The importance of bad ideas
The usefulness of an idea – whether it prompts further research and rethinking – is often more important than whether it is right or wrong. No scientist or technologist, including Isaac Newton, Tycho Brahe, Nikolas Tesla and Thomas Edison, or our own Trevor Wadley, Irvine Bell or George Pratley, was right every time.
In fact, the history of discovery and innovation is riddled with bad ideas and failed inventions, but, like extinctions in Nature, they create an environment that nurtures new innovations (or species). After all, a failure is merely an opportunity to start again more intelligently.
Every major scientific theory in history (like continental drift or natural selection) has been partly or wholly wrong at first, and every major technological innovation has had to be substantially improved; that is the nature of progress. We need to revel in failure and build a society that is agile enough to respond positively to it.
If Hermann Heunis had not developed the unsuccessful SMS-based mobile game ‘Alaya’, he might not have gone on to develop the highly successful messaging phenomenon, Mxit. If the South African team that developed the technologically advanced but commercially unsuccessful Rooivalk Attack Helicopter had not gained this aviation experience they would probably not have developed the highly successful modern aviation company, AeroSud.
Innovation is an unending process of rethinking and reevaluating. Progress requires us to keep an open mind about future possibilities, however absurd they be, but not so open, as the joke goes, that everything falls out.
The physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it succinctly, “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science”.
Without sounding too Rumsfeldian, science is all about converting unknown unknowns into known unknowns and then, with a bit of luck, into known knowns. Innovation is almost impossible if you are dealing only with unknown unknowns.
So it is good to be ignorant, but not too ignorant. Curiosity is a desire to learn but you need to know something in the first place in order to be curious!
In particular, you need to know what you don’t know, or appreciate where there is a missing link in technology. It is therefore all about closing gaps but, in order to identify the gap, you need to know what is on either side. A failure to appreciate what you don’t know, or haven’t yet invented, would therefore constitute a barrier to curiosity and innovation.
Ideas, no matter how crazy, are at the root of all innovation – so let’s create a society in South Africa that values and nurtures new ideas and the people who generate them! On Tuesday 14 March, 1pm2pm in the Monument’s Olive Schreiner Hall you can hear Mike Bruton speak on the topic, Why is science important? Science is under fire around the world as people are questioning the value of science and of science-based products. Significant scientific discoveries, such as evolution, global warming and climate change, are being questioned. Furthermore, anti-science and pseudo-science views are gaining popularity, especially through social media... Science not only provides the basic tools for us to understand our built and natural environments but also provides the theoretical framework for the development of new technologies that allow us to improve our standard of living while also living more sustainably. The scientific method also provides us with an objective way of thinking and problem solving that is useful in all walks of life.