Intellection: The art of making small ideas work

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work…. Thomas Alva Edison

In the realm of ideas, there are few that can last the test of time. I am not talking of the basic truths or natural laws. I am talking of those that make increments and improvements to our ways of living.

Think of the electric bulb and it was not Edison, who first thought about it, but he made it commercially viable that every home in Manhattan could be lit up; making things work commercially is as important as the idea itself.

Most of Edison’s inventions were commercial successes; that is the reason he mastered the art of intellection that made small ideas work. He started from an end and then thought of the means to that end. No wonder he is credited to have 1093 patents to his name.

99.8% fail.  Only 3,000 patents out of 1.5 million patents are commercially viable according to Richard Maulsby, director of the Office of Public Affairs for the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.

90% of an invention’s success is marketing it and getting it out according to Richard C Levy, who invented Furby.

Success of ideas, therefore are the rarest of the rare happenings; the interesting thing is that we still have hundreds of innovations happening every day, which means we have some million ideas to back this.

In the book Five Biggest Ideas in Science, the authors Charles Wynn and Arthur Higgins give a panoramic view of the questions scientists seek to answer about the natural world:

QUESTION 1) Do basic building blocks of matter exist, and if so, what do they look like? BIG IDEA 1) Physics' Model of the Atom.

QUESTION 2) What relationships, if any, exist among different kinds of atoms? BIG IDEA 2) Chemistry's Periodic Law.

QUESTION 3) Where did the atoms of the universe come from,and what is their destiny? BIG IDEA 3) Astronomy's Big Bang Theory.

QUESTION 4) How is the matter of the universe arranged in planet Earth? BIG IDEA 4) Geology's Plate Tectonics Model.

QUESTION 5) How did life on planet Earth originate and develop? BIG IDEA 5) Biology's Theory of Evolution. 

The fundamental question behind an idea drives the innovator to the eventual solution.

When I look at the current trials and tribulations of big ideas of today, I see the same passion for searching for the answers to big questions. But we shall see that in some cases like in Medicine or basic engineering, we have progressed only but very little.

How many disease have we eliminated so far in the whole world? Only one, Small Pox and may be Polio could be the next. United States have already eliminated a few more like Yellow Fever, Diphtheria and Measles.

Why should we still have 100000 diseases out of which 13000 could be the cause of death? Medical Science has surely progressed to reduce effects of diseases on the human body, but have done less to completely eliminate the cause.

May be this has to do with the core philosophy of medical research.

Why do we have to cut trees for the purpose of paper making, when tree-free paper can be made from agricultural residues (i.e. sugarcane bagasse, husks and straw), fiber crops and wild plants, such as bamboo, kenaf, hemp, jute, and flax or from textiles and cordage wastes?

Again the answer will lie in the economics of paper making industry and their supply chains.

Why has the internal combustion engines not progressed beyond fossil fuel based engines, when there is an existing German patent (MayMaan Research, LLC) with water-based non-fossil fuel engine?

Again the answer will lie with the economics of auto-making.

Think of some ideas that are not commercially successful and you will see that these ideas have remained as part of academic interest. But when you see prototype testing and rigorous experimentation, then you can be sure that academic interest has crossed the frontiers and have moved to the realm of economic viability.

The winds of change remind us that ideas are stronger than the economic might of industrialization. If this was not so, the horse drawn carriages would have existed for time immemorial and internal combustion engines could have never seen the light of day.

It would be to their advantage if industry is proactive to seek change and not the other way around when change is thrust upon as a forced choice. We have seen some examples of this when smart phones eliminated a few industries of current times from camera making to CDs and tape recorders.

But the winds of change create new requirements and needs. For example the phenomenal increase in head phone sales around the world coincided with the stratospheric increase in smart phones. Those in the head phone industry, who were proactive enough, made a killing.

But again head-phones could be a risky business. Who knows which direction this will take, the subtle discomfort of the ear lobes could well be done away with the touch of innovation.

When one door closes another door opens…. Alexander Graham Bell