How to question the Status quo!
As humans, we adapt to everything, this adaptability has helped us to settle down in harshest environments like deserts and pole of the cold, but as Innovators, we continuously have to strive to beat this natural instinct to adapt and adjust to things.
George Bernard Shaw once said, “you see things and say why? But I dream things that never were and ask why not?”
It is such dreamers who push us forward and take our generation ahead.
As a kid when I used to read about scientists, entrepreneurs, explorers, I used to think, all the things that could have been invented or discovered have already been done and our generation can only reap the benefits of their work. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong! Russian scientist Nikolai Kardashev proposed a scale called Kardashev scale, which classifies civilizations based upon how much usable energy it has at its disposal. This classification is from Type1, Type2, Type3 and so on. Type 1 civilization can harness all the energy that is available from a neighboring star. Type 2 civilization can control the neighboring star. On the other hand, we don’t even belong to this classification, we are a Type 0 civilization. We still heavily rely on fossil fuels and we still haven’t made the best use of solar energy, wind energy, tidal currents. You get the picture, we are so far away from being the most efficient beings in this universe, so it is our imperative to be innovators.
Ramesh Raskar from MIT media labs came up with a framework for innovation called The Idea Hexagon, to show how to go from an Idea X to an idea NeXt. I will briefly discuss the 6 ideas that he proposed by taking examples from our everyday life,
1. Generalize to another dimension:
The first idea is, if there’s an Idea ‘X’, apply the same idea to another dimension. An example would be, Flickr and Youtube. Flickr was launched in 2004, a platform to share photos, in 2005 people from Youtube took the same idea to another dimension and came up with a platform to share videos.
can be described as Flickr for videos
2. Idea X and Idea Y to Idea X+Y:
If you have an idea X, combine it with idea Y to arrive at X+Y, more dissimilar the ideas, the better.
An example would be Uber. Uber combined a physical medium like a taxi with an intangible software to give us a new product.
Combined Software with Physical Medium
3. Given a hammer, find all the nails that it could hit:
If you have a new technology or solution, find all the problems that it can solve. A very good example for this is the Internet. Think about all the problems that it has solved in the last couple of decades and there’s still a long way for it to go.
4. Given a nail, find all the hammers.
If there’s a problem, find all the possible ways that it can be solved. As an example, human’s intrinsic need to connect and stay in touch with others is so important and that’s the reason why we have so many solutions like Facebook, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Twitter and there’s a new platform coming up every day to address the same issue.
5. X, add an adjective :
If you have an Idea X, try to make it faster, greener, cleaner, cheaper etc. Again we can observe how Instagram made the photo sharing experience better than how it was with Flickr.
Instagram made the photo sharing experience of Flickr better
6. X Inverse :
Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. While every app in our phone is seeking our attention and time, there’s one app called Forest, which incentivizes us not to spend time on our phone, and that’s how you can go against the tide.
I believe these principles are universal and can be applied not only to product development but to fundamental science as well, and I hope it motivates every one of us to question the status quo.
Image Credits:
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/yt/brand/downloads.html
Uber: https://developer.uber.com/docs/riders/guides/design-guidelines
Instagram: https://en.instagram-brand.com/assets
Forest: https://www.forestapp.cc/en/
