What’s the most important invention in history?

I often ask groups in innovation teams to nominate the most important invention in the history of mankind. The ‘usual suspects’, the ones that come up most frequently, are the wheel, printing and the internet.

But how about paper? Twenty years ago, I used to hear so much about the impending arrival of the 'paperless office'. That never looked close to happening. And in more recent times it’s been the supposed death of newspapers and books.

But still paper remains central to our lives.

So when was it invented – and by whom?

It seems to have been born in China, sometime around 100AD, and has been ascribed to a eunuch in the Han court called Cai Lun. In its earliest incarnations, paper was made from hemp waste, but over time this was mixed with other plant materials – tree bark, bamboo etc.

Over the following centuries, paper-making spread throughout Asia, arriving in Europe and North Africa around the 12^th century, gradually replacing parchment and vellum.

The arrival of printing in Europe in the 14^th century led to a massive growth in its usage.

Its uses nowadays remain so many and varied – from packaging to Post-it notes, from banknotes to bodily waste. And in the office.

 

Getting a gong from the IAA

Last week, at a fun dinner in London (to celebrate their 75^th anniversary), along with several other worthies, I was given a gong for the contribution I had made to the International Advertising Association two decades ago.

I was elected world president of the IAA at a rather critical moment. First, the Soviet Empire was crumbling, and a whole new range of countries was emerging as market economies. And second, advertising was under attack, seemingly throughout the western world, with governments threatening to legislate for ad bans on all sorts of products that were legally sold.

At that time, in 1989/90, the IAA was the only organisation that could address these threats on a global basis, representing, as it did (and does) the three parts of the business ‒ the manufacturers, the media and the advertising agencies.

And yet, the organisation was clearly completely ill-equipped to create and implement the programmes necessary to defend freedom of commercial speech. The whole ethos of the IAA was not connected with advocacy, but rather was a global club, where the primary reason for belonging was to network.

So I embarked very early on a re-structuring of the governance of the organisation, reducing the executive committee from around twenty-five to just a handful of key players. Of course, this was much resented by all those who were being jettisoned.

And, together with the paid executives, director-general Norman Vale and his number two Richard Corner, we deployed three initiatives: first, to be alert to threats as they emerged, sharing best practice in dealing with each; then to create a roadshow that would travel through the emerging post-Soviet markets ‒ Russia, Czechoslovakia (as it was), Hungary, Poland and, importantly, China ‒ setting out the case for advertising, and inaugurating IAA chapters in each; and, perhaps most important, we launched a global “Campaign for Advertising” (together with tracking research), proclaiming the economic and social case ‒ the media space and time all donated.

I wonder how well the IAA would cope today, faced with similar opportunities and threats?

My fifteen minutes of fame

Chapter of accidents, more like.

As world president of the International Advertising Association, I was asked to chair the first-ever advertising conference in China. It was May 1991, just twenty-four months after the Tiananmen Square protests.

The fun started early. Arriving early morning on an overnight flight at Beijing airport in my comfortable track-suit, hair awry, I was greeted by TV cameras, photographers and eager Chinese journos, notepads at the ready.

On the day before the conference, I made five speeches to different gatherings, ending with a Gala Banquet in the Great Hall of the People. My host kept reassuring me that no speech would be required, but I knew enough by this stage to be aware that it just might be a necessity. So, after some twenty of twenty-seven courses (I couldn’t get past twelve), he motioned to me that it was my turn. Up I got…

In the weeks running up to the conference I was constantly badgered by the organisers for a copy of my opening keynote speech. But since I was going to speak about the nexus between market economy, freedom of the press and the role of advertising, I was advised that all the interesting bits would be censored.

So I kept it all to myself until the last moment, personally handing copies to each of the interpreters. There were around ten thousand delegates.

In the break afterwards, there was a long, long line of people to shake hands (and be photographed) with, and from time-to-time one would whisper to me, “We never heard all that before here.”

Job done. Even if it was just a start.

Women wanted for innovation?

Interesting piece on the Voxy news/blog site in New Zealand lamenting the lack of women innovators: http://www.voxy.co.nz/business/women-wanted-innovation/5/116926

According to Voxy, women take out less than 1% of all patents in New Zealand. Of course, this is a real problem – and not only in Kiwiland, but all over the Western world.

In my view the source of the matter lies in the negative attitudes of women towards science and mathematics, and in particular towards engineering. In the “West” there are simply too few women engineers. For it’s engineers that dominate the patent game.

I wonder what the figures look like in Russia or China, where there are shedloads of female engineers?

But perhaps Voxy is taking too pessimistic a view of the situation. After all, in the real world, most innovation happens without any consideration of patents – in strategy, in brand development, in organisational change, in people management, in design, in cultural development, in the arts and so on.

And women may well be in the majority in all those fields, innovating day by day.

Innovation and Islam

I spoke recently about innovation at a conference (organised by Continuum) of family businesses from the Middle East.

Many issues were raised by the delegates, but there was one that seemed to hang in the air unspoken. And it was this: does Islam itself have a dampening effect on innovation?

I have thought about this a good deal in the intervening days – and my tentative answer is that any dampening effect springs not so much from Islam, but rather from the very hierarchical nature of Middle Eastern society. And, of course, this is so often strongly present in family businesses.

After all, Islam is alone among the major religions of the world in having been founded by a trader. And the Koran is supportive of success in business – quite unlike the New Testament, which has practically nothing positive to say about the creation of wealth.

The powerful presence of respect for elders, within a command and control culture, always has a negative impact on the expression of new thinking and new ideas. This is true in all societies where hierarchy is a primary force – in Russia, China, India, the Middle East and elsewhere.

If these countries wish to grow dramatically in their capacity to innovate – which they all do – the question in my mind is not so much how to reduce hierarchy in general, but how to create situations where it is temporarily removed, so that people can express new ideas without fear of reprisal.

The wheel - the first breakthrough technology?

When asked to name an early invention of the greatest importance, people in my workshops seem most often to come up with the wheel. It seems to represent the mother and father of innovation in folk’s minds. Asked what they know about its development, there’s usually a longish silence.

Archaeologists tell us that the earliest evidence of the wheel is in Mesopotamia (the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in what is roughly modern-day Iraq), some 5,500 years ago.

The problem that was solved by its invention was the need to move heavy loads without high levels of friction between the earth and the vehicle. (Sledges are only good for this purpose on ice or snow.)

The idea of using tree trunks as rollers had been in use since much earlier times. It seems likely that the use of two cross-sections of a tree, joined together by a pole (a primitive axle) would have been a first step, but it would have been discovered quite quickly that, with any substantial weight, the wheels would have split. So a long period of incremental innovation followed.

The spoked-wheel chariot used in warfare seems to have emerged in Syria early in the second millennium BC, arriving in China some 500 years later. In Egypt, the river Nile had always provided an important means of transport for the materials of the pyramids, and wheeled transport emerged there around 1,700BC.

Of course, we can only speculate on the process by which the wheel was invented. Was it one person's Eureka? Or several people in parallel? Was there a long period of trial and error? Did tribal elders support or oppose its development? Was it primarily driven by military needs?

At home, we recently discovered the frame of a nineteenth-century farm cart in the barn we are converting – unfortunately without its wheels. In many ways our cart is not so very different from wheeled vehicles that existed five millennia ago. It had been stored in the roof of the barn, I guess in the 1930s, when motorised vehicles arrived on the farm. Perhaps it was prudently saved against the day when it might be needed once again. We will be keeping it!

The first breakthrough technology. Unless you know otherwise, of course…