Innovation - look at the little kitty, and don’t laugh, it’s important

Innovation generally requires change. But apparently change is funny LOL.

I´m sure you´ve had moments when you´ve come up with an idea to improve something. It could be a feature on an app: if there was only a button which did this {insert idea} or if only travel websites were better at telling me the cheapest time of year , and the pros and cons of travelling at different times a year to travel {maybe a message: hey dude, if you don´t need to travel in December to Mexico, try September, airfares are much cheaper, but on the downside your chances of encountering a hurricane will increase} . Or you might be cursing your work´s intranet page: why don´t they introduce a basic search functionality so I can find information on procurement policy, guides to getting best value for money from contractors, HR requirements, you know all the stuff that would help me do our jobs  better and presumably lift my productivity.

Maybe you are like my mum and take every opportunity to extol the virtues of bamboo and pontificate as to why it isn´t used to manufacture everything given how awesome and environmentally friendly it is #mymumlovesbambooandthinksitsthesolutiontoeverything And don´t get her started on waste, you´ll be there for hours hearing about her ideas for tackling waste issues.

Actually I should pause myself right there. Because my mum´s crazy ideas are just the sort of thing I´m wanting to talk about. Here I am bagging her out, but she have a point, maybe we should be using more bamboo, waste is a huge issue. And, I shouldn´t be making fun of her. And this is my point: stop laughing at the crazy ideas. Look at the cute kitty, and don’t laugh. Don’t just brush it off with a pat and forget about it. Nurture it, give it some milk, but the effort into it and rewarded with those cute eyes looking up at you and you saying, 

Some times you just need to know there’s a problem and that there’s solutions to be found. Getting a properly functioning mass transport system for Sydney, one which runs on time and which people actually want to use. One that´s free maybe? Haha LOL jajaja (Spanish LOL). That seem to be many people´s reaction when confronted with such ‘way out’ ideas. Well the thing is you laugh because you lack imagination, lack vision. You think ’this will never happen’, it´s funny, let´s laugh and just keep doing the same stuff we always do. Well, how about not laugh. How about look around the world and see examples of where such a crazy idea worked, and whether perhaps you might adapt it to your circumstances.

Think: it doesn’t have to be this way, we can do things differently, do them better.

Well, actually someone´s already done the free transport thing. Estonia made public transport free. Read more about it here, but chuckle. The only thing stopping things like that getting done is out own narrow minds. We have to think, it can be done, we just have to find a way to get it done. It’s the spirit, that rather unfortunately, led humanity to cracking the problem of building nuclear weapons. Think of the powers we can unleash for destruction and realise the potential power we can create for, well creation, life, each other. The same innovative  spirit that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and still threatens the existence of life on this planet, can be harnessed for good.

In addition to the laughing naysayers we also have the complainers: Oh, but why should all of us car drivers have to subsidise public transport, everyone should pay, blah, blah. Well, who pays the billions for roads? In Estonia they made public transport "free" by allocating a portion of individual´s taxes to fund public transport. That´s not that hard to do, it´s not a LMFAO moment, it can be done, it was done, and people use them trams, just as they drive on them roads. Again we routinely allocate billions of dollars to weapons to protect ourselves from our fears, real or otherwise, yet we often complain when we invest in things that could actually improve our lives. Perhaps some of the billions we spend preparing for war could be spent on trying to prevent war and ensuing peace on earth for all mankind.

I get back to innovation - laughing is the death of innovation. You need to dream, to stand with a straight face and say, we can achieve peace on earth, we can achieve a carbon free economy, we can make sure no human in earth ever dies of famine. We just need to believe. We need vision like this:

We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

Can you imagine, if the crowd just burst into laughter like a bunch of village idiots on hearing this and said, stop dreaming President Kennedy, keep your feet on the Earth. But because they took a man to the moon and delivered him safely back to Earth, they invented all sorts of other stuff we take for granted today, which you can read about here, including tiny little cameras (predecessors to those ones we have in them phones of ours), computer mouses, and laptop computer. Plus they collected a lot of rocks, which I´m sure they learnt stuff from.

Fast forward from 1962 to today, who´s making the speeches like:

We choose to have all of our Earth's energy come from renewable energy by 2030, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

Instead we hear: we can´t possible do that, it´s too difficult. To replace all our coal fired power plants by 2030, LOL, you are a nut job, let´s just make some targets to reduce our use by 20% of pre-industrialised levels and just slow down the rate at which we destroy the planet. Let´s not try too hard to fix things, just enough so we keep doing mostly what we are doing now, with some little tweaks so no one gets to  excited or upset. Maybe we could put out a little pamphlet on recycled paper that tells people to turn off lights when they leave the room or put their aircon temperature up a degree or two in summer, which won´t solve anything but which might help us all feel a little better. And how about instead of going to Mars we just try another landing on the moon? Or let’s go nowhere and just float around in the Milky Way aimlessly until the next big meteor hits or the sun goes out and takes us with it.

Innovation all begins with a dream. A dream that things can be better. Trains so fast they will replace planes for travel between China and Europe (actually happening). Solar powered passenger planes remotely piloted - scary but possible, my hope is that hydrogen gets off the ground as plane fuel. A way of ending world poverty, let´s not try that Marx stuff again, but you know, there should be other less dogmatic and dictatorial  ways to share wealth a bit better. No more war - might go a long way to achieving the no poverty goal. How about a way of training sharks to not bite people so we don´t put up all these nets that kills millions of turtles and whales and the such (it’s potentially possible). Or using the oceans in a way that don´t pollute the whole thing, or leave us with no tuna. No LOL, no jajaja, dream it, then make it happen.

On a final note, I would like to have a game based on google maps where I can use ancient armies to take over the actual world. Maybe we could use it to stop having wars, like the Eurovision song contest was invented to stop wars in Europe - hell, it worked better than the League of Nations (link provided for all you non historian people, I so sad you don´t know about the League :(there are no Avengers in the League of Nations by the way, it was a UN type things that existed between WW1 & WW2 which main purpose was to try and avoid WW2 - that´s probably not the best example of successful innovation, but there were reasons it failed, so go research if you don´t know anything about it).

And as for my game based on using google maps for a world domination. I was thinking maybe it could have like a skin where you could transform real cities into like fictitious ones, and you could set up a little village and build stuff, and sail to other countries and trade with them, and have battles with pirates, maybe some Amazonian tribes, and find treasures and stuff, that sort of thing. Anyway, if you do make it, please drop me a line, I´d love to test it out, maybe have a mention in the creator credits, or at least have a town named after me: Johncito. Maybe in the expansion pack you could head to Mars.

Peace out, Juanito.