Intentional Invention
Conformity has become the enemy of American invention. As our society has become more divided and less tolerant of differences, and as applied technologies have become more complex and intimidating, our emotional and creative capacity to invent has become stuck, just as our routine process for invention has become lost, being the intriguing and widely accepted art form it once was.
We must bring back the practice of Intentional Invention at all costs. Intentional Invention is the single most courageous and fearless act that people in our organizations, communities, and country can make to revive our roots and flourish to compete and thrive again.
As has been proven for decades with inventions like the microwave, Teflon, Play-Doh, and Post-it notes, many inventions happen by accident. However, like most all inventions, these were created while undergoing a structured invention process that was intended for another purpose to solve a very different problem.
Invention is the most courageous and fearless act a person can make. It requires the discipline to research, follow through, originate, and build an idea from nothing. There are no guarantees that it will work. It is purely the courageous act of following one’s instincts toward creating a solution that is simply believed to be a relevant solution. Yet, the inventor has a process – and he or she perseveres and strives to create during moments of disappointment, conflicting ideas, rejection and failure... until hopefully that Eureka moment arrives.
“Invention is the most courageous and fearless act a person can make.”
During the Industrial Revolution, independent invention was the missing link that closed the loop on making America great. As an author of invention, Thomas Hughes states, during the late 1800s, “no other nation has displayed such inventive power and produced such brilliant innovators as the United States.”
“Americans were naturals at applied science, improving many ideas that were already in existence and bringing them to fruition with resources newly available during the Industrial Revolution: Samuel Morse did it in creating the telegraph; Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb, but he made it practical and got his name in lights for the work; many men attempted to fly before the Wright brothers finally succeeded — under power and more or less controlled — at Kitty Hawk in 1903.”
Everyone today has the same instincts to invent. Do we have enough people with the courage to invent? While desperate times bring desperate measures, and innovation is natural outcome of conflict and discord, we don’t see enough attention in our communities and mainstream media being given to highlighting the pure creative energy and outcomes of invention.
If you agree that innovation has been the backbone of our economy and the source of pride in our country, are you doing enough to promote, feature and encourage invention in your community and organization?
An article in The Hill provides some excellent universal guidelines that can stir some thinking about how we must work harder to find and promote invention.
First, global societies must embrace and cultivate traits like lifelong passion for curiosity and learning, risk-taking, failure, tenacity, out-of-the-box thinking, collaboration, and support for the unknown or hard-to-explain.
In countries like the United States, we must continually improve mechanisms of support for these innovative thinkers by having conversations and taking action to ensure we have enough vehicles in place to incentivize invention.
Societies must commit to trying new ideas and products. We are too often sluggish and hesitant to allow disruptors to disrupt.
Globally, we need to highlight, celebrate, inform, influence, and inspire people about the realities of invention and the possibility of becoming an inventor.
Finally, as a global community we need to be excited about the possibilities for the future. We have many seemingly intractable problems, but we also have incredible people in the world looking at problems and solutions in new ways.
“Being an inventor means holding tight to one’s curiosity about life, and it means solving problems by reimagining and acting on ideas. This is not easy when most of our systems and organizations require conformity.”