WE NEED MORE INVENTIVE PEOPLE turning on more juice for the simple reason that there’s so much that needs to be invented and improved. The number of problems facing the world is mushrooming at the same time that massive amounts of new knowledge are being created that could serve the process of invention. Inventive people are fueled by their ability to redefine those problems and imagine ways to apply knowledge to the solution. Of course, new technology can’t solve all the world’s woes. Misapplied inventions make some problems worse. But as you’ve seen, an individual inventor can have a disproportionately positive impact. If we were able to tap the powers of a million new inventors of all types, we would have a fighting chance of remaking the world in one human lifetime, just as every generation of inventors has done since the Enlightenment.
As Nathan Myhrvold says, there’s never been a better time to have big ideas. We have collective brains now. People all over the world are coming up with inventive new ideas, and they’re using the Internet and new communications tools (whose prices are falling every day) to share these ideas more quickly and more richly than ever before. Even corporations that are focused on their existing markets are realizing that they’re better off trying to capitalize on all this creativity rather than trying to fight it. As a result, inventive people can greatly increase their economic power, if they choose to exercise it. Inventors have a better shot than ever before at getting the best of their creations embraced by a world that has become accustomed to constant change.
The smartest corporations have learned that they must lead the charge. “The only long-term source of profit, and the only reason to invest in a company, is your confidence in its ability to innovate,” says General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt.1 Like most corporate leaders, Immelt seems to embrace the widely known equation from economist Joseph Schumpeter: Invention plus capital equals innovation. “Good leaders,” Immelt adds, “pick the right areas to innovate, and they place big bets.” He says he’s tripling the number of engineers in executive positions in the company and reducing the number of lawyers. To grow the company, he’ll rely less on mergers and finance and more on creating new technologies such as wind turbines, photovoltaic and hydrogen fuel cells, and new instruments for detecting disease at the molecular and genetic levels. Most auspiciously, Immelt has revived the image of GE founder Thomas Edison in the company’s branding, and its new credo is “imagination at work.” He promises to again make GE’s century-old R&D laboratory “a hub for cultural change.”
This may be the first time that the heads of some of the world’s biggest corporations are on the same page with the quirkiest individual inventors. “Right now, there is an explosion of new ideas in every field,” says Woody Norris.2 He believes that almost anything written about the state of the art in energy, transportation, physics, electronics, medicine, biology, and other fields can become obsolete in three months. Big corporations are more vulnerable to invention than they’ve ever been, he says. That’s why companies are keeping a close eye on individuals like Norris. IBM, for example, recently invited Norris to address its R&D groups all over the world so that its researchers can glean thinking strategies from him. “We’re just getting started,” Norris tells them. “Fundamental new stuff is coming.”
On a personal level, Woody Norris was hit with the unexpected. A great fire swept through Southern California in the fall of 2003 and consumed thousands of homes. Norris and his wife had enough warning to evacuate in time, but their twenty-thousand square foot house in Poway, outside San Diego, was engulfed by flames. Among the possessions they lost were their collection of fifteen thousand record albums and one thousand DVDs, a half million dollars’ worth of rare books, millions of dollars’ worth of paintings, and a collection of framed letters signed by Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Nikola Tesla. Luckily, Norris’s nearby company headquarters remained unscathed, and his wife had taken out one of the largest private insurance policies in the state, with a monthly premium of $3,200. “My attitude is this: I enjoyed all those things for all these years,” he says. “Now, I’ll get new stuff.”
That brings us to the basic character trait that all the inventors profiled here have in common: They’re relentless and restless. Only an inventor would see a destructive fire as a chance for renewal. Inventors are focused on what’s next. Once cultivated, their compulsion to create is too strong for anyone or anything to contain. As long as they’re able to think well, they keep inventing. Inventors see too many possibilities for their process of invention to stop or even slow down. Inventors don’t believe in the general concept of retirement or resting on their riches. Even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves.
PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, still in his late twenties, invented a follow-up program to his Igor financial fraud detection software. Whereas Igor looks for thousands of possible anomalies in online transactions, Levchin’s newer Ilya program “covers millions of events.”3 Levchin tried to take some time off after selling Igor and Ilya, along with his entire company, to eBay. But he began brainstorming new invention ideas almost immediately. Over lunch recently in a San Francisco dim sum restaurant, Levchin wore a Japanese edition of a Bart Simpson T-shirt and dropped hints about his latest start-up idea, which is based on pattern recognition and machine learning. “I think in images all the time,” he says.
At the other end of the age spectrum, kidney dialysis machine inventor Willem Kolff, now in his early nineties, has a new girlfriend, and he’s working feverishly to bring out his latest invention: a portable artificial lung. Again, he’s planning to give his ideas to the world. “I don’t have the money or the time for patent applications,” he says. “If it can benefit mankind, they can have it.”4
Some of our inventors have been genuinely surprised by their creations. Carl Crawford, the coinventor of the spiral CT scanner, left GE Medical Systems in 1995 and became a vice president at Analogic Corporation, a Peabody, Massachusetts, company whose culture focuses on inventing across a half dozen domains. Founded by Bernard Gordon, an illustrious inventor of analog-to-digital signal-conversion chips, Analogic has never posted a loss in its three decades as a public company, but it has also never been known as a high-flying company. In 2000, Gordon received a call from Lockheed Martin about adapting its CT scanners for possible applications in airport baggage scanning. Gordon put Crawford in charge of the project. Not long after 9/11, the government decided to buy these new machines in bulk to scan checked baggage at U.S. airports for the first time.
Analogic won a big part of the business, and it delivered hundreds of these machines in December 2002. Sitting in Gordon’s corner office only a few days after the Boston Globe named Analogic Massachusetts’s best-performing company in its annual “Globe 100” survey, Crawford took it in stride. This was pretty much a one-time gain, he said. Gordon agreed: “We probably can’t grow profit margins by 10,872 percent every year.”5 Stephen Jacobsen, of Sarcos Research in Utah, was surprised by one of his inventions for another reason. Over the past several years, he’s been successful in building learning programs into robots. Using pattern recognition software, he created a humanoid robot that learned to bounce a ball after watching a person do it about three dozen times. Jacobsen then created a robot that learned how to juggle three balls after watching someone do it only five times. But it was the robot that learned to play air hockey that freaked him out. “When the robot plays, he looks like my son,” Jacobsen says. “He’s very earnest.”6 One day, when the robot missed the puck and allowed a goal, it made a pronounced human-like twitch and snarl. “It scared the hell out of me,” Jacobsen says. “He had all the mannerisms of someone who is pissed off and is going to come around and beat the hell out of you. He seemed kind of angry.”
Such stories tend to revive the debate over intelligent machines, whether humans will one day build robots with human-like cognition and consciousness. Some robot inventors still hold that out as the ultimate goal. But Jacobsen doesn’t buy it. What that air hockey–playing robot was experiencing was more like a mechanical response to an unexpected change in a pattern. Jacobsen is more worried about the state of the art of human cognition than he is about building true human intelligence into a bunch of sensors, actuators, and microprocessors. As B. F. Skinner once said, “The real question is not whether machines can think, but whether men do.”7
Successful invention tends to scale upward. Invention spawns continuous and endless improvement. The technology gets better and better. Computers become faster, medical equipment more precise, engines more powerful, communications devices more versatile, robots more dexterous, and so on. People who use these new inventions and improvements can do more work and enjoy life in new ways. Their increased living standards stimulate further economic growth, which in turn supports invention and innovation.
But invention also needs to scale outward. There are those who can’t afford any of the technology described here, and therefore they receive few or none of the benefits of invention. More than 1.3 billion people—about one out of every six people in the world—live on less than $2 per day per day, and billions of others live only marginally less impoverished lives. Can invention do for the developing world what it has done for the developed world?
Answering this question requires a different frame of reference. Amy B. Smith, a biomechanical engineer who spent four years in Botswana with the Peace Corps, has invented simple but sturdy machines that don’t require electricity, such as mechanical grain grinder and an incubator for developing antibiotics. Now a professor at MIT, she teaches her students how to think about problems that are out of their own world. “Engineers tend to be at the very top of the economic pyramid, so we tend to design for ourselves,” she says. “But what about the other 90 percent of the world?”8 She takes her students on trips to places like Honduras and sub-Sahara Africa. Back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she assigns them the task of trying to eat for less than $2 per day for an entire week. “No one is able to do it,” she says. “But even if you try it for a short time, you never forget it.”
Even better, more and more inventive thinkers in the developing world are responding to the challenges around them. One of the most successful is an inventor named Ashok Khosla. Born in India, Khosla was educated at Cambridge University and received his Ph. D. from Harvard University, where he lectured on the topic of the environment. He enjoyed the American lifestyle and his apartment overlooking the Charles River. But after ten years at Harvard, he decided to return to India. “I just packed up my stuff one day and went back home,” he recalls.9
In the 1970s, Khosla helped the Indian government set up the first national agency for environmental protection in the developing world. Then in the mid-1980s, he struck out as an entrepreneur, starting a New Delhi company called Development Alternatives. Khosla aimed to do what he believed foreign aid and government antipoverty policies were failing to do: lift up entire civilizations. His goal was to create what he calls “sustainable livelihoods”: jobs that produce basic products and services for the local economy, generate income and purchasing power, and provide dignity and meaning to people’s lives. As the old saying goes, “Give a person a fish, feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, feed them for a lifetime.” But something is almost always left out of that equation: First, you need to invent a system for creating and distributing the appropriate fishing rods.
Khosla sees three proven models that can turn poor nations into rich ones: copycatting, piggybacking, and leapfrogging. Copycats steal ideas, technologies, and techniques from other countries and improve and adapt them. During its first few decades, the United States ripped off the key secrets of the Industrial Revolution from England, Scotland, and France and launched its own industrial economy. Two centuries later, Japan and then Korea developed by copying American manufacturing, raising the quality and lowering the cost of goods. Now China is doing it again. In contrast, India is practicing the art of piggybacking: riding on the backs of rich nations by doing an increasing share of their manufacturing and service work at far lower costs. Finally, leapfrogging involves skipping over inappropriate technologies and embracing new ones; an example is Finland’s sudden break from backward Soviet domination and its adoption of inventions such as wireless networks.
Khosla believes that developing nations need to employ all three models at once. “Industrial countries have made some lousy technology choices,” he says. “Why should we adopt what we already know is bad? We need to invent on our own, thinking everything through from scratch.”
As the world’s largest democracy, with a diverse population of more than one billion, India is a fascinating experiment in economic development. Most of the attention has been focused on the country’s pockets of urban, English-speaking university graduates, who are capitalizing on the Internet and decreasing telecommunications costs to capture hundreds of thousands of software and customer service jobs from overseas, at a fraction of American or European wages. The high-tech start-ups of Bangalore have been heralded in the business press. Corporations such as GE and IBM have even opened gleaming R&D centers there, employing brilliant engineers who are helping to scale up technologies in the domains of infotech, biotech, and nanotech.
But Khosla is focused on the rural poor, the 70 percent of India’s population who are almost untouched by any of this so-called “offshore outsourcing.” He’s focused on scaling the global process of invention outward to as many people as possible.
To do this, Khosla is marshaling the same thinking strategies as other world-class inventors. Creating an ambitious opportunity in his own mind, he envisions bringing seven hundred million people in India out of impoverishment or subsistence living. The problems he has pinpointed are quite specific: People need places to live, but they can’t afford most construction materials. They need to produce their own clothing locally. They need ways to cook food, but electric service is spotty at best. They need ways to purify water. They need cheap, renewable energy.
The pattern Khosla recognized is that the most successful inventions in such environments are the ones that use locally available materials. Borrowing ideas he has seen all over the world, Khosla has invented a series of new products: a hand-operated press that converts mud into hard bricks for low-cost housing; a vertical kiln that rapidly and continually bakes and churns out higher-quality bricks made from native clay; a machine for making cheap roofing tiles out of industrial waste; a process for turning local weeds into a fuel that can burn in a diesel engine that can provide power to an entire village; woodstoves that dramatically reduce smoke inhalation and early cancer death; and hand-powered looms and paper-making machines based on radically simple designs. These are only some of his company’s successful inventions. Along the way, Khosla has embraced failure, creating many technologies that flopped, such as solar-powered water heaters that were too expensive for most people. “We use failures as building blocks for success,” he says.
Above all, Khosla thinks systematically. One of his biggest innovations is a franchising system. Borrowing a page from Ray Kroc of McDonald’s fame and rewriting it, Khosla has created a network of dozens of profitable local dealerships that set up their own businesses distributing dozens of these technologies and training people how to use them. Just as important as the jobs created at the franchise level are the jobs created by the inventions themselves. Each of Khosla’s products, once it is up and running, creates an enterprise that requires the hiring of four to four dozen employees. The entrepreneurs, who use credit to invest in the company’s kilns, looms, paper-making machines, and energy systems, now have a sustainable way to make goods that they can sell. These products do well in local markets because they serve as simple, cheap ways to fill basic needs.
As Khosla sees it, this systematic strategy is the best way to give people the chance to escape the cycle of poverty. At the same time, the impact on the environment is low. Using its own cheap mud bricks, Development Alternatives built a massive, orange-hued headquarters for 150 employees that consumes the same amount of electricity as a single American household. With those same bricks, one of the company’s customers built the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in 180 days at a cost of $40,000; the center hosts dozens of exhibitions every year. Khosla’s company is signing up franchises in hundreds of new locations, collecting ongoing royalty and training fees from each one.
Khosla also makes money by data mining and by running an Internet portal, called tarahaat.com, for communicating with franchisees and customers. He uses low-tech and high-tech ways to gather and sell market data on these new households to corporations interested in selling products into developing markets. In all these ways, invention is leading to economic growth in the areas most in need of it.
By nature, inventors are optimists, and why wouldn’t they be? They know they can light up the world with the mere twenty watts of electrical energy that fuels their gray matter. By applying thinking strategies to their surroundings, inventors can convert mud and weeds into an economy. At the very top of the scale of technology, inventors can convert the information from a drop of blood into time itself. Today’s high tech will eventually become tomorrow’s low tech, but it’s all the result of invention.
Considering all this, why is invention often taken for granted, and why isn’t exposure to inventive thinking a central goal at all levels of the education system? Instead of losing our innate inventiveness as we grow older, we should instead become more inventive with time. That’s why living a long life and having fun are often of primary importance to inventors and those around them. Inventors need to enjoy themselves, and inventors need to live long enough to see as many of the effects of their work as they can. For thousands of years, societies have risen and fallen due in large part to their inventiveness, so we shouldn’t be shocked that it continues to happen, only faster. Knowledge can now be dispersed around the globe more cheaply and rapidly than ever. Any company and any country can conceivably jump up to a new level of economic success if it is able to harness the inventiveness of its own people. So let’s turn on the juice and see what shakes loose.