Last month the New Yorker held it’s annual conference: Stories from the Near Future. They’ve setup a videocast for the talks. Below is the video of Malcolm Gladwell speaking about innovation, genius, and the mismatch problem in his talk, Reinventing Invention.
See Reinventing Invention in pristine MP4 format.
A new Malcolm Gladwell article up at the New Yorker illustrates that inventions, scientific discovery, and ideas aren’t locked down in the minds of a few genius, rather they’re simply waiting for the initiated: In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?
In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies. He thought that if he brought lots of very clever people together he could reconstruct that moment by the Grand River.
The article focuses on a theme that his new book is going to cover (coming November 18, 2008), the difference in results between an individual genius working on a project and collaborative brainstorming by many intelligent people. It turns out, you don’t have to be a genius to come up with something brilliant, you just need to get in a room with a lot of other smart people and bounce the ideas around.
Paul Dunay, of Buzz Marketing for Technology has a recap of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent speech at the World Innovation Forum about, what else, innovation.
Paul found an opportunity to speak with Gladwell during the conference and recorded his interview.
Gladwell illustrates some of his points from his book, The Tipping Point, and what I found to be quite interesting, how the “last mile problem of marketing” is still trouble for marketers.
“The last mile in word of mouth marketing is personal relationships. At the end of the day I’m most powerfully influenced by those I know, respect and love,” explains Gladwell. The most complicated marketing scheme in the world won’t have a very strong affect on any given individual if the people that that individual trusts aren’t moved by the product.
Gladwell also talks a little bit about his new book. He says it’s about exceptional performers and high achievers, how they got there, and what we can learn from them.
Listen to the “Buzz Marketing for Technology’s” interview with Malcolm Gladwell.