Computer became a major innovation when it took the shape of a consumer box that you use for running shrink-wrap software. Computing machines before Apple II were either hardware kits for hobbyists or closed microprocessor boxes with proprietary software for industry use .
Bill Gates and Paul Allen anticipated the era of the Personal Computer, but originally they thought about it as a machine for hobbyists. In 1976, Bill Gates even wrote a letter to hobbyists who, in Gates' words, were stealing his work:
.....
Before Apple II, the majority of users were hardware tinkerers. After Apple II, the majority of users were consumers who used the PC to run apps. The hobbyists became software developers interested in selling their apps to consumers, rather than stealing software from Bill Gates and Paul Allen. A new large market for software was born.
When IBM entered the PC market in 1981 they contracted Microsoft to write an operating system for their computer. The rest is history. Just as young Bill Gates had anticipated, the world of personal computing needed a lot of software. Steve Jobs of Apple Computers happened to create that world, helping materialize the Gates' business vision.
Why do we care today about the old PC? Because the same innovation pattern keeps repeating in Silicon Valley. Apple ][ eliminated the requirement for software enthusiasts to know a lot about hardware. Instead of tinkering with hardware components, they could now concentrate on writing cool apps to benefit consumers, while hardware engineers focused on driving the performance of the box.
Similarly, in the 1980s Sun Microsystems enabled developers to write ubiquitous UNIX software that powered the Internet server revolution of the 1990s and eventually migrated to the Linux platform.
Most recently, in the 2000s Google created the MapReduce technology that harnessed highly reliable, distributed, commodity hardware server systems to the purposes of the developers of networked data services. Another example would be the Android OS.
As we explain in Scalable Innovation, Chapter 4 (System Interfaces: How the Elements Work Together), the emergence of new interfaces between system elements decouples innovation cycles and leads to rapid growth. To innovate effectively, we should recognize the "PC moments" in major technology developments.
October 16, 1846 is the official birthday of anaesthesia, the art of preventing a surgery patient from feeling pain. On that day, surgeon Dr. Warren publicly demonstrated a painless tumor removal at the operating theater of the Massachusetts General Hospital. To anaesthetise the patient, Dr. Warren used the method invented by dentist William T.G. Morton. Under the invention, the patient was rendered unconscious by inhaling ether, an organic compound known to people since the 8th century, but never used in medicine before. The invention of practical anaesthesia (along with methods to prevent wound infection) created the world of modern surgery. The 1846 invention was a breakthrough that allowed people to control one of the basic biological experiences - pain.
Morton's US Patent 4,848 on the medical use of ether was never enforced due to public outcry.
For the second edition of Scalable Innovation we can use the example of desalination to show the difference between invention and innovation. After a series of droughts, Israeli government went ahead and built multiple desalination plants capable of satisfying up to 80% of the country's water needs. See,
In Israel, desalination provides 300 million cubic meters of water per year – about 40 percent of the country’s total water needs. That number will jump to 450 million when Sorek opens, and will hit nearly 600 million as plants expand in 2014, providing up to 80 percent of Israel’s potable water.
IDE opened the first major desalination plant in the country in the southern coastal city of Ashkelon in 2005, following success with a similar plant in nearby Cyprus. With Sorek, the company will own three of Israel’s four plants, and 400 plants in 40 countries worldwide. The company’s U.S. subsidiary is designing a new desalination plant in San Diego, the $922 million Carlsbad Desalination Project, which will be the largest desalination plant in America.
The innovation is based on a 1960s invention by Sidney Loeb and Srinivasa Sourirajan, of UCLA (US Patent 3,133,132. High Flow Porous Membranes for Separating Water from Saline Solutiosn). Unlike previous desalination techniques, the invention is not based on the evaporation/condensation cycle, which makes it energy-efficient and highly scalable.
It took the original invention more than 40 years to become a successful innovation. We can project that a combination of wind/solar power and novel desalination techniques will solve the clean water supply problem for many developed and developing countries. For example, with enough political will, California droughts can become a thing of the past. In my opinion, water-related innovations would be more useful to the state than high speed rail and other expensive transportation projects.
tags: invention, innovation, example, scale, scalable
[This is a rough draft/outline of a section of the book I'm working on. I'm not sure this piece will make it into the book, though. ]
Let's take as a starting point Kahaneman's formula that "success is talent + luck" and "great success is a little more talent + a lot of luck."
It follows that in every highly successful invention we should be able to discover a lot of luck. What kind of luck? What should we be looking for?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines luck as
a: a force that brings good fortune or adversity;
b: the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual;
c: favoring chance.
Definitions a and c are tautological; they won't survive logic analysis. Definition b is closer to what we need because it talks about circumstances that operate independently from an individual and don't contain fuzzy notions like "force" and "fortune." Thus, we can take Kahneman's formula and re-write it as follows:
great success = a little more talent + strong circumstances that operate for the individual.
Finding strong circumstances that help invention should be relatively easy.
Consider the example of Otto Frederick Rohwedder, the inventor of bread slicing machine. He started working on the idea in 1912. In 1916, he sold his jewelry stores and moved back to Davenport, his home town, to work full time on implementation. In 1917, he suffered a major setback [bad luck] when his blueprints and prototypes were destroyed in a fire.
While making a living as a financial agent, Rohwedder continued working on the idea. In 1927, fifteen years after starting the project, he came up with a machine that not only sliced, but also wrapped up the bread. [wrapping is important and it deserves a separate discussion]. In 1928, he built and sold his first machine - customers loved sliced bread.
In 1929, stock market crashes and, to stay afloat financially, Rohwedder sells rights to his technology [again bad luck]. In the meantime, consumer demand for sliced bread persists. In the beginning of the 1930s, Wonder Bread enters the market and by 1933 sales of sliced bread outpace those of unsliced bread. Sliced bread becomes proverbial. During WWII when authorities forbid its sale, the public complains and the authorities are forced to reconsider their decision.
Back to the formula for success. Definitely, Rohwedder has talent. But the sixty-four billion dollar question is, Where's a lot of luck? What are the strong circumstances that operate for the individual?
The answer seems to be, there's no good luck for Rohwedder. He suffers a fire, loses of assets, and faces strong competition. But there's a lot of luck for sliced bread and the bread slicing machine, i.e. his inventions. What are the circumstances that work for them?
Earlier I noted that in 1910, GE introduced first commercially successful toaster. With this information, the start of Rohwedder's quest for sliced bread in 1912 doesn't look accidental anymore. Successful toasters need sliced bread.
Let's follow the toaster thread further. In 1920, Charles P. Strite invents the pop-up toaster with timer. The new design solves two problems: bread slices don't get burned and the toasting process is sped up because heat is applied to both sides at the same time. By 1926, Strite's toaster is a major commercial success. People love the toaster, but slicing bread is a tedious task. Besides, to produce consistent results, the toaster requires uniform slices - something that can't be done consistently by a human. In short, because of the toaster success, there's a lot of demand for regularly sliced bread. The stage for the bread slicing machine is set. The toaster is it's luck, i.e. strong circumstances that favor an individual. If not for the improved toaster, nobody would care for high-performance bread slicing technology.
Two additional considerations. One: From the beginning of the 1900s, electricity becomes common in houses and businesses. In 1904, long-lasting tungsten filament for light bulbs is patented. In 1906, GE patents a process for mass production of tungsten wire for light bulbs. The same wire is used in toasters. Lucky toasters!
Two: In the early 1900s, Henry Ford begins using electric motors in his car factories. With the adoption of his mass manufacturing methods, the electric motor technology is improved dramatically. It is not a coincidence that by the 1930s Rohwedder's bread slicing machine uses electric motor. Lucky machine!
To summarize: First, when we talk about successful invention/innovation, the luck component operates not for an individual, but for his/her invention. Second, luck operates on at least three levels: 1) the invention works. e.g. the bread slicing machine is operational as designed; 2) the invention scales. e.g. the bread slicing machine with its mechanical and electric components can be mass produced; 3) there's a need to scale. e.g. there's a lot of hungry toasters out there in the wild.
author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.
Along the same lines, Facebook is working to increase the pace of interaction through apps and gaming,
December 22, 2011. VB -- [Facebook] made changes to the platform based on tests that showed it could drive re-engagement and discovery higher. The changes are part of constant tinkering that the company does to prompt users to do certain things like return to their games or click on new titles. If they work, they could generate more usage and profits for game companies.
Paradoxically, the pace is slower at large companies when compared to startups. I wonder why cities scale, while corporations don't.
The mayor of Beijing has a simple policy. If you want to buy a
gasoline-fueled car, you enter into this lottery, and if you win, you
can drive that car four days out of seven. If you would like to drive
seven days of seven, you have to buy an electric car. That looks like a
great opportunity. They are, in this way, creating clean-tech markets.
This is from the MTR interview with Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder of a battery startup, who moved her company from the US to China. Read the whole piece; it's a good example of how China tries to address its scalability problems I posted about earlier. Air pollution in Beijing and other major cities is one of those problems, which the drastic innovation measures are intended to solve.
The firm’s research found that smartphone shipments reached 23.9
million units in China during Q3, while the U.S. had 23.3 million units
shipped.
Nokia leads China’s smartphone market with a share of 28 percent. HTC, on the other hand, leads the US market with 24 percent .
It is important to note that China is entering a stage in its technological development when its scale requires new solutions. That is, over the last thirty years, since the introduction of economic reforms, the country could reuse solutions developed elsewhere. Now, they will be increasingly encountering unsolved problems (see e.g. my earlier post about diabetes II in China.) There's no country on the planet that has experience in solving those problems on China's population scale of 1.3 billion people.
In view of that, I believe, over time China will adopt IP laws and enforcement practices similar to those of the US and Europe. The society will have to provide IP protection incentives to inventors and innovators who take on the new problems.
tags: trend, intellectual, property, scale, infrastructure, china
Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) - “In Chinese medicine 2,000 years ago, people knew urine could be sweet
and people would be thirsty -- they knew the signs of diabetes,” Xing
said. “But it wasn’t common.”
The same pace of social change and urban prosperity that has fueled
China’s economy in the past decade has fanned the spread of Type 2
diabetes, the most common form of the disease, as people ate fattier
foods and led more sedentary lifestyles.
Type 2 diabetes linked to obesity affected almost 1 in 10 Chinese
adults in 2008, the New England Journal of Medicine said in a study
published last year. That would be a higher rate than in the U.S., where
the National Institutes of Health estimates 8.3 percent of the
population had diabetes in 2010. Another 148 million Chinese are on
their way toward developing the disease.
Clearly, type 2 diabetes is an urban environment disease. Just like swamps facilitate malaria and close proximity to livestock produces flu strains, cities create hundreds of millions of diabetics. Our commitment to certain types of mass manufactured foods is incompatible with the lifestyle. Ever since I did the diabetes 2 project with Roche, I've been amazed of how simple the cure for this disease is and how hard it is to make it work on a large scale. Mind seems to be the most difficult organ to inoculate against wrong commitments.
tags: health, care, problem, solution, scale, infrastructure, mind
A 10X change in health care has been allowed by FDA:
Sept. 29, 2011. Bloomberg News - Mobisante’s ultrasound attachment [to iPhone] costs
$7,495. Though the images aren’t the highest quality available,
a top-of-the-line ultrasound machine costs as much as $100,000.
Mobisante’s device, which goes on sale in October, is part
of a wave of new smartphone applications and attachments in the
nascent mobile health market. In the past eight months, products that turn a
phone into a blood-pressure monitoring cuff, a CT-scan viewer
and other health-care gadgets have received U.S. Food and Drug
Administration clearance.
The market is predicted to grow: By 2015, 30 percent of the
world’s smartphone users will be using mobile health products,
up from 5 percent now, estimates Research2guidance, a mobile-
market consulting firm in Berlin.
Smartphone will play the role of a gateway device that pre-processes local data and, if necessary, connects medical sensors to the diagnostics cloud.
A BBC video showing how the Royal Air Force used 3D photography to discover German V-1 and V-2 rocket launchers. It's amazing how they used millions of photos for producing accurate 3D intelligence about Hitler's secret weapons.
At the time, rockets were unheard of and the biggest problem was how they were to search for something they didn't know what it looked like. It's an ancient problem, posed two thousand years ago by Plato in the Meno dialogue.
Meno. And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which
you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And
if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing
which you did not know?
On October 9, 1917, Clarence Saunders received US patent 1,242,872 for a new kind of retail store. His key idea was customer self-service, a concept that is alive and well today after almost a century of shopping innovation. Here's a quote from his patent application (reads like a description of a modern IKEA store):
The object of my said invention is to provide a store equipment by which the customer will be enabled to serve himself and, in so doing, will be required to review the entire assortment of goods carried in stock, conveniently and attractively displayed, and after selecting the list of goods desired, will be required to pass a checking and paying station at which the goods selected may be billed, packed, and settled for before retiring from the store, thus relieving the store of a large proportion of the usual incidental expenses or overhead charges, required to operate it, all as will be hereinafter more fully described and claimed.
A photo of his original Piggly Wiggly supermarket in Memphis, Tennessee (below).
The Economist (Sep 10, 2011) has an interesting article on the relationship between global trends and unemployment in the US. This paragraph in particular attracted my attention:
Michael Spence, another Nobel prize-winning economist, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs
agrees that technology is hitting jobs in America and other rich
countries, but argues that globalisation is the more potent factor. Some
98% of the 27m net new jobs created in America between 1990 and 2008
were in the non-tradable sector of the economy, which remains relatively
untouched by globalisation, and especially in government and health
care—the first of which, at least, seems unlikely to generate many new
jobs in the foreseeable future. At the same time, says Mr Spence, the
mix of jobs available to Americans in the tradable sector (including
manufacturing) that serves global markets is shifting rapidly, with a
growing share of the positions suitable only for skilled and educated
people.
If you look at the "Creative Crowd" chart below, you can see that mass manufacturing processes (upper left corner) simply moved overseas where pay rates for routine labor are lower. First, the creation of a highly effective shipping industry that started in the 1950s, and then the addition of inexpensive communications in the early 2000s, lead to a situation where exchanges between the right and left parts of the chart became very easy. The housing bubble of the 2000s masked the fact that in the US not being entrepreneurial and/or creative means competing with people who live on $100/month.
Kevin Slavin about the world of algorithms (15 min TED video):
"... these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. ... we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control. ... we are writing what we can't read."
Almost a year ago I wrote about brain research evidence showing that, contrary to a popular belief in "the light bulb in your head" moment, creative thinking is a slow, rather than fast process.
In a recent paper about the relationship between national IQ and national productivity, economist Garett Jones of Mason University, cites extensive studies linking intelligence and patience.
Shamosh and Gray (2008), two Yale psychologists, summed up 2 dozen studies and found that in almost every study, high IQ is associated with patience, as measured in a variety of methods. The classic example is Walter Mischel’s experiment of a child waiting for marshmallows. In this experiment an experimenter puts a child in a room, puts a marshmallow in front of the child, and tells her that if she leaves the marshmallow untouched until the experimenter returns, she will get a second marshmallow. The experimenter then leaves the room, not returning until the child finally eats the marshmallow.
“Minutes until marshmallow” has been shown to be a reliable predictor of many life outcomes—but it is also highly correlated with IQ.
The systematic invention and innovation methods I teach and practice almost force you into a process of deliberate creativity, requiring patient application of your intelligence. As Genrikh Altshuller always said, "Inventive thinking is slow thinking."
What's also interesting is the "Hive" effect, which shows that the society as a whole benefits from an individual's IQ more than the individual him/herself. To me this makes perfect sense because in an innovation economy existence of a high-performance creative crowd is essential to turning ideas into breakthrough technologies.
For the article link, hat tip to marginalrevolution.com
See also my earlier post From Creative to Mundane.
Money is arguably the oldest technology that gets reinvented all the time. The invention of coinage by the Lydians in the 6th century BC helped create the ancient Greek civilization, the progenitor of today's Western world. Being great traders, the Lydians also invented a major modern business model - permanent retail shop. Before that, retail trade was conducted either in temporary markets or door-to-door. Only recently, some two and a halve thousand years later, the "brick-and-mortar" retail model invented by the Lydians was successfully challenged by the likes of amazon.com and Apple's app store.
Compared to temporary market stalls, Lydian shops were the equivalent of today's high-frequency trading brokerage houses, and were greatly helped by another invention, a sophisticated sexagecimal computation system:
The system allowed bankers and traders perform computational operations with large numbers of coins, by converting them from a large number of small-value units to much smaller number of large-value ones. For example, if you earned your money in obols and didn't know much math, which was quite common at the time, you could still figure out how much you made in your newly invented brick-and-mortar retail operation, by converting obols into drachmas, staters, minas, and talents. This new computational ability is somewhat similar to the invention, in the 17th century, of the logarithm, a mathematical concept that helped simplify complex multiplication operations in military and engineering applications during the Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, and beyond.
Back to the ancient Greeks, people who made lots of money were "talented". I'm not joking. The etymology of the modern word "talent" goes back to the money-related ancient Greek term talanton. A copper sheet of about 60 lb in weight, something an average man could comfortably carry, was equivalent in value to a talent. A stronger man could carry more talents, thus the connection with the contemporary notion of a natural advantage, which, in turn, found its another incarnation in a common saying, If you are so smart, why aren't you rich.
* Coin conversion table from the book "A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day", by Glyn Davies.
What made the American Civil War so unprecedented was that it was the first great war of the industrial era. This allowed not only greatly increased production of the materiel of war but a revolution in command and control as well. Railroads and steamboats made possible the rapid movement of large number of troops, and the telegraph enabled the entire war to be directed from Washington to Richmond in real time. When President Lincoln, on April 15, 1861, called for 75,000 volunteers after Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, the call reached the most distant parts of the Union states almost immediately.
A Thread Across the Ocean, by John Steele Gordon. p.163. (c)2002.
Communications are even more important today, when weapons are required to be a lot smarter than the cannons of the Civil War. Remote control drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, operated by soldiers on the ground thousands miles away from the field of action, guided by NSA intelligence collected through eavesdropping on internet and phone messages throughout the world, can deliver precision ground strikes only if they have the right information at the right time. Otherwise, they turn into expensive dumb pieces of hardware, indistinguishable in their impact from their 150-year old Civil War cousins.
