TED Talks, Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from

Just a few minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here.

This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford. I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England in 1650. That's its great claim to fame. And I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tour of historic England, but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment. And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment, in part, because of what people were drinking there.

Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank -- both elite and mass folks drank -- day-in and day-out, from dawn until dusk was alcohol. Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice. You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin -- particularly around 1650 -- and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. That was the healthy choice, right, because the water wasn't safe to drink. And so, effectively, until the rise of the coffeehouse, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day. And you can imagine what that would be like, right, in your own life -- and I know this is true of some of you -- if you were drinking all day, and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life, you would have better ideas. You would be sharper and more alert. And so it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and coffee. But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space.

It was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. This was their conjugal bed, in a sense. Ideas would get together there. And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years, because I've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from.

What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? What's the kind of environmental -- what is the space of creativity? And what I've done is I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse; I've looked at media environments, like the World Wide Web, that have been extraordinarily innovative; I've gone back to the history of the first cities; I've even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rainforests, that involve unusual levels of biological innovation; and what I've been looking for is shared patterns, kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments. Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives, or our own organizations, or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative? And I think I've found a few. But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea-creation.

We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. We have the kind of the flash of insight, the stroke of insight, we have epiphanies, we have "eureka!" moments, we have the lightbulb moments, right? All of these concepts, as kind of rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing, it's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment. But in fact, what I would argue, and what you really need to kind of begin with, is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level.

I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. An idea, a new idea, is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It's a new configuration that has never formed before. And the question is: how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form? And it turns out that, in fact, the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain. So the metaphor I'd like the use I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent -- a lot more recent than the 1650s. A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero, who has a company called ... an organization called Design that Matters. They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of, you know, the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that we know, by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically -- it's very simple -- we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments. So, the technology is there. These are standard in all the industrialized worlds. The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to a mid-sized village in Africa, it will work great for a year, or two years, and then something will go wrong, and it will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don't have a whole system of spare parts, and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment. And so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries, and then it ends up being useless. So what Prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see: what are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts?

And what they noticed was they don't have a lot of DVRs, they don't have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. There's a Toyota Forerunner on the street in all these places. They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. So they started to think, "Could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts?" And this is what they ended up coming with. It's called a neonurture device. From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you'd find in a modern, Western hospital. In the inside, it's all car parts. It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got door chimes for alarm. It runs off a car battery. And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight, and you can repair this thing. Now, that's a great idea, but what I'd like to say is that, in fact, this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen. We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are like that $40,000, brand new incubator, state-of-the-art technology, but more often than not, they're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby. We take ideas from other people, from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms, and we create something new.

That's really where innovation happens. And that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right. I mean, this is one vision of it. Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge. This is a statue from Oxford. You know, you're sitting there thinking a deep thought, and the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity. In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this, right. This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then. This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions -- people from different backgrounds. So, if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that, strangely enough, look a little bit more like this. This is what your office should look like, is part of my message here. And one of the problems with this is that people are actually -- when you research this field -- people are notoriously unreliable, when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their best ideas.

And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job. So when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler, and all these things. And he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas, where they happened. And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image -- you know, they're pouring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue sample. And "oh, eureka!" they've got the idea. What happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope.

So they want to tell the story of the "eureka!" moment. They want to say, "There I was, I was standing there and I had it all suddenly clear in my head." But in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the "slow hunch." We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them. They spend all this time working on certain problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in, but they can't quite solve. Darwin is a great example of this.

Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic "eureka!" moment. He's in his study, it's October of 1838, and he's reading Malthus, actually, on population. And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head, and he says, "Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work." That's in his autobiography. About a decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period. And Darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch. And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany, reading Malthus in October of 1838. There are passages where you can read it, and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has this epiphany. And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he had the concept, but was unable of fully thinking it yet. And that is actually how great ideas often happen; they fade into view over long periods of time. Now the challenge for all of us is: how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life, right?

It's hard to go to your boss and say, "I have an excellent idea for our organization. It will be useful in 2020. Could you just give me some time to do that?" Now a couple of companies, like Google, they have innovation time off, 20 percent time, where, in a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization. But that's a key thing. And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches; that's what often happens. You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property, you know, building barricades, having secretive R&D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will remain valuable, and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas, and the culture will be more innovative. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them. And I'll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot of these values, and it's just wonderful kind of tale of innovation, and how it happens in unlikely ways.

It's October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched, and we're in Laurel Maryland, at the applied physics lab associated with Johns Hopkins University. And it's Monday morning, and the news has just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet. And of course, this is nerd heaven, right? There are all these physics geeks who are there thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is incredible. I can't believe this has happened." And two of them, two 20-something researchers at the APL are there at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach. And they start talking, and one of them says, "Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? There's this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. We could probably hear it, if we tune in." And so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues, and everybody's like, "No, I hadn't thought of doing that. That's an interesting idea. And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he's got a little antennae set up with an amplifier in his office.

And so Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach's office, and they start kind of noodling around -- hacking, as we might call it now. And after a couple of hours, they actually start picking up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track. It was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily, because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax, basically. So they made it really easy to find it. So these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal, and people start kind of coming into the office and saying, "Wow, that's pretty cool.

Can I hear? Wow, that's great." And before long, they think, "Well jeez, this is kind of historic. We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this. We should record it." And so they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder, and they start recording these little bleep, bleeps. And they start writing the kind of date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. And they they start thinking, "Well gosh, you know, we're noticing small little frequency variations here. We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling, if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect. And then they played around with it a little bit more, and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of specialties. And they said, "Jeez, you know, we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it's farthest away. That's pretty cool. And eventually, they get permission -- this is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job description.

They get permission to use the new, you know, UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room, that they'd just gotten at the APL. They run some more of the numbers, and at the end of about three or four weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this one little signal, going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do over lunch one morning. A couple weeks later their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them into the room and says, "Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you were working on.

You've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. Could you go the other way? Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground, if you knew the location of the satellite?" And they thought about it, and they said, "Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here." So they went back, and they thought about it. And they came back and said, "Actually, it'll be easier." And he said, "Oh, that's great. Because see, I have these new nuclear submarines that I'm building. And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow, if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So we're thinking, we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean. Could you work on that problem? And that's how GPS was born.

And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson, in the power, the marvelous, kind of unplanned emergent, unpredictable power, of open innovative systems.

That is how innovation happens.

Chance favors the connected mind. Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from ||||Ideen|| Steven Johnson: Woher gute Ideen kommen Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from Steven Johnson: De dónde vienen las buenas ideas استیون جانسون: ایده های خوب از کجا می آیند Steven Johnson : D'où viennent les bonnes idées Steven Johnson: Da dove vengono le buone idee スティーブン・ジョンソン：優れたアイデアはどこから生まれるか 스티븐 존슨: 좋은 아이디어가 나오는 곳 Steven Johnson: Skąd się biorą dobre pomysły Steven Johnson: De onde vêm as boas ideias Стивен Джонсон: Откуда берутся хорошие идеи Steven Johnson: İyi fikirler nereden gelir? Стівен Джонсон: Звідки беруться хороші ідеї 史蒂文·约翰逊：好创意从何而来史蒂文·約翰遜：好創意從何而來

Just a few minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. Just a few minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. Hace apenas unos minutos tomé esta foto a unas 10 cuadras de aquí. 몇 분 전,이 사진을 여기에서 약 10 블록 떨어진 곳에서 찍었습니다. Всего несколько минут назад я сделал этот снимок в 10 кварталах отсюда. 就在几分钟前，我在离这里大约 10 个街区的地方拍了这张照片。

This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford. 옥스퍼드의 그랜드 카페입니다. I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England in 1650. Tomé esta foto porque resultó ser la primera cafetería que abrió en Inglaterra en 1650. 나는 이것이 1650 년에 영국에서 처음으로 열리는 커피 하우스로 판명 되었기 때문에이 사진을 찍었습니다. That’s its great claim to fame. That's its great claim to fame. Ese es su gran reclamo a la fama. それは名声への大きな主張です。 Essa é a sua grande reivindicação à fama. Это его великая претензия на славу. 这就是它声名鹊起的原因。 And I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tour of historic England, but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||Blütezeiten|||||||||| Y quería mostrártelo, no porque quiera darte el tipo de recorrido de Starbucks por la Inglaterra histórica, sino porque la cafetería inglesa fue crucial para el desarrollo y la difusión de uno de los grandes florecimientos intelectuales de los últimos 500 años. , lo que ahora llamamos la Ilustración. И я хотел показать вам это не потому, что хочу рассказать вам о туре Starbucks по исторической Англии, а потому, что английская кофейня имела решающее значение для развития и распространения одного из величайших интеллектуальных цветов за последние 500 лет. то, что мы сейчас называем Просвещением. And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment, in part, because of what people were drinking there. And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment, in part, because of what people were drinking there. Y la cafetería desempeñó un papel tan importante en el nacimiento de la Ilustración, en parte, por lo que la gente bebía allí.

Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank -- both elite and mass folks drank -- day-in and day-out, from dawn until dusk was alcohol. Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank -- both elite and mass folks drank -- day-in and day-out, from dawn until dusk was alcohol. Porque, antes de la difusión del café y el té en la cultura británica, lo que bebía la gente, tanto la élite como la masa, día tras día, desde el amanecer hasta el anochecer, era alcohol. というのも、イギリスの文化にコーヒーと紅茶が広まる前は、夜明けから夕暮れまで、人々はエリートと大衆の両方が飲んでいたのです。 Porque, antes da disseminação do café e do chá pela cultura britânica, o que as pessoas bebiam - tanto a elite quanto a massa bebiam - dia após dia, do amanhecer ao anoitecer, era álcool. Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice. Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice. El alcohol era la bebida preferida durante el día. You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin -- particularly around 1650 -- and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. Bebías un poco de cerveza con el desayuno y un poco de vino en el almuerzo, un poco de ginebra, particularmente alrededor de 1650, y remataba con un poco de cerveza y vino al final del día. あなたは朝食で少しビールを飲み、昼食時に少しワイン、特にジン-特に1650年-を持ち、一日の終わりに少しのビールとワインでそれを締めくくります。 Você bebia um pouco de cerveja no café da manhã e tomava um pouco de vinho no almoço, um pouco de gim - principalmente por volta de 1650 - e ainda por cima com um pouco de cerveja e vinho no final do dia. 你会在早餐时喝一点啤酒，午餐时喝一点葡萄酒，一点杜松子酒——尤其是 1650 左右——最后在一天结束时喝点啤酒和葡萄酒。 That was the healthy choice, right, because the water wasn’t safe to drink. Esa fue la elección saludable, cierto, porque el agua no era segura para beber. 这是健康的选择，对吧，因为水不适合饮用。 And so, effectively, until the rise of the coffeehouse, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day. Y así, efectivamente, hasta el surgimiento de la cafetería, había una población entera que efectivamente estaba borracha todo el día. つまり、事実上、喫茶店が台頭するまでは、1日中酔っ払っている全人口がいました。因此，实际上，在咖啡馆兴起之前，整个人口实际上都是整天喝醉的。 And you can imagine what that would be like, right, in your own life -- and I know this is true of some of you -- if you were drinking all day, and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life, you would have better ideas. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||Depressivum||||||||||| Y pueden imaginar cómo sería eso, cierto, en su propia vida, y sé que esto es cierto para algunos de ustedes, si estuvieran bebiendo todo el día y luego cambiaran de un depresor a un estimulante en su vida. , tendrías mejores ideas. そして、あなたはそれがあなた自身の人生の中でどのようになるのかを想像することができます-そして私はこれがあなたの一部に当てはまることを知っています-もしあなたが一日中飲んでいて、そしてあなたがあなたの人生でうつ病から覚醒剤に切り替えたなら、あなたはより良いアイデアを持っているでしょう。 E você pode imaginar como isso seria, certo, em sua própria vida - e eu sei que isso é verdade para alguns de vocês - se você estivesse bebendo o dia todo e depois mudasse de um depressivo para um estimulante em sua vida , você teria ideias melhores. И вы можете себе представить, на что это похоже, верно, в вашей собственной жизни - и я знаю, что это верно для некоторых из вас - если вы пили весь день, а затем вы переключились с депрессанта на стимулятор в вашей жизни У вас были бы лучшие идеи. You would be sharper and more alert. Sería más agudo y más alerta. あなたはより鋭く、より注意深くなるでしょう。 Você seria mais afiado e mais alerta. Вы были бы острее и бдительнее. And so it’s not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and coffee. Por lo tanto, no es un accidente que se produjera un gran florecimiento de la innovación cuando Inglaterra cambió al té y el café. E não é por acaso que um grande florescimento de inovação aconteceu quando a Inglaterra mudou para chá e café. И поэтому не случайно, что когда Англия переключилась на чай и кофе, произошел большой расцвет инноваций. 因此，当英国转向喝茶和咖啡时，创新的蓬勃发展并非偶然。 But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space. Pero la otra cosa que hace que la cafetería sea importante es la arquitectura del espacio. しかし、喫茶店を重要にするもう1つのことは、空間の建築です。 Но другая вещь, которая делает кофейню важной, - это архитектура пространства.

It was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. Era un espacio donde la gente se reunía de diferentes orígenes, diferentes campos de especialización y compartía. Era um espaço onde as pessoas se reuniam de diferentes origens, diferentes áreas de especialização e compartilhavam. It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. ||||||Ridley||||||| Era un espacio, como decía Matt Ridley, donde las ideas podían tener sexo. Era um espaço, como Matt Ridley falou, onde as ideias podiam fazer sexo. 正如马特·里德利 (Matt Ridley) 所说，这是一个思想可以碰撞的空间。 This was their conjugal bed, in a sense. |||ehelichen|||| Este era su lecho conyugal, en cierto sentido. Esta era sua cama conjugal, em certo sentido. Ideas would get together there. Las ideas se juntarían allí. As ideias se reuniam ali. Идеи соберутся там. And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story. Y una asombrosa cantidad de innovaciones de este período tienen una cafetería en algún lugar de su historia. И у удивительного числа новшеств этого периода есть кофейня где-то в их истории. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years, because I’ve been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. He pasado mucho tiempo pensando en cafeterías durante los últimos cinco años, porque he estado en esta búsqueda para investigar esta cuestión de dónde vienen las buenas ideas.

What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? ¿Cuáles son los entornos que conducen a niveles inusuales de innovación, niveles inusuales de creatividad? Какие среды приводят к необычным уровням инноваций, необычным уровням творчества? What’s the kind of environmental -- what is the space of creativity? ¿Cuál es el tipo de ambiente? ¿Cuál es el espacio de la creatividad? And what I’ve done is I’ve looked at both environments like the coffeehouse; I’ve looked at media environments, like the World Wide Web, that have been extraordinarily innovative; I’ve gone back to the history of the first cities; I’ve even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rainforests, that involve unusual levels of biological innovation; and what I’ve been looking for is shared patterns, kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments. Y lo que he hecho es mirar ambos ambientes como la cafetería; He observado entornos de medios, como la World Wide Web, que han sido extraordinariamente innovadores; He vuelto a la historia de las primeras ciudades; Incluso he ido a ambientes biológicos, como arrecifes de coral y selvas tropicales, que involucran niveles inusuales de innovación biológica; y lo que he estado buscando son patrones compartidos, una especie de comportamiento característico que aparece una y otra vez en todos estos entornos. И то, что я сделал, я посмотрел на обе среды, как на кофейню; Я смотрел на медиа-среды, такие как World Wide Web, которые были чрезвычайно инновационными; Я вернулся к истории первых городов; Я даже посещал биологические среды, такие как коралловые рифы и тропические леса, где присутствуют необычные уровни биологических инноваций; и то, что я искал, это общие шаблоны, своего рода поведение сигнатур, которое снова и снова проявляется во всех этих средах. 我所做的是，我观察了两种环境，比如咖啡馆；我研究过媒体环境，比如万维网，它们具有非凡的创新性；我回到了第一批城市的历史；我什至去过生物环境，比如珊瑚礁和热带雨林，它们涉及不同寻常的生物创新水平；我一直在寻找的是共享模式，一种在所有这些环境中一次又一次出现的标志性行为。 Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives, or our own organizations, or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative? Существуют ли повторяющиеся модели, из которых мы можем извлечь уроки, которые мы можем использовать и как-то применить к нашей собственной жизни, или к нашим собственным организациям, или к нашей собственной среде, чтобы сделать их более творческими и инновационными? And I think I’ve found a few. But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea-creation. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||steuert||||||| Pero lo que tienes que hacer para darle sentido a esto y entender realmente estos principios es que tienes que acabar con gran parte de la forma en que nuestras metáforas y lenguaje convencionales nos guían hacia ciertos conceptos de creación de ideas. Mas o que você precisa fazer para entender isso e realmente entender esses princípios é acabar com muito do modo como nossas metáforas e linguagem convencionais nos orientam para certos conceitos de criação de ideias. Но что вам нужно сделать, чтобы понять это и действительно понять эти принципы, так это то, что вы должны отказаться от того, как наши обычные метафоры и язык ведут нас к определенным концепциям создания идей. 但是，要理解这一点并真正理解这些原则，你必须做的是，你必须摒弃我们传统的隐喻和语言引导我们走向某些创意概念的方式。

We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. Tenemos este vocabulario muy rico para describir momentos de inspiración. We have the kind of the flash of insight, the stroke of insight, we have epiphanies, we have "eureka!" Tenemos el tipo de destello de intuición, el golpe de intuición, tenemos epifanías, tenemos "¡eureka!" Temos o tipo de lampejo de insight, o golpe de insight, temos epifanias, temos "eureka!" moments, we have the lightbulb moments, right? momentos, tenemos los momentos de la bombilla, ¿verdad? momentos, temos os momentos da lâmpada, certo? All of these concepts, as kind of rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing, it’s something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment. Todos estos conceptos, tan retóricamente floridos como son, comparten esta suposición básica, que es que una idea es una sola cosa, es algo que sucede a menudo en un maravilloso momento iluminador. Todos esses conceitos, por mais floreados retoricamente que sejam, compartilham essa suposição básica, que é que uma ideia é uma coisa única, é algo que acontece muitas vezes em um momento maravilhoso de iluminação. Все эти концепции, как бы они ни были риторически витиеваты, разделяют это базовое предположение, что идея - это одна вещь, это то, что часто случается в чудесный просветляющий момент. 所有这些概念，尽管它们在修辞上都很华丽，但都有一个基本假设，即一个想法是一个单一的东西，它是经常在美妙的启发性时刻发生的事情。 But in fact, what I would argue, and what you really need to kind of begin with, is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level. Pero, de hecho, lo que diría, y lo que realmente necesitas para empezar, es la idea de que una idea es una red en el nivel más elemental. Mas, na verdade, o que eu diria, e o que você realmente precisa para começar, é essa ideia de que uma ideia é uma rede no nível mais elementar. Но на самом деле, я бы поспорил, и с чего вам действительно нужно начать, это идея о том, что идея - это сеть на самом элементарном уровне.

I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. Quiero decir, esto es lo que está sucediendo dentro de tu cerebro. An idea, a new idea, is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. Una idea, una nueva idea, es una nueva red de neuronas que se disparan sincronizadas entre sí dentro de tu cerebro. Uma ideia, uma nova ideia, é uma nova rede de neurônios disparando em sincronia uns com os outros dentro do seu cérebro. It’s a new configuration that has never formed before. Es una nueva configuración que nunca antes se había formado. And the question is: how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form? Y la pregunta es: ¿cómo llevas tu cerebro a entornos donde es más probable que se formen estas nuevas redes? И вопрос в том, как ваш мозг попадает в среду, в которой эти новые сети будут формироваться с большей вероятностью? And it turns out that, in fact, the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain. Y resulta que, de hecho, el tipo de patrones de red del mundo exterior imitan muchos de los patrones de red del mundo interno del cerebro humano. И оказывается, что на самом деле сетевые паттерны внешнего мира имитируют множество сетевых паттернов внутреннего мира человеческого мозга. So the metaphor I’d like the use I can take from a story of a great idea that’s quite recent -- a lot more recent than the 1650s. Entonces, la metáfora que me gustaría usar la puedo tomar de la historia de una gran idea que es bastante reciente, mucho más reciente que la década de 1650. Таким образом, метафору, которую я хотел бы использовать, я могу взять из истории замечательной идеи, которая появилась совсем недавно - намного более свежая, чем 1650-е годы. A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero, who has a company called ... an organization called Design that Matters. ||||Timothy|Timothy Prestero||||||||||| Un tipo maravilloso llamado Timothy Prestero, que tiene una empresa llamada... una organización llamada Design that Matters. They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of, you know, the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. Decidieron abordar este problema realmente apremiante de los terribles problemas que tenemos con las tasas de mortalidad infantil en el mundo en desarrollo. Eles decidiram enfrentar esse problema realmente urgente dos terríveis problemas que temos com as taxas de mortalidade infantil no mundo em desenvolvimento. Они решили заняться этой действительно насущной проблемой, знаете ли, ужасных проблем, с которыми мы сталкиваемся, с показателями младенческой смертности в развивающихся странах. One of the things that’s very frustrating about this is that we know, by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically -- it’s very simple -- we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments. Una de las cosas que es muy frustrante de esto es que sabemos que, al colocar incubadoras neonatales modernas en cualquier contexto, si podemos mantener calientes a los bebés prematuros, básicamente, es muy simple, podemos reducir a la mitad las tasas de mortalidad infantil en esos entornos. Одна из вещей, которая очень огорчает нас в этом, это то, что мы знаем, что если современные неонатальные инкубаторы в любой обстановке согреют недоношенных детей, то в принципе - это очень просто - мы можем вдвое сократить показатели младенческой смертности в этих условиях. So, the technology is there. Entonces, la tecnología está ahí. These are standard in all the industrialized worlds. Estos son estándar en todos los mundos industrializados. The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to a mid-sized village in Africa, it will work great for a year, or two years, and then something will go wrong, and it will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don’t have a whole system of spare parts, and you don’t have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment. El problema es que si compras una incubadora de $40,000 y la envías a una aldea mediana en África, funcionará muy bien durante un año o dos años, y luego algo saldrá mal, se romperá y permanecerá roto para siempre, porque no tiene un sistema completo de piezas de repuesto y no tiene la experiencia en el terreno para reparar este equipo de $ 40,000. 问题是，如果你买了一个 40,000 美元的孵化器，然后把它送到非洲的一个中等规模的村庄，它可以正常工作一年或两年，然后就会出问题，它会坏掉，然后它会永远坏掉，因为你没有完整的备件系统，而且你没有现场专业知识来修理这件价值 40,000 美元的设备。 And so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries, and then it ends up being useless. Entonces terminas teniendo este problema en el que gastas todo este dinero en ayuda y toda esta electrónica avanzada para estos países, y luego termina siendo inútil. E então você acaba tendo esse problema de gastar todo esse dinheiro recebendo ajuda e toda essa eletrônica avançada para esses países, e então acaba sendo inútil. So what Prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see: what are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts?

And what they noticed was they don’t have a lot of DVRs, they don’t have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. И что они заметили, так это то, что у них не так много видеорегистраторов, у них не так много микроволн, но они, похоже, неплохо держат свои машины на дороге. There’s a Toyota Forerunner on the street in all these places. Há um Toyota Forerunner na rua em todos esses lugares. Во всех этих местах на улице есть Тойота Предтеча. They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. Eles parecem ter a experiência para manter os carros funcionando. Кажется, у них есть опыт, чтобы поддерживать работу автомобилей. So they started to think, "Could we build a neonatal incubator that’s built entirely out of automobile parts?" Así que empezaron a pensar: "¿Podríamos construir una incubadora neonatal construida completamente con piezas de automóviles?". Поэтому они начали думать: «Можем ли мы построить неонатальный инкубатор, полностью построенный из автомобильных деталей?» 于是他们开始思考，“我们可以建造一个完全由汽车零件制成的新生儿保育箱吗？” And this is what they ended up coming with. Y esto es con lo que terminaron viniendo. И вот к чему они пришли. It’s called a neonurture device. |||neonurture| Это называется неонуртурным устройством. From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you’d find in a modern, Western hospital. Desde el exterior, parece una cosita normal que encontrarías en un hospital occidental moderno. Do lado de fora, parece uma coisinha normal que você encontraria em um moderno hospital ocidental. Со стороны это выглядит как обычная маленькая вещь, которую можно найти в современной западной больнице. In the inside, it’s all car parts. It’s got a fan, it’s got headlights for warmth, it’s got door chimes for alarm. Tiene un ventilador, luces delanteras para calentarse, timbres de puerta para alarma. Tem um ventilador, tem faróis para aquecer, tem carrilhão de porta para alarme. У него есть вентилятор, у него есть фары для тепла, у него есть дверной звонок для тревоги. It runs off a car battery. Funciona con la batería de un coche. Funciona com bateria de carro. Он работает от автомобильного аккумулятора. And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight, and you can repair this thing. Entonces, todo lo que necesita son las piezas de repuesto de su Toyota y la capacidad de reparar un faro, y puede reparar esta cosa. E tudo o que você precisa são as peças de reposição do seu Toyota e a capacidade de consertar um farol, e você pode consertar isso. Now, that’s a great idea, but what I’d like to say is that, in fact, this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen. Это отличная идея, но я хотел бы сказать, что на самом деле это отличная метафора того, как идеи происходят. We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are like that $40,000, brand new incubator, state-of-the-art technology, but more often than not, they’re cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby. Nos gusta pensar que nuestras ideas innovadoras, ya sabes, son como $40,000, una incubadora nueva, tecnología de punta, pero la mayoría de las veces, están improvisadas de cualquier parte que esté cerca. Nós gostamos de pensar que nossas ideias inovadoras, você sabe, são como aqueles $ 40.000, incubadora novinha em folha, tecnologia de ponta, mas na maioria das vezes, elas são remendadas de qualquer parte que esteja por perto. Нам нравится думать, что наши прорывные идеи, как вы знаете, похожи на эти 40 000 долларов, новый инкубатор, самую современную технологию, но чаще всего они сочетаются друг с другом из любых частей, которые могут быть поблизости. We take ideas from other people, from people we’ve learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms, and we create something new. Tomamos ideas de otras personas, de personas de las que hemos aprendido, de personas con las que nos encontramos en la cafetería, y las unimos en nuevas formas, y creamos algo nuevo. Pegamos ideias de outras pessoas, de pessoas com quem aprendemos, de pessoas que encontramos no café, e as costuramos em novas formas e criamos algo novo. Мы берем идеи от других людей, от людей, которых мы узнали, от людей, с которыми мы сталкиваемся в кафе, и мы объединяем их в новые формы, и мы создаем что-то новое.

That’s really where innovation happens. And that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right. Y eso significa que tenemos que cambiar algunos de nuestros modelos de cómo se ve realmente la innovación y el pensamiento profundo, ¿verdad? А это значит, что мы должны изменить некоторые из наших моделей того, как на самом деле выглядят инновации и глубокое мышление. I mean, this is one vision of it. Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge. Другой - это Ньютон и яблоко, когда Ньютон был в Кембридже. This is a statue from Oxford. Esta é uma estátua de Oxford. Это статуя из Оксфорда. You know, you’re sitting there thinking a deep thought, and the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity. In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this, right. На самом деле пространства, которые исторически приводили к инновациям, выглядят так, верно. This is Hogarth’s famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then. ||Hogarths|||||||||||||||||||||| Esta es la famosa pintura de Hogarth de una especie de cena política en una taberna, pero así se veían las cafeterías en ese entonces. Это знаменитая картина Хогарта о каком-то политическом ужине в таверне, но именно так тогда выглядели кофейни. This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions -- people from different backgrounds. Este es el tipo de entorno caótico en el que es probable que las ideas se unan, en el que es probable que las personas tengan colisiones nuevas, interesantes e impredecibles: personas de diferentes orígenes. Это такая хаотичная среда, где идеи могут объединяться, где люди могут столкнуться с новыми, интересными, непредсказуемыми столкновениями - люди из разных слоев общества. So, if we’re trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that, strangely enough, look a little bit more like this. Так что, если мы пытаемся создать организации, которые являются более инновационными, мы должны создать пространства, которые, как ни странно, выглядят немного более похожими на это. This is what your office should look like, is part of my message here. And one of the problems with this is that people are actually -- when you research this field -- people are notoriously unreliable, when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their best ideas. И одна из проблем в этом заключается в том, что люди на самом деле - когда вы исследуете эту область - люди общеизвестно ненадежны, когда они на самом деле отчасти сообщают о том, где у них есть свои хорошие идеи, или их истории их лучших идей. ,

And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. Y hace unos años, un maravilloso investigador llamado Kevin Dunbar decidió dar vueltas y básicamente hacer el enfoque del Gran Hermano para averiguar de dónde vienen las buenas ideas. He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job. Он ходил в несколько научных лабораторий по всему миру и снимал на видео всех, как они делали каждый кусочек своей работы. So when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler, and all these things. Entonces, cuando estaban sentados frente al microscopio, cuando hablaban con su colega en el enfriador de agua y todas esas cosas. And he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas, where they happened. Y grabó todas estas conversaciones y trató de averiguar dónde estaban las ideas más importantes, dónde ocurrieron. And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image -- you know, they’re pouring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue sample. Y cuando pensamos en la imagen clásica del científico en el laboratorio, tenemos esta imagen, ya sabes, están mirando el microscopio y ven algo en la muestra de tejido. И когда мы думаем о классическом образе ученого в лаборатории, у нас есть это изображение - вы знаете, они льются над микроскопом, и они видят что-то в образце ткани. And "oh, eureka!" they’ve got the idea. ellos tienen la idea. What happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope. Что на самом деле произошло, когда Данбар как-то посмотрел на ленту, так это то, что практически все важные прорывные идеи не произошли в одиночку в лаборатории перед микроскопом.

They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings, oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise in the signal they were discovering. Eles aconteciam na mesa de conferência na reunião semanal do laboratório, quando todos se reuniam e compartilhavam seus últimos dados e descobertas, muitas vezes quando as pessoas compartilhavam os erros que estavam cometendo, o erro, o ruído no sinal que estavam descobrindo. Они произошли за столом конференции на еженедельном лабораторном собрании, когда все собрались и поделились своими новейшими данными и результатами, часто когда люди делились своими ошибками, ошибками, шумом в обнаруживаемом ими сигнале. And something about that environment -- and I’ve started calling it the "liquid network," where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other -- that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||stoßen|||||||||||||||||| Y algo sobre ese entorno, y comencé a llamarlo la "red líquida", donde tienes muchas ideas diferentes que están juntas, diferentes antecedentes, diferentes intereses, empujándose entre sí, rebotando entre sí, ese entorno. es, de hecho, el entorno que conduce a la innovación. E algo sobre esse ambiente -- e comecei a chamá-lo de "rede líquida", onde você tem muitas ideias diferentes que estão juntas, origens diferentes, interesses diferentes, se acotovelando, saltando umas para as outras -- esse ambiente é, de fato, o ambiente que leva à inovação. The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter time frames. ||||||||||verdichten||||||||||| El otro problema que tiene la gente es que les gusta condensar sus historias de innovación en períodos de tiempo más cortos. Другая проблема, с которой сталкиваются люди, заключается в том, что им нравится сокращать свои истории инноваций до более коротких временных рамок.

So they want to tell the story of the "eureka!" moment. They want to say, "There I was, I was standing there and I had it all suddenly clear in my head." Quieren decir: "Allí estaba yo, estaba parado allí y de repente lo tuve todo claro en mi cabeza". But in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. |||||||||||||||||||||||||Inkubation| Mas, na verdade, se você voltar e olhar para o registro histórico, verifica-se que muitas ideias importantes têm períodos de incubação muito longos. I call this the "slow hunch." |||||leise Ahnung Yo llamo a esto la "corazonada lenta". Eu chamo isso de "palpite lento". We’ve heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people’s minds. ||||||||||||||||||||||||verweilen|||||||||| Últimamente hemos escuchado mucho sobre corazonadas e instintos y momentos repentinos de claridad, pero de hecho, muchas ideas geniales persisten, a veces durante décadas, en el fondo de la mente de las personas. Ouvimos muito recentemente sobre palpite, instinto e momentos repentinos de clareza, mas, na verdade, muitas grandes ideias permanecem, às vezes por décadas, no fundo da mente das pessoas. They have a feeling that there’s an interesting problem, but they don’t quite have the tools yet to discover them. They spend all this time working on certain problems, but there’s another thing lingering there that they’re interested in, but they can’t quite solve. Pasan todo este tiempo trabajando en ciertos problemas, pero hay otra cosa pendiente que les interesa, pero que no pueden resolver del todo. Eles passam todo esse tempo trabalhando em certos problemas, mas há outra coisa que os interessa, mas eles não conseguem resolver. Darwin is a great example of this.

Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic "eureka!" moment. He’s in his study, it’s October of 1838, and he’s reading Malthus, actually, on population. ||||||||||Malthus||| And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head, and he says, "Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work." Y de repente, el algoritmo básico de la selección natural aparece en su cabeza y dice: "Ah, por fin, tenía una teoría con la que trabajar". E de repente, o algoritmo básico da seleção natural meio que aparece em sua cabeça, e ele diz: "Ah, finalmente, eu tinha uma teoria com a qual trabalhar". That’s in his autobiography. About a decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin’s notebooks from this period. Cerca de uma ou duas décadas atrás, um estudioso maravilhoso chamado Howard Gruber voltou e olhou os cadernos de Darwin desse período. And Darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch. ||||reichhaltig||||||||||||| Y Darwin guardaba estos copiosos cuadernos donde anotaba cada pequeña idea que tenía, cada pequeña corazonada. E Darwin guardava esses copiosos cadernos onde anotava cada pequena ideia que tinha, cada palpite. And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany, reading Malthus in October of 1838. ||Gruber|||||||||||||||||||||||Einsicht||||| Y lo que Gruber descubrió fue que Darwin tenía la teoría completa de la selección natural durante meses y meses y meses antes de tener su supuesta epifanía, leyendo a Malthus en octubre de 1838. There are passages where you can read it, and you think you’re reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has this epiphany. And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he had the concept, but was unable of fully thinking it yet. And that is actually how great ideas often happen; they fade into view over long periods of time. Y así es como suceden las grandes ideas; se desvanecen a la vista durante largos períodos de tiempo. E é assim que as grandes ideias geralmente acontecem; eles desaparecem à vista por longos períodos de tempo. Now the challenge for all of us is: how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life, right? Ahora, el desafío para todos nosotros es: ¿cómo se crean entornos que permitan que estas ideas tengan una vida media tan prolongada, verdad? Agora, o desafio para todos nós é: como você cria ambientes que permitem que essas ideias tenham esse tipo de meia-vida longa, certo?

It’s hard to go to your boss and say, "I have an excellent idea for our organization. It will be useful in 2020. Could you just give me some time to do that?" Now a couple of companies, like Google, they have innovation time off, 20 percent time, where, in a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization. But that’s a key thing. And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people’s hunches; that’s what often happens. You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you’re in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property, you know, building barricades, having secretive R&D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will remain valuable, and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas, and the culture will be more innovative. |||||||||||||||||||geheimnisvoll||||patentieren||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Então, de certa forma, falamos frequentemente sobre o valor de proteger a propriedade intelectual, sabe, construir barricadas, ter laboratórios de P&D secretos, patentear tudo o que temos, para que essas ideias continuem valiosas e as pessoas sejam incentivadas a surgir com mais ideias, e a cultura será mais inovadora. But I think there’s a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them. |||||||||||||||||||||wertschätzen|||||||||| Mas acho que há um argumento a ser feito de que devemos gastar pelo menos tanto tempo, se não mais, valorizando a premissa de conectar ideias e não apenas protegê-las. And I’ll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot of these values, and it’s just wonderful kind of tale of innovation, and how it happens in unlikely ways. ||||||||||erfasst||||||||||||||||||||| Y los dejo con esta historia, que creo que captura muchos de estos valores, y es simplemente una maravillosa historia de innovación, y cómo sucede de maneras poco probables.

It’s October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched, and we’re in Laurel Maryland, at the applied physics lab associated with Johns Hopkins University. ||||Sputnik|||||||Laurel||||||||||| And it’s Monday morning, and the news has just broken about this satellite that’s now orbiting the planet. And of course, this is nerd heaven, right? Y, por supuesto, este es el paraíso de los nerds, ¿verdad? E, claro, este é o paraíso dos nerds, certo? There are all these physics geeks who are there thinking, "Oh my gosh! |||||Nerds||||||| Hay todos estos frikis de la física que están allí pensando: "¡Oh, Dios mío! This is incredible. I can’t believe this has happened." And two of them, two 20-something researchers at the APL are there at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. |||||||||APL|||||||||||||||| And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach. ||||||Guier||Weiffenbach And they start talking, and one of them says, "Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? There’s this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that’s obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. Hay este, ya sabes, un satélite hecho por el hombre allá arriba en el espacio exterior que obviamente está transmitiendo algún tipo de señal. We could probably hear it, if we tune in." Probablemente podríamos escucharlo, si sintonizamos". And so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues, and everybody’s like, "No, I hadn’t thought of doing that. That’s an interesting idea. And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he’s got a little antennae set up with an amplifier in his office. |||||||||||||||||||||||Verstärker||| E acontece que Weiffenbach é uma espécie de especialista em recepção de microondas, e ele tem uma pequena antena montada com um amplificador em seu escritório.

And so Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach’s office, and they start kind of noodling around -- hacking, as we might call it now. ||||||||Weiffenbachs|||||||herumexperimentieren|||||||| Y entonces, Guier y Weiffenbach regresan a la oficina de Weiffenbach, y comienzan a charlar, piratear, como podríamos llamarlo ahora. E então Guier e Weiffenbach voltam para o escritório de Weiffenbach, e eles começam a brincar -- hacking, como podemos chamar agora. And after a couple of hours, they actually start picking up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track. It was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily, because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax, basically. ||||MHz||||||||||||||||||||| Estaba justo a 20 MHz, por lo que podía detectarlo muy fácilmente, porque tenían miedo de que la gente pensara que era un engaño, básicamente. Estava bem em 20 MHz, então você poderia captá-lo muito facilmente, porque eles tinham medo de que as pessoas pensassem que era uma farsa, basicamente. So they made it really easy to find it. So these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal, and people start kind of coming into the office and saying, "Wow, that’s pretty cool.

Can I hear? Wow, that’s great." And before long, they think, "Well jeez, this is kind of historic. Y en poco tiempo, piensan: "Bueno, cielos, esto es algo histórico. We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this. We should record it." And so they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder, and they start recording these little bleep, bleeps. |||||||klobig|||||||||||piep pieps Entonces traen esta grabadora analógica grande y tosca, y comienzan a grabar estos pequeños pitidos, pitidos. E então eles trazem esse grande e desajeitado gravador analógico, e eles começam a gravar esses bips, bips. And they start writing the kind of date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. Y comienzan a escribir el tipo de sello de fecha, sellos de tiempo para cada pequeño pitido que graban. E eles começam a escrever o tipo de carimbo de data, carimbo de hora para cada bip que eles gravam. And they they start thinking, "Well gosh, you know, we’re noticing small little frequency variations here. Y comienzan a pensar: "Bueno, Dios, ya sabes, estamos notando pequeñas variaciones de frecuencia aquí. We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling, if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect. Probablemente podríamos calcular la velocidad a la que viaja el satélite, si hacemos un poco de matemática básica aquí usando el efecto Doppler. Provavelmente poderíamos calcular a velocidade que o satélite está viajando, se fizermos um pouco de matemática básica aqui usando o efeito Doppler. And then they played around with it a little bit more, and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of specialties. And they said, "Jeez, you know, we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it’s farthest away. Y dijeron: "Dios, ya sabes, creemos que en realidad podríamos echar un vistazo a la pendiente del efecto Doppler para averiguar los puntos en los que el satélite está más cerca de nuestras antenas y los puntos en los que está más lejos". That’s pretty cool. And eventually, they get permission -- this is all a little side project that hadn’t been officially part of their job description.

They get permission to use the new, you know, UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room, that they’d just gotten at the APL. |||||||||UNIVAC-Computer|||||||||||||| Obtienen permiso para usar la nueva, ya sabes, computadora UNIVAC que ocupa toda una habitación, que acaban de recibir en el APL. They run some more of the numbers, and at the end of about three or four weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this one little signal, going off on this little side hunch that they’d been inspired to do over lunch one morning. Ejecutan algunos números más, y al final de unas tres o cuatro semanas, resulta que han mapeado la trayectoria exacta de este satélite alrededor de la Tierra, solo escuchando esta pequeña señal, partiendo de esta pequeña corazonada. que se habían sentido inspirados a hacer durante el almuerzo una mañana. A couple weeks later their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them into the room and says, "Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you were working on. |||||||McClure|||||||||||||||||||||||

You’ve figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. Could you go the other way? Você poderia ir para o outro lado? Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground, if you knew the location of the satellite?" And they thought about it, and they said, "Well, I guess maybe you could. Let’s run the numbers here." Hagamos los números aquí". So they went back, and they thought about it. And they came back and said, "Actually, it’ll be easier." And he said, "Oh, that’s great. Because see, I have these new nuclear submarines that I’m building. And it’s really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow, if you don’t know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Y es realmente difícil averiguar cómo hacer que tu misil aterrice justo encima de Moscú, si no sabes dónde está el submarino en medio del Océano Pacífico. So we’re thinking, we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean. Así que pensamos que podríamos lanzar un montón de satélites y usarlos para rastrear nuestros submarinos y averiguar su ubicación en medio del océano. Could you work on that problem? And that’s how GPS was born.

30 years later, Ronald Reagan actually opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform, left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it. 30 años después, Ronald Reagan realmente lo abrió y lo convirtió en una plataforma abierta sobre la que cualquiera podía construir y cualquiera podía venir y construir nueva tecnología que crearía e innovaría sobre esta plataforma abierta, lo dejó abierto para que cualquiera pudiera hacer casi todo lo que quisieran con él. And now, I guarantee you certainly half of this room, if not more, has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space. And I bet you one of you, if not more, has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last -- (Laughter) in the last day or last week, right? (Applause)

And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson, in the power, the marvelous, kind of unplanned emergent, unpredictable power, of open innovative systems. ||||||||||||||||||||emergent|||||| E isso, eu acho, é um grande estudo de caso, uma grande lição sobre o poder, o maravilhoso, tipo de poder emergente não planejado, imprevisível, de sistemas inovadores abertos.

When you build them right, they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of. I mean, here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch, this little passion that had developed, then they thought they were fighting the Cold War, and then it turns out they’re just helping somebody find a soy latte. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||Soja|Soja-Latte Quiero decir, aquí tienes a estos tipos que básicamente pensaron que solo estaban siguiendo esta corazonada, esta pequeña pasión que se había desarrollado, luego pensaron que estaban luchando contra la Guerra Fría, y luego resulta que solo están ayudando a alguien a encontrar un café con leche de soya. . Quero dizer, aqui você tem esses caras que basicamente pensavam que estavam apenas seguindo esse palpite, essa pequena paixão que se desenvolveu, então eles pensaram que estavam lutando contra a Guerra Fria, e então acontece que eles estão apenas ajudando alguém a encontrar um latte de soja . (Laughter)

That is how innovation happens.

Chance favors the connected mind. |begünstigt||| Chance favors the connected mind. El azar favorece a la mente conectada. Thank you very much.

(Applause)