Bette
Nesmith Graham, a single mother and secretary in Dallas, thought there
would be a better way to cover up mistakes made in typing. During a
recession in the 1950s, Ms. Graham founded the Mistake Out company,
later well-known as Liquid Paper.
Creativity
is possible at all levels from the kitchen chemistry lab to the killer
app (application) corporate development project or to the multinational
research initiative. Whatever the era or product, the successful project
or company starts with a creative visionary. Somebody who is persistent
and has a multifaceted mind. Bette Nesmith sold her company for $47.5
million. Even if taxes and transaction expenses took over half, she
cleared about $1 million a year.
Would
an American corporation in the early 1800s (or now) hire as their chief
designer a financially failing artist with radical political views and
an itchy foot for world travel? There was such a person. He had a vision
to develop a communication system that could send messages faster than
the best steam trains and ships and unhindered by rain, sleet or snow.
He was Samuel Finley Breese Morse, who invented the telegraph.
Both
Bette Nesmith Graham and Samuel F. B. Morse were iconic American
inventors who illustrate traits in common that will be valuable to
anyone interested in creating new designs and products:
• Unleash your curiosity, quest for knowledge and
propensity for noticing things. No lesser minds than Leonardo da Vinci
and Albert Einstein were noted for being passionately curious, using
their imagination as their prime lens to see ahead and their creativity
to solve problems. Einstein wrote: “The important thing is not to stop
questioning.” You should also notice all kinds of things, however
unrelated to your quest they may seem. When Will Carrier noticed the
apparently odd behavior of water droplets in fog, he had stumbled into
the basics of the novel technology of the Carrier Corporation, world
leader in air conditioning.
•
Project your mind into imagination space, focusing on all the
interrelated aspects of what you are creating or inventing. To create
your Eureka moment, you must forcefully move your mind beyond the
existing thinking about the subject. You must move out of your conscious
world and focus your mind in a new place occupied only by the new
creation. This is your glorious imagination space. Some people, very
few, keep this imaginative ability through adulthood. Their imaginings
lead to inventions, art, designs and explorations of many frontiers
never seen before. To start, try to be a child with the almost naïve
capability of unfettered imagination. Emotion is part of this creative
formula, and that has not been replicated in any advanced computer.
•
Bring in experts and specialists whenever and wherever appropriate. A
common mistake is to be overly protective about your novel idea. At the
earliest possible time you should have your design or composition
reviewed by an associate, faculty member, consultant or other
trustworthy knowledgeable advisor. Usually you do not have to disclose
important details to protect from copying, and very often a reviewer can
give you surprisingly good guidance on design or composition
improvement.
•
Focus on the practical, useful, needed and beautiful. Very often
inventions and other creations start out answering to a major need or a
broad interest. Then the project morphs into a personal passion with
little or no market value. Whether you’re a garage tinkerer or Thomas
Edison, ultimately your commercial success depends on developing
something which economically fills a real need and which looks
attractive to potential buyers. As you develop prototypes, theories or
compositions, show them to people in the market for overall
attractiveness feedback.
•
Be persistent. Don’t give up. In one famous incident, an associate
found Thomas Edison at his lab bench surrounded by a sea of experimental
storage battery test cells. 9,000 experiments had been carried out with
no promising developments. His associate offered condolence, “Isn’t it a
shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done, you
haven’t been able to get any results?” “Results!” Edison replied. “Why,
man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that
won’t work!” For a major invention like the light bulb, this is what’s
involved. Even minor inventions seem to take more time than imagined to
get to the production prototype stage.
Fast
forward to 2005. Steve Jobs, the legendary leader at Apple, is
initiating a great leap forward. He has directed about 200 of his best
engineers to create what we now know as the iPhone. Like Morse, he is
not the first with some version of his product. And like Morse, Jobs can
focus on a product vision that combines needs satisfaction,
functionality, apparent simplicity, and, in addition, design beauty. In
short, it is a bold act of creativity.
Where
the telegraph initiated the era of wired communications, the iPhone has
started the era of the computer clouds (almost infinitely large bundles
of data and services available by Internet) in the palm of your hand.
The telephone is not obsolete, music radio won’t go away, computers of
all sizes will always be here, video games will always have their
consoles, and data transmission will always be available through
specialty equipment; but now all of these modalities are available
together through a personal portable device.
Samuel
F. B. Morse of course did not have the technology and resources
available to Jobs for his design project. Still, even in the Age of
Google, a visionary leader is required, and Steve Jobs is reported to
have mercilessly driven his design group, never taking “no” for an
answer. There were screaming matches in the hallways, doors slamming and
completely burned out engineers.
But
there are many challenges for imaginative and analytical minds. These
include finding drugs against microorganisms which have evolved
resistance against everything and finding true understanding about all
the mechanisms of climate change so that our children won’t be living in
an infinite desert. As Thomas L. Friedman has concluded, “The era we
are entering will be one of enormous social, political and economic
change … things will have to change around here, and fast.”