Human Innovation is Limitless — It’s Time We Harnessed It

As the co-founder of a unique organization with a widely geographically distributed team of designers, engineers, makers, and tech enthusiasts, I spend a lot of time thinking about the resources we need to accomplish our goals. I also think about optimal usage of those resources. Everything from the software we use to the hours our community spends on various tasks. Most of these are finite and limited by time, money, interest, or energy.

But there’s one resource we’ve found to be truly limitless, and it has enabled rLoop to progress further on our projects than any of us imagined. I’m talking, of course, about innovation. I wrote previously that innovation is a limitless resource and, because of that, our own decentralized engineering process is more effective than centralized, top-down organizations.

I believe that this is central to our team’s success thus far, and I’d like to explore what this means, as I think it’s a way of thinking that can benefit many others.

What is innovation anyway?

When we hear the word innovation, we often think of specific technologies — the smart phone, an airplane, artificial intelligence, etc. But innovation is really about applying both knowledge and the process of acquiring knowledge to solve a problem. In this sense, then, innovation as a resource behaves far differently from other resources.

As an example, Thomas Malthus presented a theory in 1798 that human population growth is exponential while food supply growth is linear. His conclusion was that the global population would grow significantly faster than our ability to provide food, and predicted massive famines due to corrections both natural and human made. His proposed solution was to control human population growth with measures such as family planning, late marriages, and celibacy.

What he didn’t account for, however, was our collective ability to innovate. In Canada, 150 years ago (we just celebrated our sesquicentennial) more than 80% of the population was working in agriculture. Today, thanks to advances in farming technologies and techniques, less than two percent of the population works in agriculture. Yet our food supply exceeds our needs, and people actually live more than twice as long as they did when Malthus made his prediction.

William McGurn wrote: “Malthusian fears about population follow from the Malthusian view that human beings are primarily mouths to be fed rather than minds to be unlocked. In this reasoning, when a pig is born in China, the national wealth is thought to go up, but when a Chinese baby is born the national wealth goes down.”

In other words, the question “How many mouths can the planet support?” is not constant. It depends on the effectiveness and efficiency of the tech we use to access resources, as well as our changed behaviour. In the context of agriculture, as we innovate and improve on our knowledgebase our technology reduces the amount of land required to feed a person, and optimizes the output of food for a specific amount of land, and thus increases the carrying capacity of the planet.

Unlike other resources, knowledge as a resource is never used up. No matter what type of challenge we’re working to solve, the more we use our collective knowledge, the more knowledge we have, and the more people knowledge is spread to, the more value it gains. Knowledge acquisition is not a zero-sum game; one person’s gain does not need to be another person’s loss. Instead, knowledge multiplies itself.

Where’s My Flying Car?

Watch almost any sci-fi movie or TV show that’s older than 30 years or so, and you get a unique picture of what many thought early 21st century life would look like. Many of us envisioned a world of flying cars, jet packs, robots that do our laundry, a two hour work week, etc. Instead, we have Twitter (for example).

That’s not to knock some of the very impressive innovations we live with (and take for granted) today. But the truth is that many of these technologies are a) privately developed, and b) do not solve problems (in fact, it’s arguable that they have created new ones that didn’t exist previously). This is what I call the “Innovation Bottleneck,” where innovation is limited to private interests whose motivation is often solely driven by profits. Simply look at the pharmaceutical industry, or even the latest iPhone release, if you want some easy examples.

How rLoop Breaks Bottlenecks

At rLoop, we take a radical, meritocratic approach to innovation. Our mission is to develop and launch innovative technology fueled by a genuine desire to improve the world and humanity. And we accomplish this by connecting people to decentralize technological development.

By approaching innovation as a limitless resource, we empowered a huge team of people to come together (virtually) to design, build, and (hopefully) launch the world’s first high-speed Hyperloop pod. To celebrate the work of the community I point to the many successes we’ve enjoyed with this approach, including:

• Winning the “Best Non-Student Design” Award from SpaceX at the World’s First Hyperloop Pod Design competition
• Demonstrating the first pod to achieve static levitation in a vacuum
• Demonstrating the first pod with a Pressure Vessel capable of supporting human life
• Winning the “Pod Innovation” Award from SpaceX, as well as several other international awards

Today, we have more than 1,200 members in more than 50 countries contributing to our projects, and we’ve spent more than 1 million hours in design, simulation, and manufacturing our solutions. We owe all these achievements to our unique approach to innovation.

We believe this points to a new model for harnessing the greatest resource available to us: the human mind. We have faced serious challenges as a species, but our ability to innovate and improve on our knowledge base has always allowed us to overcome those challenges. And if we’re going to continue to make advancements and solve the challenges we face as a species, it seems clear that we need to increase access to the global talent pool of knowledge and skills to contribute to solutions for the future.

rLoop is designed specifically to unlock these minds and to drive knowledge, expertise, and resources towards engineering solutions for the world’s greatest challenges.