How Innovative Ideas Arise

In 2010, Thomas Thwaites decided he wanted to build a toaster right away. He went into the store, bought the cheapest toaster he could find, and hurried home, breaking it down.

The Twites thought the toaster would be a simple machine. By the time he finished renaming it, however, there were more than 400 items on the floor. The toaster contains more than 100 different materials and three of the main ones were plastic, nickel and metal.

You have decided to build the metal parts first. After discovering that iron ore was needed to make iron, the Twites called a steel mine in his district and asked if they would allow him to use others to do the work.

Surprisingly they agreed.

Toaster Project

The victory was temporary.

When it came time to make plastic for his toaster, the Twites decided he would need crude oil to make plastic. This time, he called BP and asked if they could take him out of the oil field and lend him oil to do the job. They immediately refused. It seems that the oil companies are not as generous as steel miners.

The Twites had to settle down by collecting plastic lumps and melting them into his toaster case. This is not as easy as it sounds. A home-made toaster ended up looking more like a melted cake than a kitchen item.

This pattern has continued throughout The Toaster Project. It was almost impossible to move forward without the help of the previous process. To make nickel parts, for example, he had to use to melt old coins. He would later say, "I realized that if you start out completely at first you can easily waste your life making a toaster."

Thomas Thwaites' Toaster Project (How New Ideas Arise)

Thomas Thwaites started building a toaster from scratch. The Toaster Project, as it is known, eventually looks like a melted cake. (Photo Credit: Daniel Alexander.)

Don't Start From the Beginning

Getting started is often a bad idea.

Too often, we take new ideas and logical changes that require an empty slate. When business projects fail, we say things like, "Let's go back to the drawing board." When we think of ways that we would like to change, we think, “I just need to start over.” However, creative progress is seldom the result of discarding all previous ideas and innovations and re-imagining the world.

Consider the example of creation:

Some experts believe that the birds' feathers evolved from reptiles. With the force of evolution, the scales gradually became smaller feathers, which were used for heating and coating initially. Eventually, these tiny streams grew into large feathers that could fly.

There was never a magical moment when the animal kingdom said, "Let's start over and build an animal that can fly." The development of flying birds was a gradual process of repetition and expansion of the ideas already in place.

The human flight process followed the same pattern. We often thank Orville and Wilbur Wright as the inventors of modern aircraft. However, it is not uncommon for us to talk about such pioneers as Otto Lilienthal, Samuel Langley, and Octave Chanute. The Wright brothers learned and built on the work of these men as they tried to create the world's first airplane.

The newest creativity is often a new combination of old ideas. New experts don’t, they connect. In addition, the most effective way to make progress is usually to make 1 percent improvement in what is already working rather than to tear down the whole system and start over.

Itterate, Do not start

The Toaster Project is an example of how we often fail to recognize the complexity of our modern world. When you buy a toaster, you don’t think about everything that has to happen before it pops up in the store. You do not know whether the iron was carved in the mountain or the oil was drawn from the earth.

We don’t see much of the strange connection of things. This is important to understand because in a complex world it is difficult to see which forces are working for you and which forces are working against you. Like buying a toaster, we tend to focus on the final product and fail to see the many processes that lead to it.

When faced with a complex problem, it is usually best to build on what already works. Any ideas that currently work have passed many tests. Old ideas are a secret weapon because they have already managed to survive in a difficult world.

Itterate, does not appear.

FEETNOTES:

Details of the story were taken from Thomas Thwaites' website, Toaster Project, and his TED Talk book entitled, "How I Made a Toaster From the Beginning."

If you want to know, I believe that the ancestor of reptiles closest to the birds is the crocodile. How do you think the scales of reptiles meet and sleep in the same way as birds' feathers?

I first read about The Toaster Project at Adapt by Tim Harford. He also discusses the integration of our modern world. It is best to read it if you are interested in using the concept of evolution in business and health. I recommend it.