Creativity is a skill, not a mystery

As a society, we still treat creativity and idea generation as a mystery. New ideas come from "creative", or "non-linear" people. Under this understanding, people are either gifted with creativity or they are not in a very binary way. This statement is so widely believed to be correct; it is hard to overstate how wrong it is.

Occupied Ideas

If you were alive last year, you probably remeber the Occupy Wallstreet movement. Although the movement never had a clear set of demands, one thing was clear, people were (and still are) very angry about the distribution of wealth in the country.  Clearly this blog is not about debating social issues or political groups. People tend to have very strong opinions about Occupy, and I don’t really want to change anybody’s mind. I do however, want to bring up one aspect of the movement that I think has been completely overlooked and is well aligned with the blog’s purpose. The extremely uneven wealth distribution of the United States hampers technological development, especially disruptive development.

Catchy Tech by Carly Rae Jepsen

If you follow it, you may have noticed that “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen was the number one downloaded single on iTunes this week. If you have never heard this song, it falls squarely in the catchy pop musical category. It is not good pop, or even bad pop; it is the worst kind of pop. It’s the type of pop song that you just can’t seem to completely convince yourself has no musical quality and will be forgotten in 6 months.

This is why the word catchy describes it so well. Nobody justifies its popularity with a “oh hey, that song is really well composed”, or “that song is really incorporating a new sound”. No, it’s a catchy pop song and just like a cold, it’s in our nature to be susceptible.

Catchy pop is far worse then terrible pop because terrible pop can be ignored. We can change the radio station, visit someone else’s website, or give it the thumbs down when it comes up.  Most importantly, we don’t need to buy the single. When a catchy song comes up on Pandora though, you find yourself drawn in. It is engrossing and sounds like the next big thing. Before you know it, 2 months pass without hearing anything else but this song: its everywhere.  During this period, the song sucks up all the time that we could be spending listening to good pop, or even newer types of music currently disrupting pop.

In the end though, the song just disappears without a lasting impression. If you return to the single later, it sounds just like every other pop song you have ever heard. It does not move the pop genera forward by introducing something new; it simply exists, absorbs our time and money, and then vanishes.

It is hyperboli to say that this is dangerous. But it is a great analogy to something that really is: catchy technology. Just like music, technology can be irrationally seductive. To those listening, catchy technology sounds like the next big thing. It is engrossing and seems to hold the solution to boundless problems. We see countless startups appear touting their tech and we see large companies start their own internal development efforts or make huge acquisitions to get in on it. But then, 5 or 10 years pass and people look back and ask “why were we investing in that?” or “how does that improve on the state-of-the-art?”.

Misled by Experts

Recently I had an opportunity to learn about how technical experts interpret the term disruptive. I did not plan for this opportunity, nor did the experts know they would be compared or assessed in anyway, but the result was surprising. Here is what happened. 

REbound recently submitted a grant application to raise R&D money. Each reviewer received the same grant containing roughly 20 pages of detailed technical description. They were all independently asked to review the merits of our application and were specifically asked to assess the impact the technology would have. After each had completed their review, the funding agency was kind enough to send us their comments and allow us to reply directly to any issues or confusions that the reviewers had before the funding agency makes their decision next month.

What was interesting about the comments was that, when asked how disruptive our technology was, each expert came back with a very different and contradictory answer. There responses were so disparate that if you saw them you would think that they had colluded to give the most inconsistent comments possible. 

Venture Capitalism = Socialism?

If there is one group of people who believe in capitalism, it’s venture capitalists. If you need proof just take a look at the last word of their name. However, with all this talk of food stamps recently, and my involvement with the VC system we depend on to bring us the disruptive technological development that we need, something occurred to me. Under their current approach VCs perform a huge amount of wealth redistribution. 

 Could it be that, in fact, the current VC system we use is one of the largest sources of wealth redistribution in our society? In all honesty, the answer is probably no; and it certainly is not so dramatic, but it is an interesting characteristic of the system that it takes a massive amount of wealth from the super rich and re-distributes it to the not super rich. Here is how.

Information integration

We are approaching problems using a singularly focused, categorical, and outdated problem-solving method. This method was not always outdated and as recently as 20 years ago it still made sense. Even though our access to information has dramatically changed during that period, our approach to technology development and problem solving remains the same: minimize the scope of the problem until you isolate something you can control and utilize.

For an example of this let’s look to the power industry. If we look at the technology in this sector we see very singularly focused systems developed under this regime.  Take a combined cycle gas turbine, this technology uses a single fuel (natural gas), to drive a single type of technology (thermal power cycles), to deliver electricity to a single market (shouldering electricity), governed by a single forcing function (the price of electricity).

This is not, per say, a bad technology, but it was developed under a system where the scope of the technology was minimized as much as possible. If you look at the availability of information 20 years ago this approach makes sense. The groups that developed the technology had limited access to published works outside the realm of gas turbines; they had gone to school where they participated in categorical narrowly focused curriculums, and they were led by technical and business experts with experience with the previous generations of the technology.

Under this set of circumstances the only plausible way to develop a technology is by reducing the scope you are willing to consider. If you don’t have access to information about other technology, markets, fuels, etc. you will try to remove them as variables and isolate out a system that you can fully predict and control. In general, these decisions force you to accept increased system complexity in order to reach better system performance at constant (or decreasing) technical scope.

In the last 20 years, the availability of information has increased faster than ever before. Now, with little more than a macbook and an internet connection a resourceful engineer can learn more or less anything they want for free. My wife and I can get in our car and in the time it takes to drive to the whole foods across town I can (sitting in the passenger seat of course) download hourly solar insolation data for Bakersfield CA, search a prominent, but unrelated peer-reviewed journal for articles that may apply to my technology, and read about a new bill incentivizing the use of some new feedstock in my state.

bad idea + good pitch >? good idea

Anyone who is involved with entrepreneurship, small companies, or funding startups will tell you how important your 2 min elevator pitch is. Above all else this short snippet must capture the attention of your audience. This memorized bit has become one of the most important part of getting your new company off the ground.

In the face of our technical society’s full acceptance of Occam’s Razor, these pitches must be leave the audience with an honest understanding of why your solution is better and how you will bring that technology to market all within a few minutes of talking. For technologies that have the potential to solve big problems like clean water, food and energy, this is absolutely impossible.

Being the resourceful people they are, entrepreneurs have made one small change to the requirements of the pitch.  Instead of an honest understanding of why our solutions are better, we are now only required to provide a perceived understanding. That is to say, we are forced to give half-truths about what our technology really does in order to make it seem simple and obvious.