Innovation is an art that requires peripheral vision, systems-thinking and a bit of chaos. Joi Ito, the head of the MIT Media Lab, has an insightful take on many aspects of today’s pillars of progress, saying that, “it's okay if most of society has plans, but what’s really important for the future of science and technology and the future of just the society, is that people need to have the freedom to be able to have the peripheral vision, [to] look at the innovation on the edges”. In a comprehensive interview with Edge.org, Ito outlined ten basic ideas that drive his thinking.
On the ‘new normal’, complexity and life in a non-linear world
“You can predict the motion of objects using Newton's laws in most circumstances, but when things start to get really fast, really big, and really complex, you find out that Newton's laws are actually local ordinances, and there's a bunch of other stuff that comes into play”.
On systems thinking
“We've been looking at science and technology as trying to make things more efficient, more effective on a local scale, without looking at the system around it. We were looking at objects rather than the system, or looking at the nodes rather than the network.”
On why the internet ‘won’
“The Internet was completely distributed. David Weinberger would use the term 'small pieces loosely joined.' But it was really a decentralized innovation that was somewhat of a kind of working anarchy. As we all know, the Internet won. What the Internet winning was, was the triumph of distributed innovation over centralized innovation. It was a triumph of chaos over control.”
On planning
“The world is now so complex, so fast, so unpredictable, that you can't. Your plans don't really work that well. Every single major thing that's happened, both good and bad, was probably unpredicted, and most of our plans failed. Today, what you want is to have resilience and agility.”
On learning and academia
“True discovery, I think, happens in a very undirected way [...] this sort of discovery as you go along is a really, really important mode of innovation. The problem is, whether you're talking about departments in academia or you're talking about traditional sort of R&D, anything under control is not going to exhibit that behavior. [...] Who thought about the idea of trying to fly a plane in the first place? Those people weren't trying to solve some sort of challenge that was given to them by some sort of RFP, right?”
On ‘silo busting’ and patterns
“You've got to be anti-disciplinary [...] When you focus on something, what you're actually doing is only seeing really one percent of your field of vision [...] because if you're in a discipline and you're worried about peer review and you're knowing more and more about less and less, that's by definition an incremental thing.”
On risk - “The obsession with assessments and the ability to measure. People are afraid. They're afraid of risk, they're afraid of not being able to measure things.”
On communities and networks
“What's different now that we have the Internet is that the emphasis is no longer on man/machine; it's on the community, it's on the network [...] Stop focusing on individuals and start focusing on communities. Stop focusing on top-down and focus more on bottom-up. Stop focusing on single experts and start focusing on the Cloud.”
On IP
“I'm opening up all of our (MIT’s Media Lab) content, the meetings where we show our research used to be closed; I made them open. I'm inviting outsiders in [...] I think it makes some of the sponsors a little bit nervous because many are focused on the intellectual property, but I'm trying to de-emphasize intellectual and emphasize more the network that we’re creating.”
On misfits
“What we're realizing is that a lot of the greatest innovations that we see today are things that wouldn't have gotten approval [...] You don't have to ask permission to innovate anymore [...] What I am very interested in is how you create a group of people who are given the complete freedom to come up with these crazy ideas [...] All my life, I've felt like a misfit. It turns out the world has a lot of misfits.”