An orgy beats a summit
OPINION: Phillip Adams | January 31, 2009
Article from: The Australian
theaustralian.news.com.au
JUST before heading off to Kev's 20/20 Ideas Summit last year I told you of a useful exercise for, yes, ideas.
"If you want to design a new chair don't look at a chair or sit in a chair. Sit on the floor in an empty room and look at a light bulb."That might make you think of a glass chair, a heated chair, an illuminated chair.” And on my return from Canberra, idea’d out, I came upon a far better idea for ideas, an approach to transform not merely chairs, but rooms, houses, cities, entire civilisations. Everything from light bulbs and the generation of power to – well, to everything. I commend it to you, and to Kev.
But first let me suggest it’d be a good idea for you to subscribe to The New Yorker. It’s one of the three magazines I couldn’t live without. The other two? For obvious reasons thissy, wherein I dwell, and The New York Review of Books. Apart from its legendary cartoons, The New Yorker has a habit of publishing splendid essays, going back to John Hershey’s 1946 account of the Hiroshima bombing, and last year there was a bottler by Malcolm Gladwell. In the mag’s Annals of Innovation series, Gladwell demonstrated that great ideas aren’t rare – they can be almost mass-produced. All you need is a few intelligent people and a ringmaster like Nathan Myhrvold who, earlier in his life, started Microsoft’s research division.
Gladwell explains Myhrvold’s approach by describing meetings attended, at his invitation, by groups of brilliant and sometimes eccentric friends. By putting them together he got what cattle breeders know as “hybrid vigour”, with ideas coming from across disciplines from people unconcerned with boundaries. “We may start off talking about refined plastics and end up talking about shoes, and that’s OK,” one of the participants in Myhrvold’s meetings, Casey Tegreene, an electrical engineer with a law degree, says.
Myhrvold gave his meetings the Microsoft-style brand name of Intellectual Ventures. A physicist who read medical journals for fun came up with an entirely new approach for the treatment of malignancy involving a tiny “cancer filter” that, injected into the bloodstream, had the potential to, yes, filter out cancer cells. It turns out that only a few circulating cancer cells cause metastatic cancers and filters could trap them. When a surgeon said that operating theatres needed X-rays that were only “skin deep”, a subcutaneous X-ray was the response. “We could do that.”
Bill Gates became a major investor in IV and attended some meetings. Issues raised included whether a safer form of nuclear energy could be devised. As it happens, one of the original IV collective had been a protégé of the notorious Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, a bloke who’d gone on to work on Star Wars. (Reagan’s anti-missile system, not the movie.) He recalled Teller speculating on the possibility of a “very safe, passive reactor … dead simple, proliferation-resistant with no moving parts”.
Picking up where Teller left off and quick as a missile countdown they came up with a mini-reactor that seemed so “dead simple” that it would eliminate the possibility of the human errors that caused Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Gladwell has it producing something like “one to three gigawatts of power, which is enough to serve a medium-size city … the core would be no more than several metres wide and about 10m long”. Enclosed in a sealed, armoured box it “would work for 30 years without need for refuelling” and would run on thorium, a mildly radioactive material in abundant supply. (IV calculates that the world has enough for 100,000 years.) Even better, it could use the spent fuel from existing nuclear plants. “We have 30 guys working on it,” says Myhrvold.
You get the idea. And they’ve plenty more where that came from. Thanks to a “think tank” approach that groups people who, in normal circumstances, would never meet. Let alone work together.
Kev should email Myhrvold. Ask him to open branch offices in Australia. Or simply round up some of our best and brightest from diverse disciplines or no discipline at all and see what happens.
The 20/20 summit put people together in streams, according to their areas of special interest. This approach is entirely different. Mix ’em up and let ’em rip.
“It was a long dinner,” one of IV’s co-founders recalls. “I thought we were just chewing the rag. But next day the attorney comes up with eight single-spaced pages flagging 30 different inventions from dinner. Dinner!”
Improvements in microchips, in jet engines, in the way neurosurgeons repair aneurysms. And for those with declining eyesight, “automatic battery-powered glasses with a tiny camera that reads the image off the retina and adjusts the fluid-filled lenses automatically, up to 10 times a second”. Scores of projects off and running. Imagine what you’d get from a few long lunches.
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