Ideators

Their words and voices

Piero Formica

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781802628319
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Wissenskapital

In an age where knowledge is so easily disseminated, the modern-day workplace, and roles as we know them, are beginning to transform. As ideation establishes itself as a concept, if put into action, it could help to create and form a more transformative entrepreneurial future generation. It will be the actions of many ideators that will motivate and contribute to the post-pandemic economy, and this becomes even more tangible as fewer people occupy predetermined and fixed positions in companies.

By moving from the economy of mass production to knowledge-driven entrepreneurship, value creation is embedded in the lifeblood of ideas in action (the 'ideation'), combined, shared with investors, disseminated territorially, and adapted to the conditions of individual communities.

Ideators: Their Words and Voices presents the concept of ideation and its applications in a thorough yet accessible format, focusing on the process of idea creation, and also presents a series of protagonists of creativity and innovation who will reflect on their own career changes.

Part 1

Chapter 1

Ideators: The Revolutionaries of Knowledge in Action

Piero Formica

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

(from Socrates to Eleanor Roosevelt)

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

(John Steinbeck)

Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as a man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.

(Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism)

Prologue: The Ideation Field

Enlarging the field of ideation and making it available to a multitude frees humanity from that greatest atrocity which is the inner nature of work in the industrial society. Without ideation, people could die, if not of starvation, of cognitive decline. There are many ways of conceiving. The classic economists, among whom Nicolas de Condorcet (1743–1794) stands out in this respect, urged the reading of novels as an intellectual vehicle for making important decisions, including engaging in the process of ideation. Regrettably, as argued by the philosopher and political activist Simon Weil (1909–1943) (Zaretsky, 2020), working conditions prevent workers from thinking. A reflection shared and taken up, as we shall see, by the poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923–2012) in her speech on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

At the beginning of the first industrial revolution, between 1760 and 1780, Adam Smith (1723–1790), the ‘father of economics’, was concerned about the condition of work that mortifies intellectual qualities:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.

(Smith, 1776)

Later, as machines progress, they assist or replace human muscles in their work, the Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) wrote in 1829:

It is the age of machinery….; the age which…. teaches, and practices the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance…. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster… There is no end to machinery… For all earthly, and for some unearthly, purposes, we have machines.

( Lapham's Quarterly, 2021)

In a tomorrow bereft of new ideas sprouting from the human brain, machines could ideate. That would be the case if human beings, concerned only with making machines germinate ideas, were no longer concerned with thinking. It will be the mind-expanding ideation of many ideators that will give impetus to the post-pandemic economy. This goal is reachable if fewer and fewer people occupy predetermined and fixed positions in companies. Ideation requires flying like butterflies from one side of the organisation to the other. It is the movements of people that will raise waves of disturbance, anticipating change, in the flat sea of the hierarchical organisation. Insights can be expected by looking at the industries that, according to Nobel Prize winner for Economics Michael Spence (2021),

seem poised for a period of extraordinarily rapid growth. Specifically, in sectors with a combination of technological possibilities, available capital, and high demand for creative new solutions, conditions will be highly favorable for investment and new company formation. Three leading candidates are the application of digital technologies across the entire economy, biomedical science (and its applications in health care and beyond), and technologies that address the various challenges to sustainability, especially those associated with climate change. Elevated growth in this context means not just sector growth, but high levels of entrepreneurial activity and innovation, a plethora of new fast-growing companies, and large inflows of capital carrying higher expected rates of return.

The research ground has been sown in these areas, and the entrepreneurial harvest can be plentiful if the ideators also act as knowledge entrepreneurs.

By moving from the economy of mass production to knowledge-driven entrepreneurship, value creation is embedded in the lifeblood of ideas in action (the ‘ideation’), combined, shared with investors, disseminated territorially and adapted to the conditions of individual communities. Knowledge multiplies when it is shared. Its energy feeds the mental models that map knowledge. Collaborative efforts are incentives not to collude but to combine cooperation and competition to increase the forces working for the general interest of the knowledge society.

Knowledge clusters occupy the very centre of a society attentive to new ideas, findings and opportunities. Entrepreneurial ideators, embedded in knowledge clusters, devise commercially viable and growing knowledge-intensive businesses unbounded by geography and culture. Adept at tapping into the global talent pool, those ideators contribute to raising and crossing cultural integration and creative entrepreneurship. That is how knowledge clusters take shape as uniquely human twenty-first-century urban ecology driven by the culture of entrepreneurialism imbued with a passion for ideating (Formica, 2003).

The Double Track of the Ideation Process

Ideation is an adventure. In order to conceive, do we get on the train that runs along the data track? Or do we take the train on the track of subjective experience, of the sphere of thoughts that are alien to what Adam Smith called ‘political arithmetic’ that tinkers with numbers (Williams, 2020)? There are bare facts and data, supposed, apparent, accepted, expected, reported. There is, therefore, a polygamous love that forces us to proceed with setbacks and reversals. Our magic lamp to take the best route is curiosity, which challenges conventional wisdom.

From the window of the first train, we see what is: data and thoughts that descend from them. We are trying to map better, in more detail, the known territory. We started with hypotheses, then confirmed by data. In the end, we got measurements, Enrico Fermi would say. Travelling on the second train, we envision the panorama we would like to see. Our adventure does not involve mapping what exists, but in conjecturing and, if anything, discovering new territories: what we would like reality to be.

In The Little Prince (1943/1995), the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) pens: ‘adults are obsessed with facts and figures and fail to understand the real meaning of things’. Facts that narrow the field of imagination can lead to confusing one thing for another: in the words of the Little Prince, to mistaken for a hat a boa snake that has swallowed an elephant. To not make such gross errors, reading helps us peel a book and discover the very precious part under the ‘peel’ (librum is the inner part of the tree bark). It is precious because it is white and can therefore be used for writing on. Those who do so annotate, comment in the margins, reproduce real or imagined things with marks. These are the marginalia that readers over the centuries have produced for sometimes personal, sometimes public purposes. In Il libro altruista: Metodo per la generazione di un'opera annotata ad elevata fruibilità, Vincenzo Naclerio (2020) opens the debate on the vast panorama of marginalia. The stories written by a humanist might entice a scientist to annotate new musings and vice versa. Beyond the boundaries drawn by the author, one enters the vast territories of the reader's imagination where extraordinary works of thought can manifest themselves. Einstein said that reading the Scottish philosopher David Hume's writings helped him formulate the theory of special relativity. In the oasis of reading and writing, one pauses quietly and thinks deeply, making ideas collide and then merge into unexpected combinations. A book is a vehicle for the transmission, the sharing of ideas and their constructive contrast.

Ideators, Those Who Sprout Ideas: The Case of the World's First Geographic Society

Ideators turn knowledge into action that yields in the marketplace innovation-based advantage. Ideators spontaneously gather in a community of practices, a constituency of many different characters. This community harnesses creativity and promotes the cross-fertilisation of ideas. A compromise between individuality and group harmony reduces personal antagonism induced by affective conflicts and facilitates confrontation through cognitive conflicts whose intellectual disagreement produces energy conveyed to the ideation process.

The seventeenth-century geographer, Father Vincenzo Coronelli (1650–1718) of the Order of Friars Minor in Venice, was the catalyst of a community of practice, the Cosmographic Academy of the Argonauts. Under various forms of participation, that community included princes, illustrious savants all over Europe, merchant-politicians and explorers who were the vanguard of European power. Thanks to geographic information obtained inside the community, Coronelli improved his cartographic and printing workshops in the Franciscan convent in Venice.

Traditions, beliefs, norms, values and artefacts: these are the seeds of the culture that cultivates the mind. When culture yearns to be the engine of evolution, it goes around new experiences, it runs ‘all the orb of science’, as the philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) would say. He recommended young people to compare all ideas ‘because the variety of doctrines helps discoveries and advises the right choice’ (Tommaseo, 1985).

The co-evolution of ideas (the content) and their historical, social, organisational and institutional forms (the context) have been the mainspring of progress throughout history. It is the stream of human activity, its flow of energy as described by Isabel Paterson (1886–1961) in The God of the Machine (1943/2003), her treatise on political philosophy, that makes possible the co-evolution featuring one civilisation from the next. Fifty years or so later, the time had come to reappraise that theme. In their celebrated book, The Knowledge Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) portrayed the Paterson's flow of energy as a flow of knowledge.

The energy circuit of the sailing-ship era or that of the iron-hulled, ocean-going steamship age differs widely from today. The relentless technological changes and the ever-changing geopolitical and geo-economic maps are the results of the creativity of independent thinking, which, in turn, is prompted by the changes. Cognitive skills come into play, such as rethinking, unlearning and learning several skills at once, transferring the application of skills mastered in one domain to another. The game is played on several levels: collaborating to co-create; critiquing one's ideas as well as those of others in order to stimulate new thinking; comparing the problem under investigation with something else that has little or nothing in common in leading to new insights and results diverging from those expected; wandering with thought to seek inspiration. The players in the field are the ideators, people capable of generating ideas that turn into ventures, not just entrepreneurial ones. They are people who prioritise well-being, with themselves and with the community, in the sense of altruism, which Adam Smith expounded on in his famous essay Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). The ideators replace the workers of past industrial revolutions. The current one is the revolution of knowledge in action, which requires people to conceive and move original ideas.

Renaissance Workshops

A breeding ground for new ideas, Renaissance workshops were mainly envisaged as an ideation field, in the sense that the ideas moved ahead up to cross the finish line of entrepreneurship. It is as if those workshops were equipped with a forge to make the ideas incandescent, and then worked until they turned into enterprises. Likewise, today's idea places should be equipped with an ideal furnace that heats insights, inspirations and mental representations, and then submit them to the entrepreneurial process. That is how in the Renaissance workshops innovative ventures in art, culture, science, and at their points of intersection were forged.

Family habit, societal norms and educational institutions accustom us to be exposed to in-depth teaching. We enter the well of knowledge and descend it to apprehend more and more in detail. At the bottom of the well, what has been learned to be true is a dogma to which we cling. Isabel Paterson (1943/2003) wrote:

Theories, when they have gained credence, become vested interests. The prestige and livelihood of schools and teachers are bound up in them; they tend toward enclosed doctrine, not open to fresh information.

In the meantime, emerging evidence to the contrary has come into sight. To comprehend and assimilate it, we should go back up the well and come out to see the stars of change. Dogma, now turned into superstition, prevents us from doing so. We move only defensively to consolidate the fundamental tenets of formalised knowledge.

Dogmatism Lockdowns Novelties

Daring and subversive ideators escape the teaching that would confine them to the enclosure of defensive incrementalism and take the path of learning. Having reached the high peaks of ideation, they are the ones who discover the sources of a new knowledge river flowing through creative territories. During the navigation along a course that swerves from the route traced by today's knowledge, those inquisitive minds are impatient to grasp the reality that the 21st century is revealing – which requires intelligence and knowing how to make choices that diverge from the capacity to understand the past century reality. Downstream, the river navigation continues until it brings bunches of ideas to the bank dotted with gardens where the spirit of a new entrepreneurial renaissance is cultivated, with nurseries fed by the waters of that river. In the nurseries, ideas are welcomed by the opportunities that translate them into transformative actions. The events that unfold from ideation are characterised by complex relationships in a chaotic and teeming melting pot of cultures and provenances.

Prominent Advocates for Learning: David Hume, Giovanni Papini and Mahatma Gandhi

David Hume, in the eighteenth century, wrote:

Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company.

(Of Essay – Writing. https://davidhume.org/texts/empw/ew)

1919

The Italian ...