Big Ideas: What Coffee, Cabs, and Umbrellas Can Teach Us
Transformative ideas have been born, more often than not, from challenging beginnings.
During a rainstorm in 18th-century Britain, an enterprising gentleman pulled out the first umbrella ever invented, in order to keep himself dry. Thinking the gadget was a lady’s parasol, passersby ridiculed the brolly-user and pelted him with trash. After the Wright Brothers’ first flight, French general Ferdinand Foch poo-pooed the airplane publically as “an interesting scientific toy with no military application.”
From umbrellas and airplanes to personal computers, vaccines, coffees and cabs, the plotlines are similar. Transformative ideas have been born, more often than not, from challenging beginnings.
From idea inception, the creators of these inventions struggled for credibility within an environment of opposing habits and beliefs. Fortunately for us, the inventors had confidence in their work and persisted against the odds. They also had the support of forward-thinking, early adopters. The combination of these creators’ own pluck and a posse of supporters helped them survive the naysayers, soldier on, and ultimately win over the rest of the population.
Today, umbrellas are derigueur and almost every country has an airforce. These ideas spread to the masses and proved their creators right all along. It would be easy to end the story here, but this is where the life of a really good idea starts to get interesting. Because when these innovations reached peak popularity, they spurred tangential ideas — the umbrella led to rainproof awnings and umbrella stands; the airplane expanded to general civilian use and a wealth of new industries.
These tiny, new ripples created not only sea-changes within their industries, but ultimately evolved aspects of the greater culture. In 1890, French philosopher Gabriel Tarde named this process The Laws of Imitation. The adoption and spread of new ideas.
When Tarde introduced The Laws of Imitation, it resonated with the academic community and beyond, spurring tangential ideas and counter-hypotheses of its own, in multiple fields. One of the people who took Tarde’s idea in a new direction was Everett Rogers, a professor of communications. Rogers was interested in the second law of imitation — the exponential take-off — what happens to an idea next, after it’s accepted. He wondered about how, why, and at what rate new ideas, including technology, spread.
In his Diffusion of Innovations, Rogers theorized there were four elements influencing the spread of a new idea:
- the innovation itself
- communications channels
- time
- a social system
The “social system” he envisioned had five segments divided by speed of adaptation: — the Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. As you can see to the left, there is a proportionally tiny pool of innovators, and then everyone else.
Rogers recognized big ideas not only change how humans operate in the world; they also change the culture, forever.
You too can make important change happen, and you don’t have to invent a rocketship to Mars or walk-on-water flip-flops.
