Innovation is dirty

Imagine clear white board with big letters "E=MC^2" on it. Is that your notion of innovation? Do you think that innovation is somehow pure and untethered? That is the romantic notion of innovation that I secretly cherish. This morning my views have changed after I watched the following talk:



The talk is about Voyager Flight, the first-ever, non-stop, non refueled flight around the world. What does this have to do with innovation? This guys set out to do something nobody has ever done before. They took a risk by setting an audacious goal. They followed through despite all the odds. I want to learn to be like that.

I found it fascinating how far away they have deviated from their original design. Only the core of the idea survived: the non-stop, non refueled flight around the world. The plane design has undergone a number of major revisions.

This talk introduced some new ideas and reinforced some of the thoughts I mentioned earlier in [1]:

Focus on the goal/problem
If anything will survive, it is going to be the core of the idea. That should be the focus of efforts. There is no need or reason to cling on to design decisions that are not optimal. However, it is important to keep track of what works and what does not.

Iterative development
The initial design of Voyager was totally wrong in retrospect. Even the initial metrics for choosing components were wrong (weight vs. in-flight efficiency). However, those were best decisions at the time. Test flights proved indispensable in learning what work and what does not. Keeping an open mind for change is crucial. They learned from each iteration.

Attitude is key
Despite of all the test flights and advanced calculations there were a lot of unpleasant surprises during the flight. Some of them seemed fatal. At times pilots were saved by pure luck. At other times, they saved themselves by reconfiguring the internals of the plane (the fuel system) in flight. Had they given up, they would not have made it.

Another interesting idea that Voyager design is tied to is creativity in the presence of constraints. I plan to learn more about this idea as well.