'Innovation In a Flash' Is a Myth

An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times article spells out what most of us probably already knew: real innovation takes lots of time and hard work to come to fruition. The article looks at the origins of new ideas, and attempts to dispel the myth that 'Eureka' moments create change. Comments author Scott Berkun, 'To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn't the magic moment: it's the end result of a useful innovation. Everything results from accretion. I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.'"

Exactly!

[AlphaDrake (1104357)]

You may think my hamburger earmuffs were thought up in a flash. But it took a long time to get the pickle matrix just right.

You can't discard the role of intuition.

[marcello_dl (667940)]

Prior art is the road. Hard work is the engine. Intuition is the steering wheel. You get

Re:You can't discard the role of intuition.

[blahplusplus (757119)]

Intuition is pattern recognition and changing the lenses (angle) from which you look at something, that someone took the time to work out.

The key is, as Schopenhauer said: "to think something no one has thought yet, while looking at something that everybody see's" which is fancy way of saying: Keep changing the perspective (interpretive framework) and using other seemingly unrelated subjects to try and interpret it in terms of something else.

Millions of people have similar or the exact same leads on great ideas everyday but they don't have the time or the fast mind to follow up on them. IMHO it's not that people can't figure it out given enough time, it is who and what you come into contact with that triggers the lead up to deofuscate the idea and THEN the persistence to follow that 'intuition'. Intuition is necessary but intuition

Part of the problem is the education system itself amd it's attempt to rush learning and disavow thinking about things differently in order to pound out 'educated' workers. People that realize there are connections between everything that we can't see and have initiative despite lack of formal education were some of the greatest innovators.

inspiration and perspiration

[johnrpenner (40054)]

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
(Thomas Alva Edison)

"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once
with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found
the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that
a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labour."
(Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931)

Re:

[try_anything (880404)]

Yet the same is true of theory, too. Theoretical breakthroughs require both open-mindedness and critical thought. When you combine those two, you end up looking at *lots* of stupid-seeming ideas, trying to figure out which ones are insights in disguise. (If you limit yourself to one or the other, then you never have the experience of working with ugly ideas.) A theory that seems unworkable on first glance may actually be brilliant, if only someone puts in the effort to make it work. Then, in retrospect

And that my friends...

[Mantaar (1139339)]

And that, my friends, is *exactly* why Open Source is so successful and important.

Now let's go manufacturing open source hardware...

Re:And that my friends...

[leguirerj (442771)]

Thats what the Patent System is for, to corral all those wild ideas, fence them off, and make anyone who can make them work, pay for them.

Re:And that my friends...

[jellomizer (103300)]

Open Source closed source doesn't effect if a product is innovative or not. There are many products that are open source and don't add anything new to the table, they are just trying to copy as many features as possible, of an established closed source project. The only "improvement" over the original design is using a different license for it. The same applies to some closed source projects, lets reinvent this open source project and make it closed source so we can package it and have control over it. There are also many innovative open source projects that really put the to the next step, or introduce a new concept that may or may not a hit. The same with many closed source projects. Just because a project is open source it doesn't mean you will have millions of people working on it, most project that are open source are programmed by one or two people. the same size as most Closed Source Project. The fact they decide to share the source is unrelated to innovation (on a technical level). The only advantage that open source has if someone wants to innovate off someone else's idea they at least do not need to start from scratch.

Re:And that my friends...

[node 3 (115640)]

I think you've got it completely backwards. Open Source is *not* about innovation, it's about building solid products. In general, the only thing truly innovative about Open Source software is the Open Source model itself.

Innovation is a by-product of research, and research is something that is almost *never* done by Open Source developers. What Open Source is really good at is applying innovations already discovered. Essentially, engineering using known techniques.

Now let's go manufacturing open source hardware...

And what innovations would you expect from Open Source hardware (aside from the model itself)?

That's why Open Source is not taking over from the end-user perspective--it's just not innovating enough. It's only for the types of applications which are essentially solved, where progress is made by incrementally refining something, that Open Source is taking over and will be unstoppable.

Research is expensive. Very expensive. The only reason Open Source has taken off as a software development model is that software development can be done very cheaply. It will be quite difficult for an Open Source team to create new and innovative hardware. They just won't have the resources.

Oh, really?

[Max Threshold (540114)]

Which major IP holder sponsored the "research" behind the article?

Re:

[Opportunist (166417)]

I was thinking the same. What tightening of IP laws is around the corner that needs to be sold?

Re:

[Teancum (67324)]

For myself, as an engineer, I would have to say that most "creation" is a combination of both hard work and a series of sometimes small and occasionally large scale eureka moments.

I like the term "grok" coined by Heinlein as a verb meaning "to comprehend a topic or concept completely". Sometimes it is very difficult to completely grok something in the problem domain you are working in. If you are at the frontier of human knowledge (in whatever endeavor that may be... science, engineering, theology, politi

Innovation

[Wowsers (1151731)]

I have a patent on innovation :-).

Re:

[somersault (912633)]

A method of designing a novel method or device by incremental advances on current knowledge or technology, usually without the use of flashes of inspiration, but instead involving long hours of deep thought and experimental verifications. And lots of pizza.

Re:

[mwvdlee (775178)]

I claim prior art!

By the way, I have a patent on prior art research.

Re:

[PopeRatzo (965947)]

By the way, I have a patent on prior art research.

My friend mwvdlee makes the point in a funnier and more insightful way than I ever could.

From TFA:

Everything results from accretion. I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.

What a great argument for the end of "protecting" innovation through IP laws. It sound

Re:

[Sique (173459)]

So we are back to Bernard of Chartes and his wellknown and often quoted "If I've seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Uh, I've had those moments

[by Anonymous Coward]

All the time I have little flashes of realization or inspiration. Being that I'm a software & hardware designer and developer, had I not had these "flashes" I would never have made any of the things I did. The author of this article is selling opinion and personal viewpoint as some sort of psychological "fact". I wish slashdot wouldn't post these stories because it gives the impression this opinion is widely held or fact.

Re:

[VoidCrow (836595)]

I suspect that this opinion is held by those people who would wish, for personal reasons, to seek to characterise originality and genius as a mixture of obsession and hard work. If they can convince themselves and others, then at some level they can think 'I could do all those things, but I have a life'. It's just comfort-zone area-denial for the self-deluded.

Re:Uh, I've had those moments

[Dr. Hok (702268)]

All the time I have little flashes of realization or inspiration.

Full ack. I still remember vividly how I went to bed one day after hours of fruitless pondering over that day's differential geometry lecture, then woke up in the middle of the night and suddenly *knew* what it was all about. Before, it was all just meaningless equations and symbols, which had suddenly turned into images of familiar places and faces, sort of. (Yeah, I know, people sometimes call me weird.)

Of course you can say that this moment of 'revelation' was nothing by itself, but only the last step in a chain of hard work. But still, it was just far out and a joy to behold.

MSFT

[by Anonymous Coward]

It always involves using stuff that other people have made.

Or, in Microsoft's case, buying stuff other people have made.

There is some value to that

[patio11 (857072)]

After all, is it any different when IBM or Sun pays the wages of the folks working on httpd or OpenOffice? All they're doing is paying for man hours. Microsoft also pays the innovators... they just pay several orders of magnitude better. (And this is why every OSS Visio-clone will always be an OSS Visio-clone, rather than Microsoft playing catch-up by cloning successful OSS programs.)

Re:

[mwvdlee (775178)]

The difference is a matter of ego's.

With Microsoft they have a genius that things of a brilliant way to do something, then they have an army of coders who make it happen.

With OOS they have a genius that things of a brilliant way to do something, then they have an army of coders who think THEY are the geniusses and thus try and make it their own way.

The main problem is actually the lack of realisation that a singular vision may not yield the absolute best result, but it's a better result than trying to blend

intellectual property

[User 956 (568564)]

I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.

Lucky for us, corporate america is catching on, and they're probably working on a subscription service for that incremental innovation. Because you can't just have un-owned ideas out there, floating around.

only 10% imagination

[alfrenovsky (1212088)]

Investigation is 10% imagination and 90% perspiration. That's why most investigators smells so bad.

One Premise Argument

[Wazukkithemaster (826055)]

I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.

I speak therefore everything is always incremental? Ok Descartes...

Re:

[dreamchaser (49529)]

I was going to post something similar. It's like saying "Potatoes are starchy, so the only starch must come from potatoes."

quoting Newton (again...)

[polar red (215081)]

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Re:quoting NOT Newton

[Petrushka (815171)]

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Not Newton, but Bernard of Chartres (or John of Salisbury, depending on how your citation system works). Newton just recycled the line as a way to make fun of someone else who got annoyed after Newton had plagiarised his work.

Re:

[hazem (472289)]

Not Newton, but Bernard of Chartres (or John of Salisbury, depending on how your citation system works). Newton just recycled the line as a way to make fun of someone else who got annoyed after Newton had plagiarised his work.

I worked for a physics professor that said Newton liked to say that because one of his rivals, Leibniz, was rather short. Like another poster said, (who attributed it to another reason), Newton, brilliant as he was, was quite an asshole.

Re:quoting Newton (again...)

[jimicus (737525)]

"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."
    - Hal Abelson

Re:

[camperdave (969942)]

Wow. How apropos a quote for the bulk of people who rely only on popular news media for their point of view.

Re:

[CmdrGravy (645153)]

And likewise,

"If I can't see as far as I'd like its the fault of the idiots who came before not doing their fair share"

Eureka Moments Do Happen...

[rbowles (245829)]

Its just that most often, they come at the tail end of alot of hard work. Everything comes together in a flash, seemingly in one brilliant moment. Those moments are what many of us live for, but in truth, they really aren't the result of our brains exceeding physical and computational limits and suddenly operating at infinite clock-speed. The truth is you were probably working on the problem for some time (possibly unconsciously). Give yourself a little credit for having an efficient background scheduler.

Re:Eureka Moments Do Happen...

[TapeCutter (624760)]

Sometimes the answer reveals itself in a dream rather than a consious flash, Bohr's atomic model being a famous example.

Re:

[aproposofwhat (1019098)]

Or Kekule's dream of a snake curled up eating its tail that led him to the structure of benzene - a more vivid and accessible example of the same phenomenon.

Re:

[TapeCutter (624760)]

Would you like to buy one of my patented tinfoil nightcaps?

Re:

[Lonewolf666 (259450)]

They do, but in my experience they happen early in the development process.

First, you work on the problem for some time (possibly unconsciously) but that is only a small part of the effort. Say 20% as an example.

Second, the Eureka Moment happens.

Third, you do a lot of work to go from the brilliant idea to a marketable product. If you are in a regulated industry, add lots of documentation and approval procedures. In this (somewhat boring) phase the bulk of the work happens.

This is news?

[tygerstripes (832644)]

Is anyone surprised by this "revelation"? How many of the great innovations of their time were invented by two or more parties, completely independently and almost simultaneously? Powered flight, steam-engines, internal combustion engine, radio transmission...

Quite apart from the "10% inspiration, 90% perspiration" adage, most of the big technological advances are widely understood to have come about simply because it was their time - the foundations were in place, the need was there, and one of society's more creative and industrious members put the two together. That's called progress, people.

This is merely a book promotion - ignore

[petes_PoV (912422)]

The article has at it's central point a a new book about innovation.

Apart from rather out-of-place remarks about language - which I'm not sure I really understood, so I can't say if I agree with them or not, there is a lot of column-inches given to one single example of a guy who re-invented the globe, to help teach geography. Surely there are better examples of innovation than this?

I'm also not convinced that innovation for it's own sake is necessarily a good thing. There are lots of innovative, but rea

Eureka moments do exist

[rucs_hack (784150)]

The mistake is thinking that they arrive without any prior work. They arrive usually not in the absence of previous work, but in the absence of a previous solution. How can you have a sudden idea about a solution unless you've been working on the problem in the first place?

I had one a few years back, when as far as I could tell, a whole years research was about to go down the toilet because I'd hit a brick wall.

I spent several days stressed out of my head over it, and finally resolved to get out and do something else.

Whilst I was relaxing the solution suddenly popped into my head, complete. If that isn't a Eureka moment, then I don't know what is.

I certainly had done plenty of work prior to this event, but I had no idea that solution was possible until that moment, none of my work directly pointed to it that I could tell (consciously at any rate, obviously part of my brain got it). It took seconds to realise it, and an hour to write it down, then four months to instantiate. It worked even better then I'd dared think possible.

Yes true, but

[EddyPearson (901263)]

This is true, it takes us a while to come up with all the mental material for a "Flash" innovation, but I think the "Flash" is when you suddenly work out HOW all the mental material involved fits together to make an understandable innovation.

Take the original "Eureka!" moment. Before Archimedes got into his bath, he had already formed many ideas about the nature of physics, he wasn't going into the experiance totally blind, however the "Flash" innovation moment came when he made a CONNECTION between the thi

Not a myth

[niceone (992278)]

There must have been some innovation or we wouldn't now have 8GB cards for just a few tens of dollars.

Oh wait, in a flash.

Definition

[camperdave (969942)]

I guess it all comes down to how one defines "innovation". If you take the word to mean invention, then the slow, incremental process can be called innovation.

However, I think most people use the word to mean "something radically different", as in a new way of doing something, or a never before seen product. This is the definition that most advertisers want people to have in mind when they describe their product. This kind of innovation is the result of a paradigm shift, which can come about either through Eureka moments, or it can come about when new people come on board and bring a new perspective to a problem.

In science...

[pzs (857406)]

the plaudits do not go to those who have the great idea - they go to those who persuade everybody else that it's a great idea.

I don't know who said this, but it's dead right.

Peter

If Microsoft has taught us anything...

[Digital Vomit (891734)]

What are you talking about? If Microsoft has taught us anything, it's that innovation *does* happen in a flash. I mean, it doesn't take *that* long to write a cheque, now, does it?

FYI - a review of said book

[clickclickdrone (964164)]

http://www.pcbookreview.com/reviews/other/review-the-myths-of-innovation.html [pcbookreview.com]

Hah - my patents say otherwise!

[putaro (235078)]

I had a flash and pounded out a patent - a cell phone, a camera and a web browser all in one. A little money for the patent application and now I'm filing lawsuits against all the big boys. Who says you need to do lots of hard work!

Implementation takes work; Innovation, no.

[pla (258480)]

real innovation takes lots of time and hard work to come to fruition

Tell that to Watson and Crick, who for decades could never really explain how they "stumbled" upon the secret of the DNA double helix - Until it recently came out that the thought it up while tripping their balls off.

Or Einstein? He went from a hack dabbling in the works of Planck to the greatest physicist of all time in a matter of 18 months; and while some have accused him of "borrowing" his ideas from patent applications (or his wi

does NYT write anything

[superwiz (655733)]

that doesn't promote some sort of socialist mindset? Yes, of course, the innovator is no one. He owes the work of his mind to the society and other people who made his innovation possible. Sure, sure. The individual is nothing and contributing to society is the only noble reason for living. What a bunch of nonsense! Innovation comes from two sources: wondering of the curious and gradually developed vision of forward-planning. The first is instant the latter is painstaking and slow. It is Mozart vs Salieri, if you will. And while the Salieri's make innovation useful, without the Mozarts it would never be possible. Standing on the shoulders of giants is important, but to say that it is all that matters when it comes to innovation is to refuse to acknowledge that innovation takes standing taller than anyone has stood before.