I’m Chip Wood, your instructor and this class is about discovery and new ways of thinking about

specific area of interest. It is a course to teach you process methods that get you out of the mental
‘box’ you don’t even know you’re in, and help you generate new ideas that set you on a path to
innovation...

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In summary, here’s a graphic of the course with each of the 12 lesson steps that we will be going
through together. Although they are laid out in a linear fashion, you will find out quickly that many
of these steps run concurrently and many-times there is a need to loop back to a previous step.
The whole series can be divided into two large groupings; Creative Discovery and Creative
Envisioning. But you should think about this whole process in holistic terms, always be thinking
about the end-game, even while working at the beginning; one practical reason for this is to enable
you to discern useful and valuable elements to capture and save and use for your final presentation.
We will talk more about this as we go along.

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I haven’t found one book to use for this class, so I draw from a lot of sources for the lectures.
However, here is a nice starter list of books that I recommend.
You
ou can
c add dd too your
you total
o grade
g de an extra
e 5 points
po s if you identify
de y a good book
boo too add
dd too thiss list—all
s
that’s required is that you write up a one page overview describing the book and why you
recommend it.

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A few more thoughts about this chart: Take note that half of the steps listed are under the label
‘Creative Discovery’, i.e., research. There is a direct correlation between the amount of research one
does and the significance of the innovation. Most people are not innovators, but are what I would
call ‘hitchhikers’, i.e., they grab other’s ideas, package them up and push them into the market place,
gambling with other people’s (investors) money in the hope that the ideas will stick, so they can take
credit and get the fame.
Then the other half of the steps shown here have to do with the back-end of research, i.e., Creative
Envisioning’ or exploring the possibilities based on what was learned in ‘Discovery’.
What isn’t being shown here are all the steps involved in ‘Realization’ or what business
entrepreneurs would call the ‘Value Chain’, i.e., all the steps involved in securing investment capital,
engineering, manufacturing, advertising, and distribution to customers. That is the realm of the
MBA. The activities shown here are the realm of the ATEC graduate students.

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As for the name of this course, I chose it carefully and selected these three words…and here are their
definitions…(see slide)
I’ve
ve used thee adjectives
djec ves Ge
Generative
e ve andd Design
es g too modify
od y thee noun
ou Research,
ese c , i.e.,
.e., to
o qu
qualify
ywwhat
kind of research we’re going to study in this course.

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Richard Florida has written a nice book, The Rise of the Creative Class, and as a social scientist has
noted that:
The creative impulse—the
p attribute that distinguishes
g us,, as humans,, from other species—is
p now
being let loose on an unprecedented scale.
He further notes that about 40 percent of us are now engaged in creative enterprises; the measure of
our value is tied to creative accomplishment, whereas a hundred years ago, 90 percent of us were tied
down to task oriented jobs that had little tolerance for individual initiative and creative action.
Can you name some of the forces at play that have contributed to this evolutionary change in the
social system?
•Democracy
•Free Enterprise
•Education
•Communication
•Ubiquitous
q Information ((Internet))

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OK, the first thing I want to do is lay a foundation for a new way of thinking about the subject of
research and innovation.
I hope
p it isn’t too tedious…if yyou are getting
g g lost or don’t understand what the heck it has to do with
this class, stop me and we’ll work through it until you do. It is vital that we start this course with this
common philosophical understanding before we launch into the methods and tactics.
So, after talking about some fundamental forces that are changing our lives for the better, I’m going
to chat a bit about the subject of linear and non-linear systems, and then talk about complexity, chaos
and something called the Fuzzy Front End.
We will also see what thought leaders have to say about how these new realities are effecting this new
age we are living in right now.

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About ten years ago, I was attending the Aspen Design Conference and this interesting looking, tall,
red-headed fellow by the name of Bran Ferren was one of the featured speakers, he was the new
Exec. VP for Creative Technology, Research and Development at Disney’s Imagineering Lab. He's
one of those guys that the movie industry gives awards to for technical achievements that we never
see at the Oscars. He’s also a science advisor for many government agencies including Homeland
Security and in 2000 he was awarded the Kilby (as in Jack Kilby*) Award for his contributions to
society. In short, he’s a modern technology ‘Thought Leader’…
I’ll never forget his opening rhetorical question at the conference…(see slide)
Now you realize that in 1995, the WWW was an experience that few had; in fact, you could
practically count the number of web sites there were on your fingers and toes, so few at that
conference knew where he was coming from.

* Jack Kilby was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics for being one of two scientists to invent the modern
silicon chipp while a young
y g engineer
g at Texas Instruments

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Here’s another quote from one of my favorite books about the WWW...(read quote on slide)...
That in general terms is what we have been experiencing the better part of the last decade.

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Also that year, I attended the exclusive TED Conference in Monterey California (you have to apply
to attend; they only accept 900 at a cost of $4000). It is one of the most eclectic and interesting
conferences in the country; TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design; started by Richard
Saul Wurman, an Information Architect who wrote the books Information Anxiety 1&2.
That year, the featured speakers included Nicholas Negroponte (Director of the MIT Media Lab),
Danny Hillis (Artificial Intelligence research professor – MIT), John Perry Barlow (one of the
founders of the WELL & the Electronic Frontier Foundation & Lyricist for The Grateful Dead), and
many other thought leaders of the emerging information age. There was a lot of excitement about the
potential of the WWW. As of yet there was no-one making money on the ‘Net, but all were making
prediction
di ti that
th t it would
ld (they
(th underestimated
d ti t d the
th revenue the
th following
f ll i year by b 200%;
200% it was the
th
beginning of the Internet Bubble)

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Then this guy—Stuart Kaufman, PhD Biologist—appeared on the stage with a blackboard; he’s a
complexity theorist from the Santa Fe Institute; he’s written several books, the most famous one
being ‘At Home in the Universe’. He drew a simple graphic like this…and proceeded to explain that
the rise of ubiquitous forms of information and projected influence of the Internet was very similar to
the Cambrian Explosion about 500 million years ago, when DNA emerged. When living cells had
developed this organic system to allow cellular information to hold their blue-prints in memory,
biology exploded on the earth in all it’s diverse variations of life. He said, this is what is happening
right now except that this time it is an electronic information system that holds ideas in memory and
easily shares them on a peer-to-peer basis over the Internet and the effect will be to change
everything in our social/economic lives.
lives
He went on to postulate that as the social-economic effects of the ‘information age’ explodes, the old
‘industrial age’ would wane, represented by the falling curve. His advice was to pay close attention
to the changes and begin to move over to the rising curve of change. He also warned that many will
hang on to the old systems and fall into anachronistic irrelevance.
Another way to put it would be, all of society was in the process of rapid change, giving rise to the
requirement for innovations on a massive scale
scale—TOTAL
TOTAL universal change
change.

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Now let’s move on to a discussion of one of the fundamental paradigm shifts that is supporting the rise
of that accelerating new age curve, especially as it pertains to how we will learn and discover. We just
met Stuart Kaufman, and you can see him in the company of these other scientists at the Santa Fe
Institute in New Mexico. They represent the vanguard of the new science of complexity. The Institute
was started by George Cowan and Murray Gell-Mann (1984); two noble laureates who were working
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory a short way up the valley, where the American Atomic Bomb
was developed during WWII.
They, along with many other scientist around the world are working hard at developing a new science
that will supplant the old ‘Cartesian’ science from the days of Newton and Descartes in the 1600’s…

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Mitchell Waldrop, a science writer wrote a nice historical book about the Santa Fe Institute and made
this observation…(see slide)
Linear systems
y are based on the scientific principals
p p of Sir
S Isaac Newton & his cohorts,, and are the
dominant and pervasive school of thought for describing and controlling (so they hope) our
environment all around us. It is the basis for most scientific investigation and evaluation, and is at the
heart of most systems set up to manage our civic-socio-economic lives.
The underlying tenant of linear systems is the belief that all things can be measured and then reduced
to a simple formula, from which decisions can be expanded or scaled up and contracted or scaled down
with some confidence of the outcome. This works fine if all parts of the system are identified and
there are no errant elements present to disrupt the equilibrium. The truth however, is for centuries,
science has set aside that which it couldn’t measure as so much noise in the background so they could
move on with their work, which includes fuzzy-squishy things like art and social behavior.

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Kaufman, likes to illustrate the difference by referring to how easily Newtonian Science can measure a
rock and how it will behave when you throw it into the air, but when you toss a simple bird into the air,
it is utterly unpredictable what this complex little creature with a brain will do.

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Here’s another fellow, Albert Barabasi, who wrote a very insightful book a couple years ago called
Linked. He’s a physicist who is interested in the science of emerging networks and the focus of his
research is the Internet and what we can learn from the biggest self-organizing network on the planet.
He starts out his book with this observation about linear vs. non-linear science…(see slide)…

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He continues…(see slide)…so here we have this new breed of scientist, coming to the realization that
the old Cartesian science of Newton & Descartes can’t deal with the dynamic realities of life.
Reductionism is another label for CCartesian scientific methodology,
gy, i.e.,, taking
g everything
y g apart
p to
examine the parts, get a fix on the parts and then play with the parts to make things. We can see this
old view at work today, even with the advanced work going on with gene splicing and their hoped for
therapies. You could substitute the genes for steel and rivets and it would be the same old process.
Problem is, they are finding out that genes are not rivets, but complex micro worlds unto themselves
that are more like that humming bird with mysterious parts involved in an elegant dance based on
mysterious self-organizing principals.
So, as we watch our Cartesian scientific friends in the big pharmaceutical industry push chemical rivets
around and produce a blizzard of designer drugs, like Vioxx, suddenly everyone is surprised that there
are unintended consequences attached to these so-called wonder drugs that are actually killing some
people (reference the recent $250million award to a Texas widow against Merck, with several thousand
plaintiffs waiting in the wings).
Our whole social-economic system is still, for the most part, operating in the grips of this self-serving
d t
deterministic
i i ti view
i off the
th world…but
ld b t nott for
f long…
l

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…to put the nail in the Cartesian coffin, Kaufman makes this observation…(see slide)…
That’s a mouth full and we probably could spend an entire class discussing this…what’s the bottom
line here? I think it is summed upp in the opening
p g statement,, which is that life is an unendingg
procession of change, change which is imposed on us by other forces that surprise us…I put that out as
kind of ground rule or mental framework in which we must understand and accept as we endeavor to
understand the future and how we can participate in it in a creative way.

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OK, there are lots of ways to examine complexity. Mathematicians like to calculate and graph their
findings and here’s just one way to look at it.
Think of this chart in terms of it representing
p g life’s pplaying
y g field—with two end-zones at each end.
On the left is the Equilibrium end-zone, where things are linear, simple and all the parts are easily
identified.
On the right is the Chaos end-zone. Where complexity is extreme and defies measurement.
In between is the zone of Emergent Complexity, a.k.a. where we live!

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