Thoughts on “Are Good Ideas Hard to Find?” (1) This Will Rogers quote is worth keeping in mind: “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.” A few others have said something similar. Good ideas emerge through experience and a lot of that will be obtained from bad ideas. (2) With metrics, we end up facing situations similar to the Ultraviolet Catastrophe in physics. When the “law” doesn’t fit, some basic assumptions have to change. The Ultraviolet Catastrophe was a result of human smugness and Planck’s quantization hypothesis helped resolve that crisis in physics. It’s important to ascertain whether the assumptions for a particular metric are valid when extended. Also from Will Rogers: “You've got to go out on a limb sometimes because that's where the fruit is.” (3) The evolutionary phenomenon that Stephen J Gould highlighted in his essay on the disappearance of .400 hitters in baseball is that variability diminishes (because the pitchers are now better trained and you bump up against the reality of individual human limits). A metric of early development is probably not relevant for maturity. A pediatrician is guided by a different set of metrics for obvious reasons. What do you think?
Few would disagree that ideas are important to innovation and productivity growth. They are needed for the conception, implementation, and long-term diffusion of new products, processes, and methods. One challenge is how new ideas fit together to enable positive outcomes. Is the initial idea for the concept the most important, the ideas for the implementation, or those for the many problems that must be solved over the course of a technology’s lifetime in order that the #technology becomes better in any way we define better? Stanford and MIT researchers try to make sense of these issues. Their paper analyzes the number of researchers needed to achieve improvements in the number of transistors per chip, sometimes called Moore’s Law, crop yield, usually measured in output per area of farmland, or a new drug. The paper found that the number of researchers needed to achieve these outputs has increased over the last 50 years, thus suggesting that researchers are becoming less effective in finding new ideas either with the same or a new technology. The paper is controversial because it restricts ideas to the achievement of these improvements. Many people would claim that our world is filled with ideas, even if they might not be associated with the metrics used by the researchers from Stanford and MIT. For instance, funding of startups by venture capitalists reached records each year between 2017 and 2021 not only in the U.S., but in Europe, China, and India. This funding went to a wide variety of product categories, both low-tech and high-tech. Would VCs be giving money to startups if those #startups didn’t have new ideas? Most people involved with the startup eco-system and university research would answer with a resounding yes. A key point of the paper (and my article) is that we need good ideas, not just ideas. Good ideas should lead to positive economic outcomes, and the fact that 90% of Unicorn startups are unprofitable suggests the ideas for them weren’t very good. In contrast, improvements in chips, crop yields, and new drugs require many new ideas, and thus cumulatively, the improvements represent thousands if not millions of ideas. Most of these ideas were for small and not noteworthy improvements but together these ideas have had a huge cumulative impact on our lives. My forthcoming book addresses these types of improvements being experienced by today’s technologies, and they aren’t very rapid. Virtual and augmented reality devices aren’t getting much smaller despite the importance of electronics. Drones are not becoming better at delivering to high-rise apartments or navigating power and telephone lines. Hallucinations aren’t becoming less frequent for generative #AI and hyperloop isn’t getting much faster. One could argue about which metric is the best, but it is hard to find evidence that these improvements are occurring. #innovation #hype https://lnkd.in/egZHhR7w
Tomaž Vidonja
3mo
We never know how good are actually ideas unless we go and implement them. It's a function of time and changes that influence how idea develops to a final outcome. Good ideas are not so hard to find as they are hard to implement.
Sunny Durman
4mo
It's crucial to remain aware of your surroundings and be mindful of the context in which you operate. Understanding the environment and its dynamics can greatly influence decision-making and idea generation.
Corporate Exec Turned Entrepreneur, Multi-Unit Franchise Owner | Franchise Consultant, Helping Others Do the Same | Own Six Prosperous Franchises | Leveraging Decades of Experience, Guiding People to Franchise Ownership
4moSuresh Babu, insightful thoughts. How can organizations balance innovation metrics for sustained growth?