Innovation

The other morning, I was sitting around chatting with my parents. I had just woken up, so my mind was still struggling somewhat to get running. At one point, they both left the room and I just let my mind wander. I really like moments like this, where my mind is wandering yet quiet. It's when I have my most interesting thoughts.

This particular morning, my mind turned to the printing press. The invention of the printing press, by any definition, revolutionized the world. It made the spreading of ideas a much more manageable affair, and it helped spawn the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the modern era. Pretty powerful stuff coming from a Medieval goldsmith.

But when I thought about it a little bit more, I realized that the actual press itself was a fairly simple machine. Early presses were just arrangements of cast letters that were dipped in ink and pressed onto paper. In principle, they weren't all that different than the process of writing by hand, except that they took that process and mechanized it so it would work at a much faster pace.

Such a simple idea right? Then why did it take millennia after the creation of the creation of the written word to come up with such a simple thought? Doesn't seem so simple anymore does it?

And that's when it hit me. True innovations, the inventions that change the world as we know it, aren't huge, complex contraptions. Quite to the contrary, they're often the very simple ideas that any one of us could have, and probably have, thought of but just didn't realize the importance of. That's because true innovation isn't an invention, it isn't a thing, it's an idea. And ideas have a way of building off each other, which is what I think we're seeing in the modern era: the net result of all of history's good ideas mixing together and making new ones.

So, if you ever find yourself trying to come up with "the next big thing", don't think big. Think small, think broadly, and think often, because it's the small, novel ideas that change the world.

I'd like to dedicate this 'blog entry to the memory and spirit of Steve Jobs. Much like Gutenberg and his printing press, Steve changed the entire world in his lifetime, and he did it by recognizing the value of simple ideas and putting them together. Thank you Steve. We'll miss you.