Innovation

There has been a constant pull and tug between creativity and engineering in my life; at least one person would like to think it's because of my parents but given a chance parents will claim every good attribute as their own. The reality is that being creative and being able to engineer things is a tough balance, particularly when one has a deficit in the business area (something, of course, parents won't claim) and a constant need to pay bills so that people don't do silly things like throw you out of your apartment, repossess your vehicle, and so on. Today, suddenly, as I was corresponding with a long time friend, the whole battle between technology and creativity came into focus again.

Enough Time

Technology and engineering are simple enough once you go about investing enough time¹ into the relevant fields, arguably around 10,000 hours. The people that I know who are creative with technology are not, however, the people whose interests are truncated with technology. During the enough time phase, some people border on obsessive (or, like me, simply obsessive) - arguing with each other like freshmen, more interested in the computer lab on a Saturday night than the place that sells the cheap beer where a few cheap thrills can be followed somewhere to a squeaky bed.

Some geeks - and we are geeks - survive this phase to become more circumspect² - the ability to look at a technology and engineering solutions from different angles. In fact, if there is anything I have learned in my lifetime of dealing with technology, it's that there are 4 phases of learning any technology:

1. Newbie: The person who is still in the 'enough time' phase. People new to technology don't understand that they are in this phase, people used to technology know that the only way to get out of this phase is by discussion and even challenging of people of elder levels. Some newbies try to jump immediately to Master - some can because they 'get it' at an intuitive level. Some can't. The trouble is that the people who can't don't recognize it.
2. Competent: The person who can and has solved problems consistently with engineering and technology and is becoming more circumspect. People at this level still have the zeal of the newbie and can get stuck at this level if they don't reach higher or opportunities don't arise for them to reach higher.
3. Mastered: The ability to integrate and be creative with the technology begins.
4. Playful: It's no longer a technology or engineering issue - it's a plaything. This is where the creative mind differentiates itself in technology.

Theoretically, everyone should be able to go through these various phases and get to the Playful stage. Sadly, many are truncated for a variety of reasons - life obligations such as taking jobs to pay the bills are the sinkhole where much creativity can be lost.

There is another factor nowadays that has become more pronounced: Time. Technology/Engineering can become obsolete. This time constraint is interesting to consider given Moore's Law. Being kind, we'll say that technology becomes obsolete every 2 years (it does seem faster these days), and in a 2 year period. Full time employment during a 2 year period comes up to roughly 4,159 hours - 41.6% of 10,000 hours.

And that, you see, is the rub: the more quickly technology changes, the less likely an individual can do something creative with the technology. This is where, allegedly, crowdsourcing and collective intelligence - really a mask for sheer volume - allegedly compensate for any changes in innovation and creativity in technology.

I'm not sure what to think of that. What do you think?

Over the last week or so, I've had hints of something - like an invisible muse teasing me. But it wasn't invisible. It was the photograph of the man looking for glass and metal at the side of the road. It was the bedridden man I just visited. It was the deluge of social media around me. It was staring me in the face even as I looked myself in the mirror.

It was only after speaking with the man recovering from his stroke, who may never walk again even with therapy, that it came home. The difference between the young and the old is simple: The young dream and the old have forgotten their dreams. The old wander the roadsides looking for something to keep them in beans. Even as I immerse myself in social media, gleaning the side of the social media road for original thoughts and ideas - or even better ones - I wonder how many sit at their desks doing the same things.

Hoping someone can dream for them.

It's not to say that this is always the case. I wouldn't even say that it is the majority of people who use social media - but it is apparent that there is a void in many people's lives that social media somehow - hopefully- fills. And what is that void? Is it the discussions and ideas? For me, that is true - geographically, I'm almost never around people interested in the same things. But that can't be true for everyone or the world would be a lot more to my liking since everyone would be me.

There's an old man in a bed maybe 100 yards away from me right now, over a wall and through some louvres, who once dreamt of traveling. Over decades of his life he never realized that dream - the constant pressure of business and finance kept him hermetically sealed from his dreams. In that, he is not too different from the man in the picture.

Even as we waterboard ourselves in the sea of social media, we need to remember to dream. Social media means nothing unless you bring something to the collective. And to bring something of worth to the collective, you have to be innovative. To innovate, you have to imagine. To imagine, you have to dream.

Don't just tour your prison. Break out of the box. Breathe.

Over the last 10 years, there has been something bothering me that I couldn't quite put a finger on. It was ethereal and numbing, something that defied description- yet aspects were apparent in so many different things. While people were busy trying to outblog each other in some insane competition for popularity and implicit revenue, I kept reading the same hype on different topics that simply didn't seem... warranted. Things were going to transform our lives.

I've been reading 'Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality' in spurts, sometimes stopping to wonder what would have happened had I known some of the things in the book 20 - even 10 - years ago. Where ideas are easy for me, some hard introspection shows that I haven't been able to follow through on some of them. In some instances, it was simply me charging against the world with an idea and a lighter - in others, I probably could have done more to bring things to fruition had I been more organized.

There's a de facto paralysis that happens when one tries to do too many things at the same time. Some people are better at it than others for reasons that could be blamed on gender, genetics or experience. And some people are worse at it. The key, really, is organization and pragmatism - two things that I am above average at but I don't necessarily use on everything I do. I've got at least 6 projects I'm working on, one that will pay regardless, so the triage is somewhat easy. Even so, a little more organization will allow some cross pollenation, and I'm working on that today.

But as I work on it today, I couldn't help but wonder how many people out there are paralyzed by social media - addicted to Twitter streams, to Facebook status updates, waiting for an IM or text message. I daresay that at least a year of innovation is lost every week to that around the world - perhaps even a year of innovation per day is lost as people wait to see what their friends are doing, what someone else is thinking, in the hope that some answer that they need will show up. The odds of that are pretty slim and the paralysis of it is quite real.

As my old man would say: "Get off your ass and do something."