One Big Idea to Connect the World

By: Emily Haggstrom Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Business

As East clashed with West and ideologies collided during the Cold War, the 1950’s set the stage for an idea that would change the world in unprecedented ways. During this volatile time, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite into orbit, prompting President Eisenhower to create the Advanced Research Project Agency (Arpa) to secure the United States as a leader in the technological arms race. In an effort to funnel information worldwide from terminal-to-terminal, an elite team was assembled and the vision of a data network was finally being realized.

Once the tensions internationally subsided, the 1960’s bore the youthful vitality of the baby-boomer generation, who were maturing into college graduates and changing the very fabric of our culture through seemingly superficial trends in music, literature, sports, and fashion. In contrast, human inventions and innovation were revolutionizing the world in the newest wave of electronic technology. Ideas that had previously only been studied in theory were becoming a reality—the human mind was breaking resistance points and uttering the words, "it can’t be done." In universities and research labs across the country, students, professors, and researchers addressed the areas of information theory, data networks, and packet switching.

The foremost thought leaders on these subjects were brought in by Arpa to create an interconnected network where schools and research centers across the country could merge knowledge. The Arpanet project, led by chief scientist Lawrence Roberts, developed the first computer network linking the University of California, Los Angeles with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara. This core network eventually grew to include Hawaii and institutions in the United Kingdom and Norway.

"Computers at the time were extremely large and very expensive, but I believed our work would be very economic and effective," said Roberts. By linking computers to a network, the group saved excessive computer costs and a tremendous amount of money by sharing a single connection—it was like realizing the cost of paying for an individual consumer phone line. "The cost savings were 15 times less than using a phone line; it seemed like a no brainer," said Roberts.

By 1969, Arpanet facilitated the first successful communication between nodes, or connection points; for the next two years the network grew to 40 computers as it expanded. Not long after, Internet protocol (TCP/IP) addresses were instituted commercializing what we now know as the Internet.

Knowing it would be a large undertaking to manage, Roberts offered the phone companies an opportunity to take over the network for free. But, he was told that the phone networks were not compatible with what Roberts and his team were working on. So, Roberts and his team continued their work and by 1990, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the initial software for the World Wide Web, which would not have been possible without Roberts and his co-founders work on the Arpanet.

Today, with almost two billion people connecting to the Internet worldwide, the system faces new challenges. Network security has become a serious issue with new viruses, spam, software loopholes and authentication problems affecting users around the globe. What most people fail to realize is that as access to the Internet continues to increase, bandwidth is becoming congested, downloads are sluggish, security is vulnerable, and the quality of service to our global village is slowly diminishing.

"The network was designed for the period in which it was built. It really hasn’t changed its structure, only its speed," said Roberts. As the network experiences spikes in performance, packets drop, causing the network to crash and slowing response times. As software becomes enhanced and new products are instituted, demands on the network from downloading, voice calls, and video streaming, which require more bandwidth, will continue to weaken the network.

Recently Roberts, who was a primary architect of packet switching, has developed an effective counter measure device that directs traffic to dramatically improve responsiveness, throughput, and relieves congestion on the networks. His newest venture, Anagram, routes Internet traffic to control bandwidth so that spikes on the network are reduced to increase speed, reduce delays and eliminate jitter, an end-to-end delay variation between packets. By adjusting individual usage rates, Roberts’ device can equalize capacity between peer-to-peer (P2P) users.

The product has been heavily utilized by Internet service providers (ISP) across Asia who have moved quickly to expand their networks by testing the software, realizing its value, and then implementing the product to enhance their current coverage. The product is also very valuable in higher education where Anagram can evaluate what programs are being used over school networks to categorize and prioritize them based on what packets are slowing the system and then redistributing them based on their priority. By looking at every packet and reviewing the traffic level, it is two to five times cheaper for ISP’s to use Anagram’s device than to re-packet their systems.

"Service should be based on equality, not byte caps. It should be equality by price range, that way there are no caps on wireless users based on what they pay for," said Roberts. "That’s a much better model." "The benefits from this new approach to packet traffic control are numerous, and allow networks to finally support extremely demanding new applications, eliminate the artifact and distortion in voice and video, improve the performance of data applications, guarantee capacity for priority applications, relieve networks from the imbalance caused by multi-flow applications like P2P, and allow each project, department, or application to share a common network without being impacted by the other classes of activities," he said.

Engineering Time and Creativity

By: Eli Regalado Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Business

Although it was a typical Monday morning, in a typical executive boardroom, Steve Wozniak is not your typical kind of guy. If you’ve never met Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple and a self-proclaimed gadget freak, most would assume that the conversation would be difficult to comprehend or even dull. Yet Wozniak is surprisingly playful, and his sometimes enigmatic personality is quite refreshing. The man keeps you on your toes—from his watch to his curiosity, this was one interview ICOSA was happy to engineer.

ICOSA: What have you been up to recently?

WOZNIAK: Most recently I’ve been working with a company that is replacing hard disks with solid state chips. It’s a thing that everyone who has a camera is very familiar with, but we are doing it on a big scale with data centers consisting of hundreds of thousands of servers and hard disks. This company, Fusion-io is so successful—it’s like being with another legendary hit like a Cisco or Apple. It’s not that well known by people yet, but boy is it taking over the Internet servers.

ICOSA: From what I’ve heard, you’re quite the prankster. Why is a sense of humor important to you?

WOZNIAK: The best pranks to me are usually the ones that take a lot of time and effort to set up. It’s a pleasure of mine. My mother always said to treat life nicely and to have a sense of humor. I always made sure to build a lot of fun into my work so that I have breaks for fun and take time to laugh. I’m convinced that a little bit of misbehaving and crossing the boundaries of things you’re not supposed to, is what leads to creative thinking. When I was in school and when I was working for Hewlett Packard or doing Apple, I always believed you should have a lot of fun around your work.

ICOSA: Our magazine’s entire focus is on connection and collaboration. How have these two words shaped your life and career?

WOZNIAK: Connections with others have given me the guidance to have a direction to know if something is right. Even though I was very inward as a person and very independent, you hear things everywhere you go. When you hear people talking to other people, you can pick up a queue about the world. I was picking things up from other people when I was way too shy to actually develop them.

When I was younger, if I got interested in anything, like a Ham Radio license, my father, an electrical engineer, would help me but he never pushed me. He was there to work with me as a partner. Later on in school, I was lucky that one teacher saw that I was too brilliant for his electronics class so he arranged for me to program computers at a local company where an engineer would work with me and show me how to feed the programs in. It was where I wrote my first programs. I was lucky because the company was willing to allow a high school student to come in, supervised by an engineer, and use their computer because we didn’t have computers in high school. That was a type of collaboration between business and education that you rarely find, and the teacher was smart enough to get those connections outside of school.

Then there’s Apple. I worked on project after project with Steve (Jobs) because we wanted to build. Steve and I saw this terminal talking on the Arpanet, which was later commercialized to become the modern day Internet, and I said, "Oh my God, I had to have it." Well, I had no money, and Steve had no money so when you have no money, no savings account, and no rich relatives, we found that no one could loan us money. So we went home and built it with parts that were basically free. We just had to find a way to do it. So really my education and my evolution of technical designs were enhanced because I was just doing it with a close friend. And, in the end, when I had it, I showed it off to the world. Basically, I was collaborating with the world, and that was my motivation.

ICOSA: In your book iWoz you said that your dad taught you that electrical devices could do something good for people and take society to a whole new level. How has this statement come true in your life?

WOZNIAK: In the book, I was talking about how my father spoke about how technology— that it had good sides and bad sides—like how one might discover something more about the atom or might create the atomic bomb. There are different ways to look at things. Everything has its positives and negatives. My father always questioned, "What is the reason? Why do people want to be engineers? Why are engineers important?" I knew I just wanted to be one of those people who made things better for people. I wasn’t thinking about what the military needs to get a rocket into space and that kind of stuff; I thought about the transistor radio. The radio was just such a beautiful technology, and it gave me music all night long. I could sleep and hear the songs of the day. So, when I grew up and became an engineer, I was still driven by that foundational theory that I could make things good for the normal person’s home through technology. I knew I wasn’t going to be a theoretical engineer, but a practical engineer because I wanted to build devices that you could actually interact with—tune things, push buttons and they do things they are supposed to do. That was so key in my thinking.

ICOSA: What other breakthroughs do you feel have changed society in your lifetime?

WOZNIAK: The personal computer, the Internet and access to the Internet are key breakthroughs. But networking advances where we were able to switch packets and then get high speed to our homes was crucial to that. Today the whole computer is in such a tiny package. I look at it and I’m in awe to this day and I wonder how much of a computer is in there and how many sensors? I think it is incredible how displays and input devices can even sense direction like a gyroscope does. And now it’s portable, useful, and it has changed my life more than the actual computer did.

But then there are cell phones. Even if it was just a dumb phone that just made calls—my gosh! It used to be in the old days that you had a powerful AM radio transmitter, and 50,000 watts was the most power you could get. You could probably hear signals across the country. Smaller stations were local, shared the same channels, and only worked in a small area. When cell phones came along and small little cells shared the same frequencies, it thereby multiplied the number of people who could use the phones and be portable. I was always into portability. Anything that made you feel freer and connected was good to me. Now we have all these smart phones that can browse the Internet and retrieve email. Really the iPhone is the first one that changed that world. So that was a big one too.

ICOSA: In regards to Facebook, with connections and relationships between people growing, how do you see this affecting society as we become increasingly connected?

WOZNIAK: Facebook is today’s modern creative person’s outlet. It used to be you built your own little devices, but now people are building their own web pages. People are establishing those links and connecting to the world. It’s really like the world is based around people—what they are doing and who they know. It’s a much more interesting type of world than the traditional structured business thinking. Social networks are basically... every new friend you meet is free. It’s like you get a new gift for free if you have something in common and you start sharing ideas. That is the gift.

ICOSA: So, let’s talk a little about education. Where do you see gaps in our current education system?

WOZNIAK: I used to talk a lot about the gaps in education. After Apple, I secretly taught fifth grade and above for eight years. I saw a lot of things that were wrong, and when I would suggest ideas about what I thought needed to be fixed, it did not get fixed. It hasn’t been fixed my entire life.

For the last 50 years everybody is always talking about how education doesn’t have enough money and that it doesn’t do a good enough job. Well, in my opinion, it’s worse now than it was 50 years ago. Schools, I think, are always going to be shorthanded because it’s sort of like taxation without representation. Families with no students don’t want to pay more money. However, families with students care about schools a lot and want to pay more money for schools, but only one third of families have kids. So, a family of five gets no more votes than a family of two and that means votes turn into money. So, it’s short-handed—the students never get counted.

ICOSA: For an engineer you seem remarkably concerned with people and concerned with society. Where did that come from?

WOZNIAK: I wish I knew. I grew up quiet, and maybe because people left me out of their society, I had a lot of time to think things out for myself. I’ve always tried to be a really good person. Aside from being an engineer, I wanted to be a good person, and a good person is one who takes care of others, like a family. It’s like how Hewlett Packard took care of everyone during the recession when they gave people one day off every two weeks rather than let people go. I tend to care about the people who don’t have much. I don’t know why it gets to me. I was never one of those people. I was so lucky I didn’t even have to worry about what I was going to do for a job after I got out of college. I just always knew. I really think one of the most important things you can do is to relate and help someone person-to-person.

ICOSA: What do you want our readers to know about you?

WOZNIAK: Right now I am doing a lot of public speaking on different categories and topics. I used to be afraid of people and now I just like meeting them, talking to them, finding out what they’re about and sharing stories with them. Because of Apple’s success, people hold me in high esteem. They are always very nice and friendly to me. I’m very blessed.

I also think about how fortunate I am when I’m in small venues listening to music. Music has always been an important part of my life. In high school, they taught us how to listen to songs and analyze them as poetry. I learned there were messages in songs that I never would have caught reading the words. I wasn’t really into literature so it just stunned me to listen and hear the words. I got into Bob Dylan in his early years and his words were just so incredible. I wondered how a human being could write words like that. I use a lot of the words as little guides in my life—when I come across something in life where I ask, "How do I handle this?" I often relate it to a certain phrase in a song that applies to my situation.

Lastly, everybody should know we’re all sharing in the same life. We’re all drivers on the highway and we’re all going places, some different and some together. We’re all a team. We’re all on the same side. We’re all working together. I love that, and I smile at people wherever I go. I think, "You’re all just a part of this world that I’m in. You’re in the same game. Hooray for us!

Charles Adelman

By: Jordan Paul & Allison Wachtel Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Business Charles Adelman has always been a man of the future. It’s easy to understand why. He has an energy that can’t be pinned down. It’s an energy that is simply too great for the present or the mundane. Most people who say they want to change the world meet with looks of skepticism; when Adelman says it, you are compelled to ask if his crusade has room for one more. He is a driving force, incapable of stagnation, who changes everything he touches. And now, with his groundbreaking global media and technology company, Adelman Enterprises, he is on a path to connect the world.

A lifelong member of the film and television industry, Adelman is no stranger to the media’s capacity to transform its audiences. At the age of 10, he began working as an actor. A talkative, imaginative child, he immediately recognized the entertainment field as the best avenue by which to share his vast ideas with a captive audience.

After years of balancing academics with his acting career, he began writing screenplays at age 16. His passions led him to film school, where he continued to explore the avenues for communication and innovation that entertainment media offered. In 1997, he graduated from the acclaimed University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts with a degree in Film and Television.

Soon after obtaining his degree at USC, Adelman co-founded the DVD authoring and distribution company Anthem Digital. He honed his creative and directorial skills on the feature film thriller 2:13, with Mark Thompson, Kevin Pollak, Dwight Yokam, and Little Fockers star Teri Polo. To the untrained eye, he’d found success.

But what one quickly learns after spending time with Adelman is that, to him, success is a dynamic and infinite concept. He is constantly looking past his surroundings, building on them mentally, until he has elevated them to their greatest potential. And he saw too much promise in his own field to remain content with his current successes. He didn’t want to simply work in the entertainment industry—he wanted to revolutionize it!

His solution was to found Adelman Enterprises in April, 2010, a pioneering company that would present his own passions to the public. The global media and technology organization would encompass a powerful duo of television and entertainment technology projects: the Anthus Channel, an independent broadcast television network dedicated to heath, wellness, positivity, and global philanthropy; and Menache Adelman, a motion capture special effects company built around a newly developed technology to be utilized in movies, video games, and eventually, nearly every industry worldwide.

Adelman Enterprises was founded as a public shell company with the intention of funding each of these ventures through an initial public offering. Adelman believed that the most effective way to generate key interest and startup capital was to appeal directly to the public. "We discussed this project with several venture capital groups who wanted ultimately to own the venture or who just didn’t have the capital resources to back our company. We soon realized that the message of our network and of Adelman Enterprises itself has a great deal of public appeal, and an IPO would offer us far greater opportunities to play to our strengths," explains Adelman.

THE ANTHUS CHANNEL

Today, Adelman and his staff are hard at work on their most ambitious project yet: an independent broadcast television network centering on health, wellness, positivity, and philanthropy. The Anthus Channel, which takes its name from a mythological Greek character who, after death, was reborn as a songbird, will launch later this year, with a queue of shows promoting individual health and global well-being. The fundamental concept isn’t unheard of. It’s a unifying wish, a human wish; Adelman simply plans to harness it.

What he envisions, however, is more than just a line-up of shows centering on health and humanitarianism. His vision is one of transformation, of an all-encompassing new culture focused not on society’s predicaments but on its potential—its inherent power to change, unite, and evolve. The premium that Adelman himself places on unity is reflected in the structure of the network itself. The 24-hour programming schedule is filled with familiar television programming models—cooking and reality shows, dramas, sitcoms—"clad" in the healthy new "garb" of his vision for worldwide well-being and positivity. And so, at home in his field of media and entertainment, Adelman begins his revolution.

Douglas Ridley, chief operating officer at Adelman Enterprises, has his own long-standing dedication to the kinds of nonprofit and charitable goals that Adelman envisions for the company. As a former Rotary Club president and a member of Rotary International since 2005, Ridley has devoted years to international projects such as the development of clean water sources and the eradication of poverty and polio, as well as organizations devoted to enriching the lives of children, like Little League and Boys and Girls Clubs. He sees Adelman Enterprises not only as a platform for Adelman’s visions, but also as an opportunity to broaden the reach of already existing charities and nonprofit organizations.

With his philanthropic involvements united with Adelman’s experience in the media, Ridley is confident in the company’s ability to effect change on a global scale. "For years, the popular media has been used to influence behavior and to sell products," he says. "That is the reason why Hollywood’s stars smoked cigarettes for so long and why fast food is in every television show. Imagine though, if we could use that media in the same capacity, but to promote good, to encourage people to take care of themselves, and to take care of the world around them. It would be nothing short of world-changing."

But beyond its programming, at the core of the Anthus Channel is a powerful, innovative social network, a community for people who share Adelman’s philosophies and yearning for a brighter world. "Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with the Internet," explains Adelman. "They view it as a threat, much like the record companies did in the 1990s." The Anthus Channel plans to break down those walls by launching the network on three platforms simultaneously: television broadcast, the Internet, and mobile systems. In addition to providing valuable opportunities for the public to interact with and influence programming on the Anthus Channel, this multi-platform accessibility will allow for a greater number of people around the world to experience Anthus programming even before the channel is carried by local cable providers.

The network will unite already existing health and wellness communities with new forums helmed by the Anthus Channel and Adelman Enterprises, creating an avatar-based, globally accessible, fundamentally creative medium for the transmission of ideas and information. This collaboration will make the network home to an extensive store of content. "It’s almost difficult to comprehend the extent of the innovations that our social network will set into motion," says Adelman. "It’s one thing to build a next-generation social community, but it’s another to be a partner in the technology that allows consumers, advertisers, and broadcasters to shape both products and environments."

But Adelman’s visions for his network aren’t only of a united community of viewers. Woven throughout the Anthus Channel’s social network will be rich opportunities for advertisers and related industries. "Why should companies rely on market research and focus groups when they can interact directly with consumers?" asks Adelman. "The network we’re creating will give businesses a unique opportunity to communicate directly with their target audiences, to develop products and services that the public really wants, and to innovate on pace with a changing global community."

This capacity for business and interpersonal connection is the same reason Adelman decided to take his company public in the first place. His vision is of a company and a community that bypasses intermediaries, refusing to re-tread established paths of commerce and communication in order to construct new bridges with fresh materials to revolutionary places. "This is the reason we’re here," he says eagerly. "This company has a vision for something that will transcend any model that’s currently in use, and the only way we can put it into full practice is by connecting directly with the people we reach."

MENACHE ADELMAN

The final element in Adelman’s vision carries an impact of equal innovative consequence. Adelman Enterprises’ media technology branch, Menache Adelman, is developing a revolutionary method for measuring the movements of an object to new levels of accuracy with minimal cost. As of 2010, Menache Adelman holds exclusive patents on radio frequency motion capture, or RF Mo-Cap.

Traditionally, if a production required the tracking of human movement, actors in suits dotted with reflective tags akin to luminous ping pong balls would move and interact in front of cameras that captured signals from the sensors. This technology was developed and refined by media technology pioneer Alberto Menache in the early 1990s. However, this older technology, still used today in films such as Lord of the Rings and Avatar, has a few lingering but substantial problems: it is very time consuming, expensive, and inaccurate.

The process begins on a darkened, environmentally controlled stage. Once an actor’s movements are captured, the data must be sent to a company that can take the resulting digital stick figures and make them into characters like Lord of the Rings’ Gollum or the Avatar Na’avi. The cost of "fixing" this data usually exceeds the cost of the recording itself, limiting the use of motion capture technology to projects that can afford the substantially expanded budget it requires.

Menache studied this technology and realized that it could be improved. Instead of using the familiar ping pong-esque reflectors, he created radio frequency tags, similar to those attached to retail merchandise. With these new developments, he created a patented algorithm that records the location of an object bearing the tags in three dimensional space. The technology, which pings data 500 times per second, is accurate to a millimeter from a distance of up to two football fields from the subject, allowing for a degree of flexibility unheard of with traditional optical infrared motion capture methods.

The system, whose adaptability and 85 percent lower costs will broaden its user base to a nearly infinite degree, introduces motion capture technology into fields in which it was previously an unfeasible pipe dream. With the need to employ a second company to "fix" the data eliminated, this technology now becomes feasible for use in any television, film, or video game project with minimal cost.

"This is what I love about working with Chuck," says Ridley. "He’s a futurist. Most people would stop after developing the ability to dominate the fields of cinema and virtual gaming. Chuck is looking to change the world. He sees this technology as the missing link between existing technology and virtual reality—it’s the Rosetta Stone for changing the world we live in to the world of Star Trek."

With applications in home entertainment, gaming, security interfaces, and even ergonomics, Adelman may not be far off. "Imagine what you could do with technology that can track any object in three-dimensional space over time with that much accuracy. This changes everything," says Adelman.

Now, with this revolutionary technology at his side and a television network in his "holster," Adelman is poised to bring Adelman Enterprises to the top of the public consciousness. Similar to entertainment industry cornerstones like Sony or Lucasfilm, Adelman Enterprises will provide production media content while bringing to market a development that changes how artists create their work.

ADELMAN ENTERPRISES: THE FUTURE

Through the Anthus Channel’s positive, wellness-oriented programming and the revolutionary media technology of Menache Adelman, Adelman Enterprises is poised to usher in an entirely new era of communication and global well-being. But at its core, Adelman Enterprises is rooted in more than technological and commercial innovation. The components of Adelman Enterprises are harnessing the creative power of an entire community—perhaps an entire world— to collaborate and evolve on a new level.

"The power that today’s media is capable of harnessing is undeniable," says Adelman. "Even with our current technologies, we can communicate more quickly and in more varied modes than ever before. Through the efforts of Menache Adelman and the Anthus Channel, we are carrying that torch of ever-growing communication and unity, but we’re also reversing the tide of negativity that still plagues today’s media. We’re channeling the power of people to help make the world the place that we know it can be."

Dr. Jordan Paul is a psychotherapist, author, business consultant and co-host of Connections Radio at www.vividlife.me. His books include the best selling, Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved by You? and Becoming Your Own Hero.

To contact Dr. Jordan Paul please call or email him at: 303-440-1444, [email protected].

Allison Wachtel recently graduated from California Lutheran University with a B.A. in English. Her interest in global wellness has led to an internship in Public Relations at Adelman Enterprises.

Where Good Ideas Come From

By: Gayle Dendinger Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Inspirations In the previous issue of ICOSA, I wrote an article titled Overdue for Do where I addressed the momentum we are gaining from the coverage of the Biennial of the Americas and our cover story on immigration with Rupert Murdoch, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the Partnership for New York City.

Continuing the momentum, I had the privilege to interview author Steven Johnson who has written such books as Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate; Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter; and The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. But the book I am most inspired by is Johnson’s most recent book, Where Good Ideas Come From.

While intrigued by many of the concepts in his book, I am most interested in the "incubation setting" where people with "half ideas" can converge to create better ideas or have that "eureka moment." And, I am inspired with how Johnson processes ideas.

IS AN IDEA "in its time" as opposed to "ahead of its time?"

Johnson says that a filtering process plays into ideas, and that the hard part is to figure out which ideas ultimately stick. For example, let’s say that you’re out talking to people and somebody mentions something. Then, you have a conversation with someone else who is in a different field and perhaps they mention something similar that reminds you of the first topic. Johnson says that when you have that feeling that you keep coming across the same idea through various inputs, the idea is usually "ripe."

CUTTING THROUGH THE NOISE TO REACH SERENDIPITY

Johnson concisely expresses how leaders can cut through the data overload, or noise, if you will, and use the noise to their advantage. One of the cross-cutting themes in Good Ideas is the importance of serendipity and of error in leading to new discoveries, and he uses the invention of photography to make his point. He says, "Photography was invented by an accidental mess. When you’re in too sterile of an environment, you know exactly what you are looking for and your research is directed to one path because you’re locked and committed to one idea. If the idea needs to grow, evolve or get refined, then a little noise is needed in that process. You need a little bit of a surprise, messiness, and accidental connection – and that’s the virtue."

Part of the noise reduction has to have, according to Johnson, a "coffeehouse phase" where people from diverse backgrounds can have free flowing conversations that are not too structured. It is where you are likely to stumble across an interesting thing that helped move, enhance or push your idea in a new direction. "It’s the dialogue between those different perspectives that can be really helpful to ideas," he reiterates.

Creating ideas and cutting through the noise is what apparently gets us to that next level of a great idea—the slow hunch. Johnson purports that when you look at great ideas historically, there is almost always a slow hunch phase where the idea is not fully flushed out and the idea is hard to diffuse. For example, as a child, Jack Dorsey would listen to emergency calls on a radio. As years passed, he found a way to build a software platform to send out status updates—today known as Twitter. "So many interesting ideas have this long pre-history, like Dorsey’s, where they start as hunches. The trick is to create mechanisms where hunches can be cultivated and preserved."

Oftentimes however, the challenge for smaller organizations and start-ups is that they live in a hunch time—they don’t really know what the business is yet, but they’ve created a space where they try to find it. Johnson says the advantage of a smaller organization is that it is easier to create a culture that encourages a fluid exchange of hunches and perpetuates people saying, "You know I’ve got this interesting idea! I’m not sure where this leads but what do you guys think?" "Basically, it’s easier to come together in a smaller organization because people have an opportunity to talk to each other," Johnson says.

CONNECTING VS. PROTECTING IDEAS

As Johnson and I discussed the dynamics within small and large organizations, we drifted to the topic of connecting and protecting ideas, and how people and organizations can bridge the gap between reward and fear.

What Johnson tries to demonstrate in his book is that a good driver of innovation is people borrowing and building off of other people’s ideas, instead of starting from scratch. "All innovation is collaborative by definition," says Johnson. He argues that the problem we have with market-driven innovation is that there is this natural tendency to close off and protect ideas because people are afraid that their idea will be stolen. "A certain amount of protection is reasonable, but every time a protective wall is built around an idea, whether it’s being kept a secret or whether it’s wrapped in intellectual property protection, we limit the ways in which ideas can be transformed, reshaped and turned into something even better or something totally different."

LET’S GET DOING

I agree with Johnson. He inspires my work here at ICOSA. And as we expand our work to include the Do Tank this fall, I will be using and promoting his work.

I believe that the Do Tank is In Its Time. I believe that we have cut through the noise and are well on our way to serendipity. We, here at ICOSA, have had a hunch for a long time that we are overdue for "do," and we are ready to move forward, fully engaged in prompting change locally, nationally, and internationally. We will have the opportunity to work with others’ ideas and build upon those concepts by facilitating a flow of ideas that allow participants to take action.