Our memories of the past can design the future

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is thought to have said: “You cannot step twice into the same stream.”

This observation helps us to understand that our world is a transient one. Everything changes. Being inventive is merely recognising that we inhabit a world where change is not only possible but inevitable.

Invention is the enemy of stale habit, and we cannot simultaneously preserve the status quo and expect to be creative.

A manager of a multinational firm who loudly exhorts people to be innovative must be prepared to engage with the challenging ideas that emerge. The creative spirit for change, once untethered, is not easy to control.

Any genuine innovation cycle is characterised by uncertainty; there is no history. To the extent that what is being attempted is breaking entirely new ground, there may be no prior examples to guide us. At the very outset, we may depend entirely on creative intuition.

This is why investors are nervous of innovation cycles in their early stages since, until evidence of feasibility and demand begin to appear, the probability of achieving a successful outcome cannot be estimated; the risk is incalculable.

This is also the reason why attempting to pick winners in the early stages of an innovation cycle is a less sure process than picking a horse in the Derby based on the form book.

Small firms are generally acknowledged to be an important catalyst for change because they are less bureaucratic and are typically motivated by a strong creative impulse to produce something different.

But the principals and investors in small firms need to remember that the conception of a novel idea for a product is merely the first step in a cycle of creative effort; the first idea in what necessarily becomes a chain of ideas.

Each step is a problem requiring a solution. Each solution helps us to identify new problems, requiring further creativity. In Jul 2007, Nokia, with a 40% share of the mobile phone market and large cash reserves, was well positioned to meet the challenge of the smartphone.

Yet, five years later, Nokia has shed perhaps a third of its staff and faces intense competition from Apple, Google, and Samsung.

At any point along the path, a small but necessary solution may elude us; we may take a wrong turn. One way in which inventors have overcome some of the problems of uncertainty in development is by using prototyping methods.

Prototyping is a form of idea testing, and is a natural human ability.

When we consider whether we would like our walls painted red, we test the concept in our mind’s eye. When two or more dishes on a restaurant menu seem equally appealing we try to select one by “sampling” them in our imagination.

This trick is possible because we call upon empirical memories of the past to design the future. If the menu description of a particular dish lists ingredients we know individually but have not experienced in combination, we perform the mental exercise of bringing that combination into existence in our minds.

These acts of imagination are trivial examples of the more complex imaginings and detailed physical prototypes prepared by engineers, designers, artists, or inventors. Creative power resides in developing this ability to reconfigure or recombine — with a fully open mind — elements of the world that we know well to make new things. As we evolve the prototypes, we solve each new technical problem, our empirical knowledge increases, and we are able to demonstrate that a practicable solution is available.

We can never know who first conceived the idea for a boat that sailed under the water. Da Vinci is a contender only because he produced the earliest known drawing of one, but no better prototype appeared in da Vinci’s lifetime. It took a further 400 years to explore the technical problems and produce a submarine.

Kevin Scally lectures on creative design and innovation in UCC, where he also directs the MBS in management and marketing. He is a former designer and has written on innovation and the use of the patent system to protect information.