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Exponential Wisdom Episode 16 – Driving Innovation, Part 2

Peter Diamandis and Dan Sullivan discuss strategies to drive creativity in an organization. 

  • Most organizational executives are older. However, historically, creativity comes at a younger age. 
  • ie- Nobel laureates do the bulk of their prize winning work in their late 20’s.
  • When NASA was a young organization in the 60’s, the average engineer was in their 20’s, and from that came striking innovation. No one to limit their thinking. 
  • Since then, the average NASA age has doubled. 
  • Early .com bubble followed the same pattern. 
  • There is a corporate age bias, and being youthful and naive can be an important attribute. 
  • Youth also prevents bias of legacy issues that they are ignorant to. They don’t self censor. 
  • In large organizations, the entrepreneurial are shut down early on and burn out. 
  • National Institute of Health now gives more grants to 70 year old researchers than 20.
  • Fear of failure drives this regression to the uncreative. 
  • Innovation comes from risk and naivity. 
  • First human driver – curiosity. 
  • Fear as the second driver. 
  • Wealth creation is 3.
  • Significance is 4 – people will die and risk all to feel significant. 
  • “find something you would die for and live for it.”
  • How you announce a big bold idea is critical to its existence. It can create an energy that will feed the idea to success.
  • Even team announcements matter. 
  • Darwin spoke of evolutionary pressures. Genetic evolution occurred rapidly in smaller populations. Or in geographic isolation. Finally, rapid environmental change.
  • The above is true for ideas and services. 
  • The threat of competition is a prime example of the rapid environmental change above – disruption. 
  • A corporate example of this was Steve Jobs pulling a small Macintosh team, and geographically isolated them.
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