The Truth on Innovation and Eureka Moments

This topic has been increasingly important and valuable to me. I have always wondered what the secrets to innovative new ideas and creativity are, how they are formed, what the underlying processes are that give rise to such, so that they can be replicated, and its power harnessed for our own benefit, and what kind of effects these have on our collective species as a whole.

First off, I want to post this video, it's a TED Talk by Matt Ridley, called 'When Ideas Have Sex':

What I find intriguing is how the rate of innovations have increased exponentially over time since the moment our ancestors created the first tools. In the example given in his talk, stone tools hardly changed in design for about 1 million years (1.5 million to half a million years ago). Homo Erectus had essentially used the same tool for 30,000 generations. There were some changes, but not as much as the biological changes of those who used them. In other words, no new innovations whatsoever. Today however, the opposite case is true, and Matt uses the humble computer mouse as a perfect example, which pretty much goes obsolete in less than a year.

What's more intriguing is the fact that hardly anyone knows how to make a computer mouse, and how we've gone from something as simple as a tool made of stone using only one material, from something of far greater design complexity, using all sorts of sophisticated materials.

Matt makes the case of increasing specialization of skills, which have contributed to this using the example of how much more efficient it would be for one man making an axe, and another man making a spear, compared to the generalist approach of each man making both an axe and a spear. We have grown as a culture to focus on specializing on different subset areas, starting as early as gender roles where men would go out to hunt and females to look after the young, all the way to nations producing one thing and another nation producing another to which they then trade and both benefit from this transaction.

By having this kind of system it seems, we can actually improve the way we make things, which creates further momentum for increased specialization, leading to increased exchange hence, the birth of innovation.

And what is more shocking is that the opposite case can be observed in regards to exchange - if you cut off trade from one group of people to another, this will in effect hinder technological progress and in fact throw it into reverse, experiencing a regress / decline of innovation (the case of the Tasmanian islanders gives as a powerful example of this phenomenon).

Matt also highlights the importance of having a large population size to maintain innovation, declaring that it requires millions of people just to be able to produce a computer mouse today, just from drilling the oil to turn to plastic, creating electronic components; designers, engineers, and scientists working in the material and computer sciences, all the way to the farmers producing the food needed to sustain the people working in those higher sectors. A really mind-boggling process.

So to summarize, it takes specialization, exchange, and the power of numbers, as the key main / general ingredients to spark and drive innovation.

How relevant is this to us on an individual level in this day and age?

With our growing use of social network mediums on the internet, to the use of smartphones and other information communication devices, we as a species are at a point where we are more connected to everyone else than ever before. And it seems that if we want to experience greater innovation and progress it's vital that we do not disconnect ourselves from these powerful mediums, especially when we are in the day and age where we need more solutions to our growing global socio-economic problems. In fact we need more connections, more interaction, and more exposure to easily accessible information mediums. We can't just sit in silence watching the world go by.

We need to work together as a collective, where each of us are focused on one specialized skill, so that we can get better at it, and we must be more willing to exchange our knowledge, experience, and ideas more than ever, so that we can benefit globally altogether. I don't think this should  rule out the need for 'generalists' entirely however, for I believe they do serve a vital role too, as system engineers and project managers with sound understanding and experience of how to connect together all the key component fields to make them work properly -- this can be seen as a kind of 'specialization' in a sense.

Now, the next piece to the puzzle can be seen in this next video, entitled 'Where Good Ideas Come From' by Steven Johnson:

It's actually a take on the notion of "Eureka" moments, suggesting that the phenomenon doesn't actually occur in the way imagine. As he put it in his own words:

"One pattern that I call the slow hunch, that breakthrough ideas always never come on a moment of great insight in a sudden stroke of inspiration."

"Most important ideas take a long time to evolve and they spend a long time dormant in the background."

"It isn't until the idea has had 2 or 3 years, sometimes 10 or 20 years to mature, that it suddenly becomes accessible to you and useful to you in a certain way."

"And this is partially because good ideas come from the collision between smaller hunches so that they form something bigger than themselves."

 This realization is actually fairly profound. Ideas require an "incubation period", and they need to collide or "mate" with other ideas, so to speak. And this goes back again to highlighting the importance of making connections with groups of people, sharing / exchanging ideas in order for innovations to flourish. This is also reflected in our own brains needing time to form new neuronal connections that will lead to that "breakthrough" moment.

As Isaac Newton once wrote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." coming to mean that all great "AHA!" events don't come from a simple apple dropping on the head, but developed on from an earlier body of work that our predecessors have left off. And this is certainly the case with the field of science, as it is with technological innovations. This it seems, is the real "Eureka".