Innovation resulting from
unique connections
Remember the story of Italian engineer and Nobel Prize winner G. Marconi, inventor of radio. As radio equipment began to get more powerful, he could transmit signals across greater distances. He thought that if he had strong enough equipment, he could beam signals across entire countries, possibly across continents and oceans. I’ll tell you ’bout … Read more
Have you gone out to play today? People need playtime. Especially adults. Especially serious adults. Especially serious adults who think they have no time for playtime. Whimsy (noun) – playfully quaint or fanciful behavior or humor; a whim; a thing that is fanciful or odd. Some people are apprehensive about playtime because it is not … Read more
The “Invisible Gorilla Test” was an experiment that showed participants a short video showing players in white shirts and players in black shirts dribbling a basketball and passing among them. The test asked participants to count how many times the players in white shirts passed a basketball. While most viewers managed to count the number … Read more
Last night the moon appeared as a tiny sliver. Above it was one bright star. Someone proclaimed the star was actually the planet Venus. My mind likened the crescent moon to a smiling mouth in the sky. Then I realized Venus was an eye. Venus and the moon together formed a face. The face of … Read more
It’s hard to look at something familiar and see it in a new way. But that is what we often must do when we work with the same material over and over again. Musicians use the same 12 notes. Artists use the same forms of composition. Painters use the same primary colors as the source … Read more
If our definition of a Singular Link is the union of unrelated elements resulting in something new, the epoch-making Link of our era has been COVID-19. Think about it. Over the course of about a year the virus went from something that affected zero people to something that affected 8 billion people. It influenced the … Read more
There are popular myths that claim some creative works manifest spontaneously in their final, completed form like stars falling from the sky. The Beatle Paul McCartney allegedly woke up one morning with the song Yesterday in his head, and that song went on to become the most recorded song in history. However, what gets lost … Read more
Sitting down and staring at the blank slate of a new project can be intimidating, and it can fill our minds with both excitement and dread. Where do we find the inspiration for our work? How do we identify the important elements to link together? Optimism and pessimism wrestle for control of our thoughts like … Read more
I love to fly. This is fortunate, I suppose, because I seem do it a lot. Perhaps I was a bird in a previous life. The most interesting part of airplane travel is the ascent from the ground up to the clouds. That’s the time when all the commonplace objects like trees and cars and … Read more
“How can individuals identify links among seemingly unrelated influences to make innovative new discoveries?” I asked that question to OpenAI/ChatGPT and, in about 30 seconds, I received this persuasive response… Identifying links among seemingly unrelated influences to make innovative new discoveries requires a combination of creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking. Here are a few steps … Read more