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Image of
open human head with various objects belongs to IPOwatchdog.com
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By Kenneth Nwachinemelu
David-Okafor
Welcome
to the third installment of this post.
I had great excitement over the second part
of this post which showed how the world economy had at various times benefitted
from world-changing inventions. The point is unmistakable: INVENTIONS HAVE
PLAYED A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN GROWTH OF GLOBAL ECONOMIES AND NATIONAL WEALTH.
What significance does this hold for
Nigeria?
A lot.
Perhaps we should expatiate this
significance.
I want to treat in this following post how
you get an idea for a feasible and "buildable" idea for your invention. This is the most important part of this post so far.
The big question is: HOW DO YOU SOURCE GOOD
IDEAS?
NAIJAGRAPHITTI
BLOG has an excellent post although it was referring in the broader context to Africa (as you read think of Nigeria in your mind), I would share (please permit me) in its entirety here:
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| Source: "How Big Ideas Are Built" by Rowan Gibson |
Creativity &
Innovation — "Standing On The Shoulders of Giants"
By Kenneth Nwachinemelu David-Okafor
Ideas are ineluctable inputs
and outputs of both the creative and innovative processes. Ideas in essence are
the business of the blog on creativity and innovation; it would be a recurring
theme and topic as long as NAIJAGRAPHITTI BLOG exists.
Starting March 10 to April 15,
2015, we posted three separate articles on how they emerge, preparing the ground
for teaching blog readers and enthusiasts how to harvest their ideas.
This post is the third of
three posts which we wish to use to establish the collaborative nature of ideas
birthing.
In the article, Where Original Ideas Come From, Greg
Satell (CLICK HERE) made the point on the nature of and results of communal effort in the
emergence of scientific revolution. With clear examples he defines the
collaborative nature of ideas which have transformed human history across
millennia.
Rowan Gibson established in How Big Ideas Are Built (CLICK HERE) that Einstein
stood on the on the shoulder of more giants to revolutionize physics among
other facts. In this post, Steven Johnson in this 2010 TED talk Where Good Ideas Come From takes us
through history to show even more examples of collaborative idea birthing and
growing. People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!"
moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His
fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's
coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity
web.
In this post, I wish to build
on the theme of collaborative pursuits for ideas birthing and highlight the
gaps in the African ideas marketplace going back as far back as 5,000 years ago.
Winning Ideas – Outcomes of Collaborations
In his article, Where Original Ideas Come From, Greg
Satell named Sir Isaac Newton and made reference to how Sir Newton, the
greatest scientist of his age and not one known for his false modesty,
acknowledged, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders
of giants."
Newton wrote this line in his
famous letter to his friend, Robert Hooke, himself an English natural
philosopher, architect and polymath, in February 1676.
Several scholarly and mainstream studies and
other works exist which were undertaken to establish the collaborative
emergence of ideas.
Singh and Fleming (2010) in the work Lone inventors as sources of breakthroughs:
Myth or reality? published in Management Sciences journal stated "The “lone
inventor” is a myth: even geniuses benefit from exposure to ideas of others."
While a number of other scholars and
practitioners in creative design practice including Dow, Fortuna and Schwartz
agreed that "Seeing ideas different from their own broadens
people’s perspectives, sheds light on obscure connections, and inspires people
to come up with ideas they might not have thought of alone."
Scholars Pao Siangliulue, Kenneth C. Arnold, and Krzysztof Z.
Gajos all of Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Cambridge,
Massachusetts, USA and Steven P. Dow of Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh,
Pasadena, USA reiterate the same point in their work Toward Collaborative Ideation at Scale—Leveraging Ideas from Others to
Generate More Creative and Diverse Ideas.
Now let me elaborate on Sir Newton’s works. Science
historians explain that Sir Isaac Newton’s
work had built on a long chain of theory and works including those of Nicolas
Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei.
Specifically, they believe
that Newton's work represents the finale in a long chain of theory and
discovery that evolved throughout the Scientific Revolution. The beginnings of
progress had come in the sixteenth century. Nicolas Copernicus suggested that
perhaps the ancient concept of the Earth's position in the universe was flawed.
Giordano Bruno went one step further to claim that the universe itself was far
different than the ancients and the Church perceived, and that it stretched out
infinitely. Next, Johannes Kepler reduced the motions of the planets to
intelligible mathematical rules. Galileo developed the system of earthly
mechanics that he hinted might be applied to the heavens. Newton's work was the
culmination of this chain of science, inspired by the ideas of these men and
the methods and tools developed by them and others of his predecessors. Sir
Newton’s seminal work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia
Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy") linked the
last two remaining pieces of the puzzle—Galileo's physics and Kepler's
astronomy—and emerged with the 'grand design' so many before him had sought.
The design seemed not to have been established by any planning or simple
geography, but rather by the interaction of the forces of nature, principally
gravitation, on an enormous scale (SparkNotes, 2014). In the long run, Sir Newton set off FOUR
scientific revolutions.
In turn, Rowan Gibson in How Big Ideas Are Built wrote how Albert
Einstein studied the work of his predecessors and
peers—from Isaac Newton to James Clerk Maxwell, David Hume, Ernst Mach, Hendrik
Lorentz, Henri Poincaré, and Max Planck—either building on or refuting their
ideas.
Culture Enables, Deters Or Euthanizes Ideas Emergence
What is less explicit from
Satell’s and Gibson’s write-ups is the influence of culture in enabling or disabling
ideas birthing.
Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From gives us a
good expose to how culture fosters ideas birthing or leads to idea refining. He
shares how the London’s coffee houses played significant role in the age of The
Enlightenment.
From experience, this blog and
its publishers have established that this has not been the case for efforts in
the African ideas marketplace even from prehistoric times. It should bother
every African.
Africa lost out on key
advantages where great ideas are concerned. There are ample proofs ancient
Africa empires’ lost their learnings, knowledge stores, sciences and wasted
competitive advantage. How?
Did you know that this
brilliant man Euclid who theorized Euclid’s
geometry though Greek actually spent a lot of time in Africa at the
Royal Library in Alexandria, Egypt, one of the most ancient places of learning
in the world at the time?
Euclid was a Greek mathematician, often
referred to as the "Father of Geometry". He wrote
the most enduring mathematical work of all time, the Stoicheia or Elements,
a thirteen volume work. This comprehensive compilation of geometrical
knowledge, based on the works of Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle,
Menaechmus and others, was in common usage for over 2,000 years.
At the time of its introduction, Elements was the most comprehensive and logically
rigorous examination of the basic principles of geometry. It survived the
eclipse of classical learning, which occurred with the fall of the Roman
Empire, through Arabic translations. Elements
was reintroduced to Europe in 1120 c.e. when Adelard of Bath translated an
Arabic version into Latin. Over time, it became a standard textbook in many
societies, including the United States, and remained widely used until the
mid-nineteenth century. Much of the information in it still forms a part of
many high school geometry curricula (Encyclopaedia.com, 2014).
Euclid was active in Alexandria during the
Ptolemaic Dynasty in reign of Ptolemy I (323–283 BC). Again from history
we learn that Ptolemy I Soter I was the person credited with creating the Royal
Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Ptolemy I Soter I was a Macedonian general
under Alexander the Great, who became ruler of Egypt (323–283 BC) and founder
of both the Ptolemaic Kingdom and the Ptolemaic Dynasty. In 305/4 BC he
demanded the title of pharaoh. The Royal Library was one of the largest and
most significant libraries of the ancient world. It was dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts. It functioned as a major centre of
scholarship from its construction in the 3rd century BC until the Roman
conquest of Egypt in 30 BC. With collections of works, lecture halls, meeting
rooms, and gardens, the library was part of a larger research institution
called the Museum of Alexandria, where many of the most famous thinkers of the
ancient world studied. The Library at Alexandria was in charge of collecting
the entire world's knowledge, and most of the staff was occupied with the task
of translating works onto papyrus paper. It did so through an aggressive and
well-funded royal mandate involving trips to the book fairs of Rhodes and
Athens (Wikipedia,
2014).
Euclid’s contemporaries include Archimedes
(287 BC - 212 BC), Ptolemy I (born 367/366, Macedonia – died 283/282 BC),
Egypt, Conon of Samos (280 BC - ca. 220 BC), and Apollonius of Perga (born c.
240 BC, Perga, Anatolia – died c. 190 BC).
Archaeologists have not found evidence that
Euclid’s works enjoyed wide spread familiarity in ancient Egyptian society
which was more interested in promoting aesthetics, mysticism and magical
knowledge, and revelling in promoting the grandeur of these knowledge.
Euclid’s work was also not renowned in the
neighbouring kingdom, Aksum.
Archaeologists have determined that the
Kingdom of Aksum (or Axum), also known as the Aksumite Empire, was a trading
nation in the area of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, which existed from
approximately 100–940 AD. Historically, the ruins of the ancient city of Aksum
are found close to Ethiopia's northern border. They mark the location of the
heart of ancient Ethiopia, when the Kingdom of Aksum was the most powerful
state between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia. The massive ruins, dating
from between the 1st and the 13th century A.D., include monolithic obelisks,
giant stelae, royal tombs and the ruins of ancient castles. Long after its
political decline in the 10th century, Ethiopian emperors continued to be
crowned in Aksum.
The
Kingdom of Aksum was ideally located to take advantage of the new trading
situation. Adulis soon became the main port for the export of African goods,
such as ivory, incense, gold, slaves, and exotic animals. In order to supply
such goods the kings of Aksum worked to develop and expand an inland trading
network. A rival, and much older trading network that tapped the same interior
region of Africa was that of the Kingdom of Kush, which had long supplied Egypt
with African goods via the Nile corridor. By the 1st century AD, however, Aksum
had gained control over territory previously Kushite. The Periplus of the
Erythraean Sea explicitly describes how ivory collected in Kushite
territory was being exported through the port of Adulis instead of being taken
to Meroë, the capital of Kush. During the 2nd and 3rd centuries the Kingdom of
Aksum continued to expand their control of the southern Red Sea basin. A caravan
route to Egypt was established which bypassed the Nile corridor entirely. Aksum
succeeded in becoming the principal supplier of African goods to the Roman
Empire, not least as a result of the transformed Indian Ocean trading system
(Wikipedia, 2014).
In spite of the greatness of these
civilizations there are no records of educational and scholastic knowledge
interactions, no exchange of learning between ancient Egypt, Kush and
Aksum!
Now what bothered me was why
with all this rich resource of manpower, learning and viable platform of
learning in ancient Egypt, Kush and Aksum, why did no African built on what
Euclid did while in Egypt?
Gaps in the African Ideas Marketplace
The answer that came to me was
an admixture of several concepts: culture;
curiosity; purpose and access to the
works of other great minds.
If you wish to stand on the
shoulders of giants, you need to be curious, purposeful, collaborative and
systematic; the prevailing culture must also engender clement environment and
motivation.
There were other compelling
reasons. A study of the historicity and social geography of Egypt reveal that
the Royal Library of Alexandria and the whole notion of scholastic excellence
was first and foremost a prestige factor to the grandeur and wealth of Egypt than
anything else. Ancient Egypt’s elite and leadership were more enamoured of
esoteric arts and mystical writings in that era.
Then there was the emergence
of writing which did not spread uniformly for all the kingdoms, to enable their
knowledge workers capture their learnings and knowledges. Some wrote things
down and others still depended on oral history and folklores with confining
limitations.
There were other reasons like
atomistic ethnic cleavages, cultural alienation and linguistic barriers.
For me, curiosity is key; interestingly I recall the words of a
controversial American advertising magnate Carl Ally of Ally & Gargano
(formerly Carl Ally Inc) who had thoughts of why curiosity is vital in birthing
ideas when he said "The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He
wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history,
nineteenth-century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower
arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come
together to form a new idea."
Still on curiosity, it was possible that others around Euclid in Africa were
not interested in what he was doing, perhaps because they did not place much
store by it. Or his African contemporaries did not have the same purpose as to
add to the store of human knowledge.
Or, lastly, Euclid’s brilliant
scholarship was not readily accessible to his contemporaries and scholars
within his immediate environment, by geographical limitations or by language
barriers.
Access is a big challenge for
a number of reasons some of which are closely tied to language (Okafor, 2015).
Language as Barrier for Ideas Cross-pollination
Even from prehistoric times,
Africa never has a language of tinkering, social thought and scholarship like
Latin and later English. Arabic would come the closest in the last 5,000 years
(Okafor, 2015).
Translation of foreign
languages has proven to be a particular hurdle to scholarship (Okafor, 2015).
Sir Newton’s book
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published in Latin, the language of
scholarship in his day. Later when English would overtake Latin in importance,
there were grants made available by wealthy patrons and governments to
undertake massive translation projects which would make these books and their
contents widely accessible.
Africa has endured many
stitch-ups in this instance. African ideas exchange has been hobbled by
strictures of mother tongue and foreign languages, with no structures and funding
specifically for rapid translations (Okafor, 2015).
For instance, the Timbuktu
manuscripts (large number of historically important
manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in private households in
Timbuktu, Mali; the collections include manuscripts about art, medicine,
philosophy, and science of the late Abbasid Caliphate, as well as priceless
copies of the Quran; the number of manuscripts in the collections has been
estimated as high as 700,000)
written mostly in Hula and Arabic have yet been completely transcribed for
African (and other) scholars!
Africa Rising?
We have new vistas to reverse
the generations of wasted opportunities, if we should refuse to believe our own
myth.
Try as much as you can, Africa
cannot leapfrog critical thinking and problem solving. These are empirical.
Shimon Peres the former Israeli President
gave an insight into Israel making oasis out of a desert, when he said "In Israel, a land lacking in natural
resources, we learned to appreciate our greatest national advantage: our minds.
Through creativity and innovation, we transformed barren deserts into
flourishing fields and pioneered new frontiers in science and technology."
Now can you dust up your tucked away ideas and let’s head to the NAIJAGRAPHITTI BLOG "coffee house" or any other place we can keep these ideas conversation going?
NB: All reference to "Okafor, 2015" is part of ongoing research which findings would also be published here.
TO BE CONTINUED
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