Sometimes I have the suspect, it’s more than this, that everything we investigate, test, or even DISCOVER, was already found, in another period of the human history. Two main facts drive me to such a thought, the first is due to our innate capacity to react to the innovation in a way that safe our brain to blow up. If something shocking appears, you have to react and reduce it to something explainable, even if difficult to do. You see a ghost, you don’t believe it, and you have to explain it. If something innovative appears, really new, you have to understand it and, using your knowledge, you try to reduce the innovation to something you’ve already experienced. (The worst case is when you totally ignore the invention ‘cause you don’t understand it, but this is another story… Somewhere I read that if you show to a primitive man an airplane passing through the sky above, probably he’ll ignore it, but if you put a horse in front of a carriage and let it drag it, he’ll be certainly surprised and he’ll appreciate your suggestion).
But now look at the second reason that makes me think of us as Epigones and not Innovators: it depends on people we know…it’s amazing! Every time something new arrives, appears, enlighten our darkness, there is a man, a special kind of man, that started to whisper “I’ve already seen it, I’ve already done, tested, developed, discovered, invented, investigated, annunciated, evangelized, ate, drank, put in a drawer and forget”…wow! It’s normal that, after a shower like this, we started to think that “yes, it’s true, I’ve already seen that bi-molecular disintegrator ray in a corner of my past experience”. For example, all of us already known the iPhone shape and features, some of us started to draw some prototypes in 1990s, a couple of us went to Cupertino to ask Steve to join them, and in a Da Vinci’s old paper it’s clearly illustrated a shiny little box that looks like a mobile phone with an apple in the background…
In addition, even in the Holy Bible someone said: “Nothing New Under The Sun” (Ecclesiastes, 1), so why to be concerned about?
Why do I blog this?
It’s Alex’s fault, he suggested me to do this…But it was easy, I carbon copied it from and old Babylonian stone, unbelievable.
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One Comment
1 Alessandro wrote:
Correct… It’s my fault but, as I was reading this, I made up my my mind and I have to admit you are right.
It seems that there is always someone who has already seen, tested, developed, etc anything you are working on.
The real point is that it may be true. They may have really seen something similar in their past experience but why did they put it apart?
Times were not ready, technology was not there, customer wont accept it or it was simply a great mistake?
My point is, you can say pretty much anything on an innovative idea. After you said that just try to add some value or people will think you are make an implicit assertion that you made a mistake in the past.
This lead us to an interesting point that I think is worth a post at some point in time. After you have run your due diligence on an idea, and having proved that it does not fit your current scenario, you should put it somewhere in your innovation process just to make sure that at regular intervals you check it again.