Due to some unexpected technical problems, the first lecturer--I dont's remember his name--didn't leave much impression on me. All I know was that he put some funny pictures on the screen in addition to the topic of his speech--how to innovate. Regarding to this interesting topic, I feel I must further develop the idea.
The key word in the definition of innovation is “new.” The common trap about newness is the assumption that new means something the universe has never seen before. This turns out to be one of the most ridiculous assumption in the history of mankind. Here’s proof: Name any great innovator, and I guarantee they borrowed and reused ideas from the past to make whatever it is they are famous for.
The Wright brothers, the inventors of powered flight in the United States, spent hours watching birds. As boring as it seems, we have bird-watching to thank for the supersonic jet planes we have today. Picasso’s development of cubism, one of the great artistic movements of the last two centuries, was heavily influenced by his exposure to African painting styles, as well as the work of an older French painter, Cezanne. And Thomas Edison did not create the concept of powered light: You’d have to talk to the thousands of people who died before Edison was born who turned wood, wax, oil, and other fuels into controllable and portable light sources.
Even in today’s high-technology world you can find easy connections between what we call “new” and ideas from the past. The World Wide Web and the Internet get their names from things thousands of years old. The first webs were made by spiders, and the first nets were used to catch fish by indigenous people around the world, thousands of years before the first computer. Google, the wonderful search tool, is often called a search engine, in reference to concepts of physical mechanics, not digital bits.
All these examples prove that the trick to innovation is to widen your perspective on what qualifies as new. As long as your idea, or your use of an existing idea, is new to the person you are creating it for, or applies an existing concept in a new way, you qualify as an innovator from their point of view, and that’s all that matters.
