Climbing over the ladder of innovation

Not that long ago, I was challenged with the task of designing something innovative.

As you often do in such situations you collect ideas you've seen on numerous projects and see if you could bring them together in a new way. You don't try to reinvent the wheel, but rather to present existing things with a new twist that makes them interesting.

I thought I had done a good job of it.

I was wrong.

What I presented was not judged to be innovative enough and I was criticized over the fact that the individual elements I had used had already been seen before.

But then I asked myself: what is innovation?

Is it still possible to think of something that would be ground-breaking? Something never seen before?

On the 4th of July 2012, the CERN announced it probably had discovered the Higgs Boson that was predicted in 1964.

Despite the Boson being called Higgs, after the british physicist Peter Higgs, you may be surprised to learn that Higgs wasn't its inventor.

Or rather, he wasn't alone.

The mechanism conducting to the existence of the Higgs Boson was in fact proposed by several physicists at about the same time.

Indeed, Wikipedia credits several physicists along Peter Higgs for the discovery (R. Brout, F. Englert, P. Higgs, G. S. Guralnik, C. R. Hagen and T. W. B. Kibble).

Incidentally, not only this theoretical discovery was a shared discovery but also the concrete discovery of the Higgs Boson itself is a team work.

To find evidence of the Boson, scientists used particle accelerators such as the Tevatron at the Fermilab and the LEP (later replaced by the LHC) at the CERN.

Such accelerators are huge pieces of engineering. 

In fact over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries worked on building the LHC responsible for the CERN's discovery.

Discovery as it seems, isn't the matter of one person anymore but rather a collaborative work by brilliant minds all around the globe.

For the story, that doesn't prevent such events to be a fierce competition between scientists! Since the LEP had to be shut down before the LHC could be operational, people at the CERN were in fact quite worried that their colleagues at the Fermilab would make the discovery. The willingness to be the first was strong enough that, just before they shut it down, they went as far as pushing the LEP beyond its designed limits in the hope of catching the Higgs Boson.

You could think that collective discovery is a recent phenomena due to the development of communication and the easiness of sharing knowledge almost instantaneously.

You would be wrong.

In 1439, Joannes Gutenberg, contrary to what you learn in school (or at least to what I learned), did not invented printing.

What he did was improving over existing techniques (namely movable types, ink and screw presses) so that printing could become a mass market product.

Thomas Edison did not invented the electric light bulb. He perfected it, making it long-lasting and practical.

I'm sure you could find numerous other examples and you probably have your own.

My theory is that invention as such does not exist.

I consider it something made possible by a succession of steps above which you build so-called "new" things.

It is not that much about being innovative than it is about being creative.

It is not that much about having a stroke of genius than it is about looking at things differently.

I believe it's about assembling existing elements to build the unexpected.

Did you know that there are more than 915 million possible combinations for six 2x4 LEGO® bricks of the same color?

Credits: Fotolog Bureau Robin, http://goo.gl/Z8VS8