Ideation Erosion

Ted.com is a website that highlights ideas worth spreading. Experts in their field are invited to speak at conferences and share findings from their research and observations. Recently, Matt Ridley presented a talk he dubbed, “When ideas have sex”.

Ridley postulates that there is no one idea that is not influenced by others’ ideas. The ways in which we communicate have become more and more complex in nature and will continue to do so. Rather than face-to-face interaction, we now have Twitter, cell phones, Skype, texting, etc. Just a short time ago, if you wanted to make a phone call, it needed to be done from the confinement of your own home or a pay phone. Now, information can be spread instantaneously.

Ridley says, “We have created the ability to do things which we don’t even understand. We have gone past the capacity of the human mind”. He provides this simple example: ages ago a stone axe was used as a simple hand tool. Likewise, a similar-sized computer mouse, serves a comparable function as well. Different? Yes. Yet, oddly comparable. No one knows how to make a mouse in isolation, but people working together, creating their specific part, can do just this.    

Ridley also argues that we have created the “collective brain”. This is the meeting and mating of ideas that causes progress (i.e.: the sustainability movement and vehicles=hybrid cars). When related to technology or theoretical ideas, it is easy to see the benefits. There is room for innovation, improvement, enhanced efficiency, etc. Life can become more “user-friendly.”  Just look at the spread of ideas through social media. Someone can pose a question on Facebook and immediately receive 10 responses.

What happens when the core of a company (its values) are placed on the operating table? If these values start melding, mashing, and blending together, we get farther and farther away from the original intent. The danger in this: values set the foundation for a company; they guide, direct, and determine all decisions. They need to withstand the test of time. If core values are heavily influenced by the billions of new ideas each day, companies have the greater potential to stray from their organic beginning. 

To combat this and create positive implications for idea sharing, it is necessary for companies to reproduce ideas stemming from a solid, unshakeable foundation of values towards a specific purpose. 

By Ali Lewis, second year Soderquist Fellow

Comments

[Chuck Hyde]

Peter Drucker said, "Leadership is a only a means - to what end is the crucial question." I think the same could be said of innovation.

There are plenty of examples out there where the collective ideas/brain, when not built on moral/ethical foundation, have resulted in decay or even destruction. I just watched a movie "American Gangster" - a based on a true story of the heroin trade in the 1970s in Harlem. Here's a deal that no one person could pull off by himself but for 7 years was a well-oiled machine that had gone undetected by drug authorities.

Conversely, when applied productively, you might end up with the mouse for our computers, new medicines, sources of clean water or renewable energy.

So yes, 2 heads are better than one - but as my dad would probably say, "as long as they're screwed on straight."