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I’m very excited about the new Speaker Series that MSR New England has kicked off today, featuring David Kord Murray, author of Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by building on the ideas of others. David gave a solid talk, emphasizing the importance of two aspects in the process of being “creative”: Borrowing other ideas, and knowing how to Judge ideas.
In his book’s second chapter (on borrowing) he quotes Einstein: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”. What he lays out later in the chapter, describes “smart” ways of borrowing – basically don’t borrow ideas from your direct competitor, but possibly someone else in a related field, or yet better, someone in a completely unrelated field, who is trying to solve a similar problem. Bill Gates borrowed solutions from the existing software industry, while Charles Darwin borrowed his creative solutions from places not usually associated with biology (Galapagos). Borrow from within your industry and you’re considered a thief or lowly pirate. While if you borrow from another industry, you are considered a creative genius.
Another interesting quote from that chapter: “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” He continues to write about how Bill Gates stole the mouse+click GUI idea that Macintosh developed first. Apparently Steve Jobs spotted that technology at XEROX parc, hired the reseracher who worked on the mouse, and put him to work on the Mac. Gates immediately recognized the potential of the idea, and blatantly copied it. After years of legal battles, Microsoft won the suit, on the claim that the original idea didn’t originate from Apple, but from Xerox. Dan Bricklin, a prominent software engineer who developed the first spreadsheet, said about the suit, “This is a sad day for the software industry in America.” He added, “Writing software is not the same as writing a book. Software builds on what was there before.” Bricklin is right. Software builds on what was there before, but so does every commercial product, engineered machine, scientific theory, and creative thought… also books!
In the Q&A session I asked the author what his thoughts of DRM & technology/web copyright. He didn’t have a stong opinion other than – he understands why its necessary for profitability, but also sees how it inhibits the creative process.
My notes from his talk:
Borrowing Brilliance is about taking ideas and restructuring them. New ideas are always built out of existing ideas. The key becomes where you go to look for ideas. Main questions:
1. can you teach someone to be creative? Definitely.
2. is there a defined process? Maybe.
defined six steps:
the origin of a creative idea:
step 1) defining – define the problem that you’re trying to solve
step 2) borrowing – borrow ideas from places with a similar problem
step 3) combining – connect and combine these borrowed ideas (this is the essence of creativity)
the evolution of a creative idea:
step 4) incubating – allow the combinations to incubate into a solution
step 5) judging – identify the strength and weakness of the solution
step 6) enhancing – eliminate the weak points while enhancing the strong ones
DEFINING
We’re not necessarily good at the formation of a problem. The problem is the foundation of a creative idea. Its important to define, understand and describe the problem. Its important to describe the problem from different perspective, define it differently.
BORROWING
The problem with define where to look for the solution. John Nash had an economics problem: how do members of the economy act, he sensed that they were acting with incomplete information. He recognized that as the same problems he had playing poker. He took the same solutions to the problems from poker into create a decision-making model as a solution for his economics problem.
how do you solve a navigation problem? First look at other software companies. Then step away outside that industry and look at search&rescue teams, truck drivers… etc, and see how they solve their navigation problems.
COMBINING
this is the essence of creativity.
Walt disney created disneyland by using a movie metaphor while constructing the park. Used a move metaphor while breaking out the different experiences that people should have in different parts of the park. Facebook’s original metaphor was an online yearbook. Creative thinkers use metaphors. Isaac Newton was thinking in terms of metaphors – making the connection between the apple and the moon – the apple falls down, but moon moves around. combined celestial and earth-based physics.
INCUBATING
Input to the subsounscious is important => incubate => output from the subconscious (usually happens in the shower! -> the one time of the day where we’re not consciously thinking). Before going to bed, important to glance over some things we’re thinking about, then put it away… It’ll come back.
JUDGING
This is used to drive/improve the idea. Put on your positive and negative hats. So in the next phase, you can bring up an idea that doesn’t have the negative bits and mostly the good bits. This helps develop your intuition, identifying good ideas fast. Example: steve jobs visits XEROX PARC 20 years ago. Goes wild over a demo of mouse+click GUI. Identifying that as a brilliant idea vs. others that had the same demo…
ENHANCING
Trial and error as the passage to the creative solution.
[tags]creativity,book,review, David Kord Murray [/tags]
Thought provoking article on Techcrunch about the shift from dedicated web pages to real-time streams.
“The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.”
This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos and videos.
The author presents a coherent stream metaphor: “A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information – that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.” He claims that the stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them:
“Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”
“The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge? Borthwick suggests letting go of the notion that you can ever master the stream, even just your own personal data stream of friend’s Tweets, updates, blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube video finds and so on:
This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we can’t attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it.”
This is where I have to somewhat disagree. Yes, the average user must deal with information overload more than ever. Our emphasis must not be focused towards this notion of “giving up” or realizing that we can ‘never master the stream’. We need to build smart filtering mechanisms that help us navigate this overload and data-heavy information ether. We need to build systems that help us know when and where we *should* hop into the stream. We need to be able to set and identify levels of immediacy – I am not willing to miss out on any content from my closest friends, but will easily let other content slide by. Why can I not easily set preferences across the board and am constantly prompted to setup less-than ideal preferences within walled gardens?
“So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.”
The information overload “problem” is that of smart filtering, and in a way, the article’s last sentence portrays one of the most promising filtering mechanisms – social & collaborative. By letting people you trust around you do some of the work, it becomes much easier for users to take the plunge and step into the stream.
So start classifying y’all. I want to be able to finally deal with all my feeds!
[tags]filtering,overload,web,rss[/tags]
On May 6th, Arianna Huffington presented the opening remarks for the Senate Subcommittee on Cummunications, Technology and the Internet’s Hearing on “The Future of Journalism”. She began with a clear statement: Journalism Will Not Only Survie, It Will Thrive! She added that we are actually in the midst of a Golden Age for news consumers, who access stories from countless sources around the world, up-to-the-minute, enabling conversations and direct comments to the author and between other readers, enabling communities to form around the topics.
Even with the staggering numbers that we have seen over the past year (the newspaper industry shed an estimated 15,970 jobs in 2008, and 8,484 through April of this year), it is important to remember that the future of quality journalism does not depend on the future of newspapers. People have gotten used to getting the news they want, whenever, however and wherever they want. This change is here to stay. The discussion needs to move from “How do we save newspapers?” to “How do we strengthen journalism — regardless of which platform it is delivered on…”
We must not act as if we are still operating in the old content economy, as opposed to the new link economy. The survival of the industry cannot be found by “protecting” content behind walled gardens. The future is a linked economy – it is search engines, online advertising, citizen journalism and foundation supported investigative funds.
Arianna firmly believes in a hybrid future:
where old media players embrace the ways of new media (including transparency, interactivity, and immediacy) and new media companies adopt the best practices of old media (including fairness, accuracy, and high-impact investigative journalism). The emphasis should not be on subsidizing what exists now, but on how to rededicate ourselves to the highest calling of journalists — which is to ferret out the truth, wherever it leads. Even if it means losing our all-access-pass to the halls of power.
Unfortunately, this is a concept that has fallen out of favor with too many journalists who, like Pontius Pilat, wash their hands of finding the truth and instead are obsessed with a false view of “balance” and the misguided notion that every story has two sides. And that the truth can be found somewhere in the middle. But not every story has two sides and the truth is often found lurking in the shadows.
[tags] huffington, news, senate,arianna[/tags]
If there was one day in the year I truly wish I could go back to Israel for, it would be today – Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day). It is the day I feel furthest from home; most taken out of context. A day that is such an important part of Israeli reality; a tremendously sad day where we commemorate those who gave their lives so that we could live, independent in our country.
A day where we sing songs teary eyed and add more soldiers names to the long list of fallen soldiers since the start of our young state. A day when we reflect on the continuing bloodshed and wonder if it will ever cease. A day when we stand silent and sing our national anthem proudly. And even with all the typical Israeli cynicism, today we come together, as a consolidated people still struggling to justify our right for a home.
On memorial day, a siren is heard throughout the country, and everything stops; all cars, people, everyone stops, and stands in silence. Such powerful, strong silence is overwhelming. Even kids know, that when the siren sounds, you stop, stand, and reflect.
One of my favorite Yom Hazikaron songs, translated from Hebrew.
PERACH (flower):
There, in the dust and the sky’s blue
a piece of peace exists
Sleep flower, sleep
Sleep little girl.
They took life from you
Oh, holy wars
Angels wept for you
With dry eyes.
Your smile, baby girl,
They buried in the ground
how does silence grow
from within the chaos?
Whoever pressed the trigger
Blood will stain his heart
In wars for justice
Children also die.
Yehuda Poliker
[tags] yom hazikaron, memorial, day, israel[/tags]
Several weeks after the Israeli operation in Gaza, Danny Zamir, director of the Yitzhak Rabin military preparatory academy at Oranim College, organized a meeting of his graduates. There they chatted behind closed doors and shared their experience from the operation. A transcript of their conversation was initially published in the College paper, but was picked up by Israeli mainstream newspaper Ha’aretz and sensationalized on the front page.
The soldiers’ testimonies described cold-blooded murder of Gaza civilians and unreasonable commands passed during the operation. This lead to a promise by the military to form an investigation which was recently concluded, resulting in no file charges against any of the soldiers as their descriptions were based on hearsay. Their names have not been released in order to protect their identity, and the military investigative police did not publish any more information about the case.
Zamir’s efforts haven’t sat well with a certain patriotic constituency within Israeli society. The IDF is seen as a sacred national institution that is beyond reproach. I’m sure Zamir didn’t expect to be lionized for his efforts, he probably didn’t expect to be vilified either. Not only have Israelis accused him of smearing the IDF, they’ve accused him of aiding and abetting the nation’s enemies who are only waiting to pounce upon such stories to justify their hatred of Israel. The IDF itself initiated this campaign by revealing that Zamir had been imprisoned briefly in the 1990s when he refused to guard a settler group holding a provocative religious ceremony at Joseph’s Tomb. They attempted to shoot the messenger. (link)
While doing research for my Global Voices Online post, I scoured through Israblog, Tapuz and other Hebrew portals, trying to find posts from soldier first-hand witnesses who wrote about their experiences in Gaza. To my dismay, I could not find any. It is such a taboo topic; an Israeli must not help those haters validate their claims against our country. We were all soldiers. We all realize that these situations are not black and white. And even if these stories are somewhat true on a micro level, it is certainly not an IDF-wide phenomenon. But when they are taken out of context and amplified to the masses, it is easy to forget the source, while letting our emotions play out. Especially when messages are rapidly amplified through Twitter, the effects can be devastating ( a.k.a. what we saw last week re: #amazonFail)
Ever more often, we are witnessing the implications of living in a society with fast-paced, worldwide media coverage that can easily spin stories out from their original context. This is precisely how a closed door session between school colleagues turns into a worldwide news sensation against the reputation of one of the most powerful armies in the world. We must remember that the truth usually lies somewhere in-between, and make an effort to fact-check before letting our emotions passionately take over our logic.
Here’s a link to my GVO article:
[tags]Israel,global voices oline,testimonials,context,idf,soldiers,war,palestine,gaza[/tags]
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