Quickthink

Facebook just bought this mobile platform for photo sharing for $1 billion in stock and cash. Why so expensive? As Om Malik points out, this is 2x the value that VC’s were recently putting on the company. Om thinks that the answer is simple. Facebook freaked out that Instagram was going to eat its lunch. That explains the high price. He may have a point. But this does not explain why the Instagram folks bailed out so early. The business has room to grow, and they might have made a lot more by sticking with it.

Well, for those kind of numbers one can understand … I guess.

While I am on this creativity jag, we might consider another example of a creative solution to a real world problem. Mexico City was known for many years to have a problem with air pollution. Not just a small problem, but a serious problem. It is addressing that problem in a new way, using an old fashioned system that is well known and understood. The city is installing very large green sculptures that soak up co2. And it seems to be working. As an aside, the eco-sculptures are fun and beautiful. NYT has the story.

So where did the idea come from? Well, it was not just an emotional and spontaneous response to the problem (an artistic solution). Tracing the thinking process back,

…  the activity stems from the tangible nature of the problem; bad pollution is felt in the scratchy throats of all.

Stress led to analytical thought by government to find a solution. So back in the 1980’s the government started to implement policies to reduce air pollution. They included

mandates that reformulated gasoline, closed or moved toxic factories, and banned most drivers from using their cars one day a week. More recently, Mexico City added a popular free bicycle loan program and expanded public transportation systems.

These helped, but were not enough.  And the problem remained serious — for decades. Using hindsight, we can say that another source of thinking was needed. And Mexico City is lucky to have another source of ideas

…  among the young, hip and educated — those opening new boutiques for modern Mexican design, and partying at the Vive Latino music festival — there is a growing civic consciousness.

Part of this can be seen in the capital’s vibrant art scene, where environmental concerns often overlap with creative expression. Indeed, a version of the about-to-burst potential that once characterized Paris or New York in, say, the 1920s, seems to have arrived in “new world” megacities like this one, but with a twist. The Machine Age of the early 20th century has given way, for some, to the Green Age of the early 21st.

And the result?

VerdMX’s giant green sculptures — which are part of a broader vertical and roof garden movement — fit right in.

I find this combination to be very interesting. Long term systemic thinking by government to address a problem didn’t produce the right answer. But the determination to find a solution did set the stage — for new thinking.  The creative process gained richness with input from an outside source - the artistic community, informed by science. The combined thinking of policy makers, scientists and artists brought about a eureka moment. And the benefits are not just in breathing better air. Mexico City finds itself in a global leadership role. The excitement and fun have huge multiplier effects.

My hat is off to them.

The last several days, I have been thinking about the various types of creativity that are elaborated by Susan Weinschenk. The one that is most familiar is the emotional and spontaneous sort. Think of Van Gogh painting. This form of creativity comes from the amygdala and is deeply emotional. As children of the romantic rebellion, perhaps that is why we are so fascinated by it. I am also familiar with the cognitive and spontaneous sort. Think of Newton seeing gravity at work when an apple fell.  This sort of creativity requires a huge body of knowledge and stepping away from intense thought. A Eureka moment, that we associate with genius type work. But Steve Johnson argues that these are not the most common place for finding new ideas. That, he says, comes from exchanges in threads of conversation.

So what about the other two? These may be more important to us as sources of innovation, and yet we tend not to value them as highly. One  is where you face an emotional crisis. The brain shifts into overdrive and can produce new ideas quickly. Think about deadlines as a trivial example of how this works. This works when you are alone and it helps get teams in synch. But it works in a sloppy way. You get a result, but not necessarily an elegant one.  The final type is deliberate and reflective. This happens when you focus on a problem over a period of time, amassing a lot of knowledge. As you learn more, your brain has a greater capacity to combine things in new years. 

Think of Edison and his thousands of trials and errors to get the light bulb right. And here is the great man (from Eureka)

Applying this to global warming, we know that we inject too much carbon into the atmosphere. Check. We could cut back (and we are trying to) but that is tough. What if we could remove carbon? Well, it turns out that doing this involves rather simple chemical processes. We just haven’t applied them on a massive scale. So, some people are fooling around with different types of processes to find which ones work best at scale. Like Joe Jones at Skyonics. Jones says

“SkyMine is really Edisonian, in that it takes proven technologies and combines them in novel ways to innovative results,”

Right. Mining deliberative, cognitive creativity. My bet is that this will be where we find our solution.

But can we speed it up? Sure we can. If we could build a platform where people had incentives to share their experimental results, we would get more results faster. The problem is in creating the incentives. This is why big firms can be more innovative than start ups. With more capital, shared goals, and a larger pool of people with different kinds of knowledge, they can exchange knowledge about experiments faster. Think of Bell Labs. This is what that sort of place looks like (from Emilio Segre Visual Archives)

BTW, this is not the end of the story — there is still a sharing option (from open innovation). But that is for another blog post.