Emanuele Priest, former author of FIRSTonline on corporate culture topics, offers us a detailed reflection between business and art to understand the innovative mindset and ideational momentum. All in his new book “Never seen before. The origin of new ideas” which he reveals to us exclusively here.
Your book is about innovation. What is his point of view?
The topic of innovation is very interesting to study to understand human nature. The super-challenge for those who do business or art is the affirmation of their idea. The reasoning I wanted to put together intends to put the designer at the center and shed light on the generation of new ideas, i.e. never seen before. In this sense, this type of idea turns out to be very interesting for understanding its genesis and ideational process. Let's take an example. In 1949, Mr. McNamara took his wife to dinner at Majors Cabin Grill in New York. Unfortunately he forgot the money at home and his wife will pay it. The following year he launched the first credit card, the Diners Club Card. This idea became the new alternative to the cash payment model with a new credit and debit payment system.
What is the difference between a new idea and a never-before-seen idea?
The process of generating ideas must be considered imperfect, in the sense that it is an arduous path, and also very rare, as it is very difficult to generate new ideas. The substantial difference consists in the degree of innovative and ideational intensity. The new, unprecedented idea, never seen before, represents a real, radical, authentic and distinctive overcoming of an existing concept or the resolution of an emerging problem. In this sense, the example of the frigidaire could be given. Historically, the conquest of cold for food use has been an insurmountable problem for man. The most important invention for the frigidaire was Alfred Mellowes' 1915 compressor. It was certainly an idea already seen but the compressor for continuous cooling made it a very popular and distinctive product compared to previous products.
Another interesting aspect of your book is that you believe that the ideational mindset can be educated?
Do you think that my wish is that this essay is read mainly by young and very young people. However, the educational capacity arises from the fact that the innovative mind follows an ideational process, not necessarily linear, but which is based on common aspects that I believe can be transmitted. The first step is the exploratory and adventurous attitude which is followed by specialist and sectoral knowledge and the internal need to desire and shape destiny or to satisfy a strong impulse. This is what I call the primordial mindset without which it is difficult to generate new ideas. Subsequently we enter the generative mindset which first pre-conceives with intuition and then rationalizes the formulation and execution of a new idea with experimentation and method. To all this we must add strong determination, courage and tenacity and combine soothing doses of independent free thought.
Tell us more about the intuitive phase.
Intuition is pre-anticipatory logic of a utopia and of the imagination of the absent. In summary, the ability to originate new ideas never seen before is based on the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist, overcome a sort of ideational gap, diverge from a custom. Intuition, “the mind's eye,” is a form of pre-rational avant-garde intelligence that shows us the direction and vision that could be the configuration of a new idea never seen before. For example. Malcolm McLean, observing a cigarette vending machine, had the idea of the container and the first "metal boxes" set sail from the port of Newark in 1956. It was an extraordinary revolution in logistics and transport like the internet. McLean knew the market and his needs and his intuition stimulated his pre-logic causing him to originate an idea never seen before.
So, you don't believe in luck?
No! I don't believe in innovations or random, fortuitous and lucky discoveries. I believe more in building the best odds to get closer to the result. I prefer not to dare in the hope of blind luck and I believe it is better to dedicate ourselves to strengthening skills, competences and knowledge. As Seneca said. «Luck doesn't exist: there is the moment when talent meets opportunity». The only true randomness is the historical moment in which we live and in which new ideas are generated. If Marconi had not invented wireless radio transmission, Martin Cooper would not have invented the mobile telephone, brick phone, and Steve Jobs the smartphone without a physical keyboard and application system.
Let's go back to the imagination of the absent and the ideational phase.
The perceived absence is the void to be filled. Here lies the source of ideation as well as the overcoming of a previous concept. Without this turning point there is no true, distinctive and authentic new creation. In my opinion, to grasp the very difficult and very rare ideational momentum and try to give birth to new ideas there are five elements: the elevation of the ideational threshold, divergent thinking, the evaluation of the best options, leadership and the work group. Refreshed by healthy skepticism and irony. All in all, the question on which the discussion turns is how to ideate better. This momentum should build a cognitive, environmental, social, consensual, more adaptive, more fertile context capable of activating the human conditions most favorable to great mental openness, freedom, analysis and planning capable of stimulating and provoking greater intuitive power and greater ideational superiority, with the hope of generating new authentic and distinctive ideas, never seen before.
However, from reading we understand that the rationalization of new ideas is not linear, rather it has an emotional component.
Exact. There is a very strong emotional component in the creator that arises from strong and pulsating contradictions. On the one hand, the search to solve an emerging problem and on the other hand, the pressing dissatisfaction and the search for trespassing. Ingenuity and ideation arise from an internal "conflict", from trepidation and disturbance in the human being. If very intense and very vibrant, these impulses should give rise to perceptions, stimuli and intentions that will move towards the solution. The ardor and tension of the desire for resolution and dissatisfaction become the engine and push that push the search for new alternatives and new resolutions. If we think about it, this drive is an anthropological reason that underlies the evolution and advancement of the human species since the dawn of time and which has had a strong acceleration in the last three hundred years.
In your opinion, what will be the relationship between artificial intelligence and the future generation of new ideas?
We are at the dawn of the algorithmic society and we will see the real developments when the problems regarding the management of the volumes of available information, the increase in computing capacity and the most performing business models are resolved. From what I can imagine today for the ideational phase, I believe that artificial intelligence will be able to have an auxiliary role in speeding up some steps, perfecting some calculations, accelerating productivity, reducing operating costs. Honestly, it seems unlikely to me that the “machine” can intuit, perceive, feel, pre-plan and, specifically, design the utopian prophecy or imagine the absent. It would mean being able to internalize the designer's conscience, awareness, experience, knowledge as well as his desires, his obsessions, his contradictions, his tensions and, finally, that intuitive power and ideational superiority, the "lucid madness”, which gives rise to the spark of new ideas.
Give us a couple of examples of ideas that in your opinion artificial intelligence would not have been able to generate.
There are new disruptive ideas that create new complex and complex ecosystems. The most interesting example is Hollywood where the seventh art, mass entertainment and a new model of industrial district unique in the world were born which influenced customs (editor's note, the star system), culture and consumption from the twentieth century onwards. Then there are simple ideas that are so revolutionary that they trace the before and after. In 1917, the year of the great events that shocked the world - World War I, Russian Revolution, Spanish flu - Marcel Duchamp, with the work Fountain (ed., urinal, signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt 1917), imposed a further revolution by presenting the new paradigm of the decontextualization of the environment and objects of common use which were transformed into works of art, thus subverting previous artistic conventions and customs, overcoming existing boundaries and introducing new languages and meanings.
