There’s no thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor who sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success.
—NIKOLA TESLA
HYBRID CARS. Portable digital music players. Handheld computers powered by fuel cells. Experimental gene therapies. Drug-dispensing nanobots. We’re impressed with breakthrough inventions when we first come into contact with them—before we begin to take their existence for granted. But understanding invention itself is another thing. Invention is the core of innovation, the process by which new products or methods or entire new companies are evolved and introduced. Inventions can create value in the marketplace or create entire new marketplaces.1 These growing markets, in turn, drive national economies.2
But what drives invention? How does the mysterious act of invention happen? Where does the mental leap, the breakthrough, the “Aha!”, the “Eureka!”, come from? What makes a person or a company or a society more inventive than another? What motivates someone to search for a problem, brainstorm a solution, and create that highly sought-after something that has never before existed? Can we better understand and stimulate inventiveness? If we could map the contours of the inventive mind, what would we see?
We can begin by glimpsing new ideas as they come about. To neuroscientists, the mind and the brain are one. Wielding inventions such as the PET scan, the MRI, and the EEG, neuroscientists have shown that the mind works via electrical and chemical impulses. The brain’s hundreds of billions of neurons, or nerve cells, fire signals across tiny gaps known as synapses. These neurotransmitter signals travel across billions of pathways, often making new connections along the way. One of the mind’s many astounding feats is that this network of neural circuits can operate and grow while consuming only about a quarter of the electrical power that drives a modern microprocessor, or about twenty watts.3 This internally produced electricity is our juice. Neuroscientists can actually watch our circuits in action, seeing the mind “light up” in places where language happens, where memories are stored, where spatial judgment occurs, where dreams are projected. Invention may happen when the brain makes an unexpected neuronal circuit.4
Twenty watts. Seems like a pretty dim bulb. But the light bulb itself, which has served as the symbol of inventiveness since the days of Thomas Edison, is not only an outdated metaphor for invention but also a very poor example of technology. Incandescent lamps blow out after only a few months of use. Worse, the bulb as we know it converts less than 10 percent of its inflow of juice into light, while the rest of the energy is lost to heat. That’s why it’s never a bright idea to grab a lit bulb. Those who know how a light bulb works are hyper-aware of how inefficient it is. Just think of all the coal that’s burned just so our lights can produce heat we don’t want or need. A visitor to Edison’s basement laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, still comes across signs hung by the legendary inventor himself that admonish: “Save the juice, save the juice, turn off the lights when not in use!”5
Our basic understanding of invention needs to be reinvented, moving beyond Edisonian homilies such as “genius is hard work, stick-to-itiveness, and common sense” because it’s clearly more than that. And what better place to start than with the invention metaphor itself?
An inventor named Nick Holonyak has actually spent his entire career working on replacing the light bulb. The son of Hungarian immigrants, Holonyak grew up in a coalmining town in southern Illinois where literacy was the exception. He saw the devastation of the coal miner’s life up close—including violent strikes, Depressionera layoffs, deadly explosions, and black lung disease. When Holonyak was ten years old, his father gave him a pocketknife and said, “Make what you need.” He learned to apply his mental capacity to his everyday problems and desires, first by whittling, then by taking apart telephones and fixing car engines. He ended up receiving his degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. In the early 1950s, Holonyak became the first graduate student of John Bardeen, who had co-invented the transistor at Bell Labs, a breakthrough that led to the first of Bardeen’s unprecedented two Nobel Prizes in physics. The opportunity to have the serene and brilliant Bardeen as a mentor and role model “was pretty lucky for me,” Holonyak recalls. “I was not 100 percent smart.”
Now in his seventies, Holonyak is spry and silver-haired, and looks a little nerdy when he wears his large glasses. But he still comes across as that hardscrabble country boy when discussing the advent, some four decades ago, of the biggest of his “Aha!” moments. After stints at Bell Labs and in the U. S. Army, Holonyak joined General Electric in Syracuse, New York, where he was supposed to be working on improving semiconductors under an Air Force contract. He heard something odd that distracted him from that work. Semiconductors, he had learned, could produce invisible infrared light energy. That got him wondering whether it would be possible to make circuits that produce light you could actually see. He created this opportunity in his mind. “My colleagues thought I was a bit nutty,” he says, and he had to keep his experiments secret from his boss. “I worked on the sly for two years,” he says, noting that if management found out, “I would have been in trouble and gotten fired.”6
His breakthrough came one day as he was testing a semiconductor material called gallium arsenide phosphide. When juiced with electricity, the circuit emitted a speck of red light.
Holonyak had invented the light-emitting diode—the LED. “Once I created a red one, I was constantly thinking, why can’t I create an orange, a green, and a blue one?” He and other inventors later discovered different materials that produced the different color frequencies. The blue LED was created by a Japanese inventor in early 1990s, and the race to perfect a bright white one is on right now.7 But LEDs of any color can last ten years or longer. They also produce almost no heat. Now used as standard indicator lights for everything from digital clocks to appliances to car dashboards, LEDs are also the basis for new flashlights, car taillights, traffic lights, and the giant NASDAQ billboard in Times Square. Each year, there are twelve LED-based products sold for every person on earth, and LEDs are already becoming a source of general lighting. Holonyak waves at incandescent lamps and fixtures. “All of this,” he says. “Doomed.”
On a symbolic level, Holonyak has replaced an obsolete metaphor. For every watt of power, an incandescent bulb produces only about fifteen lumens, a measure of brightness. The light-emitting diode, by contrast, can produce up to five times the lumens per watt, in the range of fluorescent lighting, but with a more pleasing glow. That brings us back to our twenty watts of internal juice. “I can generate a hell of a lot of light with twenty watts,” says Holonyak. “With twenty watts, you’d be walking around like a lighthouse. You’d be totally lit up.” That’s why the LED must be seen as the new symbol of invention.
We all may have pretty much the same amount of juice powering our minds. But if we channel it the right way, if we keep making new and unexpected connections, we can produce that special form of creativity known as invention, and cognitive LEDs will start popping up in our heads more and more often. As Nikola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current, noted, the electrical energy of invention races through your heart as well as your brain, and there’s no feeling quite like it. After you come up with an invention once, says Holonyak, you have enough confidence to keep doing it. Indeed, you can become addicted to invention. This ability to receive meaning and pleasure from the act of thinking differently begins to explain why some people are more motivated to invention than others.
To get a sense of how invention works, try playing the invention game for yourself. Think of something that people would need that doesn’t now exist. Something that would make you rich, or something that would help people live better, or something that would transform your company or your industry. Take as much time as you want.
Many people will first think of something in the realm of zany science fiction: an antigravity pack that lets us hover above the treetops, an anti-aging pill, or a brain implant for reading other people’s thoughts. Others will think of something more practical: car keys and sunglasses with radio-frequency chips that let you locate them when they’re lost, or chairs and tables that never grow out of balance and develop that annoying rocking. Others, with more knowledge of what’s happening in certain fields, might name something that sounds impossible but that’s actually under development: a “cellfixer” nanobot that swims in your blood and repairs damaged cells, or a “clonemaker” machine that synthesizes genes and proteins and builds new life from scratch. Finally, there are inventions of the whimsical variety, such as the ones showcased on Futurama, Matt Groening’s cartoon series in which Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth unveils his smell-o-scope, his cool-o-meter, and his what-if machine—the ultimate invention because it enables the user to visualize anything. (Of course, we already have one of those between our ears.)
These visions aren’t bad places to start. But what would you do next? The point of this game isn’t to get you to become an inventor. That’s not necessary. You already are an inventor, or can be. As Emerson wrote, “An inventor knows how to borrow, and everyone is, or should be, an inventor.”8 Contrary to popular belief, an inventor is rarely the person who first conjures up the basic idea for a hit product. Today’s inventors combine different ideas from different knowledge domains to make the visions of others become a reality. Inventors are often inspired by one another, and they often work best in cross-disciplinary teams. Nature invents too, and some of the most unlikely breakthroughs in medicine, materials, and artificial intelligence are inspired by analogies to how nature works.
A highly focused form of human creativity, invention is an enduring essence that we’ve all inherited, part of what Ecclesiastes, the Bible’s book of wisdom literature, calls “the immortal mind.” Prehistoric handtools recovered by archeologists are some of our earliest evidence of the human mind at work, reminders that people were exercising their inventiveness long before we came to subsequent milestones—writing, agriculture, science. But that doesn’t mean we’re aware of how this concentrated kind of ingenuity happens and can best be put into practice.
We all suspect that invention has some degree of overlap with artistic creativity and scientific thinking. Many books and studies lump these domains together, trying to find the commonalities among the Eschers, the Ellingtons, the Edisons, and the Einsteins. But what if we remained informed by the artists and the scientists but simply made it our main goal to understand invention? What if we could learn how inventors spot new opportunities in surprising new ways and how they approach problems from unexpected angles? What if we could drop the conventional view of products and markets, and if companies began thinking more like inventors who had already brought forth incredible things? What if invention were a discipline that you could discover and apply—to any domain?
The first thing you’d need to do is to stop thinking like a consumer for a long moment. In our current social context, we are trained to ask: Do I want that? How much does that cost? Would I impress people if I had that? What can that product do for me or for my company? This consumer-centered attitude toward the objects in our world is so pervasive that humorist Dave Barry mocks it in one of his columns. “Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer,” he writes. “Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.”9
Thinking more like an inventor requires a different perspective: How does this work? Why does it work? What is the thinking that went into making it? Why wasn’t it made at an earlier date, in a different place, by someone else? What’s wrong with it? How can it be improved? How can it be made obsolete? What else is needed? Who says it needs to be this way?
The good news is that you don’t have to be a scientist or an engineer to be more inventive. We typically think of invention in certain contexts: in computing, chemistry, consumer products, biotech, medicine, materials, aviation, energy, electronics, defense, and so forth. But invention is transdisciplinary and therefore can be extracted from any technological realm and applied to problems in any area.
The bad news is that invention isn’t easy. The bar is set high by three rules. First, an invention needs to be new. It’s not enough for you to be creative and imaginative, you must originate something that no one else has created before. An invention also must be nonobvious. For example, you can’t take someone else’s idea, put it on the Internet, and call it an invention. The third rule is that it must be useful. A sculpture can be original and entirely non obvious, but it isn’t an invention in the literal sense because it isn’t used to perform a practical function. That thought, however, might be open to challenge. In fact, every assumption is open to challenge. That’s also how invention begins.
In addition to being an enduring part of human history, invention is vital for the human future. There are thousands of problems out there than can be solved by inventive thinking. And most of the value in our economy is now based on creating opportunities and solving problems in some form. Drudgery gets outsourced to the machines that we invent or to the people in places where knowledge work doesn’t yet dominate the economy. Invention is the ultimate knowledge work. The best jobs of the future will involve invention in some way. Good inventors can’t be unemployed. They may be struggling, or they may have attained such great success that they no longer need to work, but they will never suffer for a lack of things to do. Invention never stops, and inventors never stop inventing.
In this book you are going to meet some of the world’s most accomplished inventors. These inventors express the belief that “the idea is the thing” through their actions, by inventing mainly for the sake of inventing. Most of these people have become wealthy, and that is indeed their desired outcome. But that’s not why they invent in the first place. They could have chosen other ways to make money, and they still can. They invent because they are inventors. They have that same inner compulsion to create that has marked the advance of civilization since the beginning of humanity.
Where does that compulsion come from? What can we learn from these people? One hint comes from Nick Holonyak’s childhood pocketknife and his fixing of clunky telephones and noisy car engines. Virtually all the inventors we’ll meet in this book were seized by something similar when they were kids: playing with erector sets and chemistry kits, taking apart radios and televisions, and so forth. It’s why dissecting a foul-smelling frog in biology class tends to drive home the biology lesson itself. There is something visceral and multisensory about delving into physical objects. This childlike tendency to phyically explore why something works and why it can be made better sometimes gets lost in our current world of symbolic experience. It goes back to the truth at the heart of the famous Confucius quotation: “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”
The conventional view is that the people who tackle these hands-on projects are nerdy and quirky and that much of their inventing can be explained by their personality traits—that Edison was an autodidactic, workaholic, attention-deficit-disordered savant, and there’s no sense in trying to become like that. Because there are so few famous inventors living today, there is little to counteract that image. If you try to name well-known living inventors and count them on one hand, you will likely have several fingers left over. Inventors used to be national heroes in the days of Edison, Bell, Tesla, and the Wright brothers. But the new industrial corporations that these and many other individuals spawned went on to build giant and successful corporate R&D laboratories, and the creative, highly educated, technical professionals who worked there were reclassified as “researchers.” In 1940, the U. S. Census Bureau actually eliminated “inventor” as a separate job category.10
These days, most popular notions of what an inventor is come from works of fiction that show inventors with superhuman talents. Epitomized by the mythical Dr. Victor Frankenstein, by Willie Wonka, by Doc Brown in Back to the Future, or as creators of destructive robots in The Terminator series, such portrayals have inventors working outside mainstream social and academic contexts, and they depict inventors as irrationally passionate, emotionally unstable, or downright mad.11
Inventors are only a little bit like that. They tend to have personality quirks, but so does everyone, and because those traits are varied, to focus on them would only be a distraction. You’ll get a sense here of the intellectual background of the inventors profiled within these pages, as well as a taste of their personalities. But that is not the focus. The focus is on their strategic thinking patterns, the series of “Aha!” moments that leads to the final products we recognize as inventions.
Invention is highly path-dependent. To understand an inventor’s breakthroughs and contributions, you must understand what came before them: the inventor’s motivation for tackling a problem, the series of choices the inventor made, the chance events that shaped the inventor, and the knowledge available to the inventor—as well as the knowledge that had to be abandoned as wrong or in the way. Invention is also highly contextual. You need to know the environments inventors have been working in, and the needs of society at the time of their inventions. The case studies here are of inventors working today. They have been chosen because they are interesting, because the inventors were available for in-person interviews, and the inventions described in each case have always been ahead of their time. For contrast, these stories are juxtaposed with classic cases.
Where and when do inventors come up with breakthrough ideas? They do it everywhere and all the time. They’re assigning themselves problems at bedtime and dreaming new ideas as they sleep; they’re having epiphanies in the shower; they’re incubating concepts while driving; they’re brainstorming while exercising on treadmills, riding bikes, climbing mountains, and jogging through canyons; they’re informally bouncing possibilities off of colleagues; they’re reading constantly; they’re observing everything around them, looking for clues; and they’re often absorbed in their own thoughts. But they’d be the first to tell you that most of their ideas aren’t brilliant. They need to generate a lot of ideas to come up with the fewer viable ones. They rely on a messy yet systematic process for doing what they do, and when they stop to reflect on it, they can sometimes tell you how this special kind of thinking actually works.
I’m not saying that you can pour their thinking into a glass, drink it, and become an expert inventor tomorrow. But the inventors profiled in this book tend to agree: Invention is a set of strategic thinking tools that you can teach, learn, and practice, just as you can with other skills like cooking, acting, or sailing. Unfortunately, the practice of invention is rarely taught in schools, perhaps because it requires so much independent thinking, or perhaps because it has been steeped in myths such as the notion that invention is purely accidental or that inventors are born, not made. The hope here is that you will be able to use this book as a tool to help you turn on the juice of your own inventiveness. We know that brainstorms are electrical, and you need to have many of them if you want to change the world. Here, at least, are a blend of examples to get you started.