First comes the discovery

I constantly see research reports (in business no less than in academe) that are filled with observations, but appear to lack any kind of initial idea. Who is commissioning and paying for these tomes? And why?

Without an initial hypothesis, they are destined for the great pile of the unread, unnoticed. A complete waste of everyone’s time and money.

The right sequence was clearly enunciated by the great Czech photographer, Josef Sudek:

“Discovery — that’s important. First comes the discovery. Then follows the work. And then sometimes something from it remains.”

“Gradually, then suddenly”

I came across this phrase from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in Narelle Hanratty’s blog. And it occurs to me that so many discoveries and inventions happen this way - gradually, then suddenly.

A good example is the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in the early 1950s. I wrote about the way that they battled with this fundamental problem (20 December 2009), together with Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins and others, over a long period of time, and how quite suddenly one day the sun rose - and the answer was clear.

“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” wrote Watson, describing the Eureka moment in his exciting book, The Double Helix.

Of course an analogy in animal life is the gestation of foetuses followed by the birth of the young.

Have you noticed examples of this in your innovation work and elsewhere?

The Tale of the Unknown Island

I was working in Porto and was surprised that the participants in my Innovation Masterclass, all Portuguese, were so convinced that they and their compatriots were not really innovative. I reminded them of the proud Portuguese history of discovery, but they were not convinced.

Perhaps they had not read the short story by their own novelist, José Saramago, “The Story of the Unknown Island”. It opens: "A man went to knock at the king's door and said, Give me a boat..."

Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

The story is in the form of a fable and covers so many of the critical issues in creativity and innovation in a hierarchical society – powerful bosses, having clarity of vision or destination, managing doubts, the value of persistence, and courage, paying attention to one’s dreams, breaking away from current wisdom, finding partners with complementary attitudes and skills, realising that we already have the answer within. And much else besides.

I picked it up at the suggestion of my friend, the composer and trombone-maestro, Simon Wills.

Do read it! And let me know what it says to you.

http://www.amazon.com/Tale-Island-Jose-Saramago/dp/0151005958

Words, words, words

At risk of catching the dread disease of definitionitis (see blogpost, 27 October 2010), I think it’s useful to distinguish between some words that are commonly used and confused. For example…

Invention: is the application of creativity to solve a problem, usually involving technology of one sort or another.

Discovery: is usefully applied to productive new insights and new understandings.

Creativity: is the generation of new thinking, ideas that may be quite speculative in nature.

Innovation: is the process of turning new ideas into reality, making them happen. It usually involves problem-solving.

How am I doing?