The Age of Visionaries

The Age of Visionaries

The recently observed ‘World Intellectual Property Day’ brought into stark focus two very significant facts: (i) India is number 1 in terms of number of engineers and, (ii) India ranks 42nd out of 55 countries in the latest International Intellectual Property Index.

 

This reveals that we have before us the enormous task of igniting and inspiring the minds of engineers and helping them become visionaries to create intellectual property that will help India rise in the ranking on the IP Index.

 

The word ‘visionary’ for some reason brings on the response of ‘no, not me’ in many bright people. The purpose of this blog is to convince such doubters that everyone is born with vision and that it can be developed and turned into creativity, which brings about miracles.

 

At the outset let us be clear about what exactly is involved and what are the sources of creativity?       

According to Lexico, creativity means "the use of imagination or original ideas to create something". Creativity also means  "adding a first-ever new thing to the world".  It could be a piece of art, a novel car or a new service like Uber or space travel as Elon Musk  and Jeff Bezos have.

But where and how do you get the idea of that 'new thing'?  

Well, creativity is a process but the starting point is 'vision'. Vision, in turn, is defined as 'an alluring picture of the future that is meaningful and can be created’. Where do you get it? The sources are abundant and are all around us.  But only a dreamer, a  keen observer with a vivid imagination and passion for the pursuit of novelty can catch it. Each one of us had these qualities in childhood, but under the pressures of conforming to social and academic 'normalisation,' they remained dormant. With the sweeping winds of change of the digital era in which reality is jumping ahead of fantasy, we have no choice but to rekindle these and acquire the wizards' quest for creativity. 

Here is a short list of some possible sources of vision and creativity:

Fiction

Many dramatic, new things are buried in fictional stories and are waiting to be 'discovered'. The most illustrious and dramatic example is Jules Verne's sci-fi novel about landing men on the Moon, titled  "from the Earth to the Moon". It was published in 1865. And NASA actually did it in 1969! Now look at the amazing similarities in Jules Verne's novel and the elements of NASA's mission: Verne's Cannon (spaceship) was named 'Columbiad', NASA's was called 'Columbia'. Both spaceships had a crew of three persons. Even the physical dimensions of both projectiles were close. Both were blasted off from Florida and the crew in both were recovered by the US Navy.

There are more sci-fi stories that have become realities. 'Machine Learning'  was the theme of Samuel Butler's novel published in 1872. Mary Bradley's story "Mizora" (1880) talked about lab-grown meat. In a decades-old Marathi story, the protagonist, Pandu Tatya, was always busy experimenting in search of new things. Once a friend asked him, “What are you discovering now?” Tatya said, "how very stupid to grow white cotton in the fields and then labour to dye yarn. Why not grow multi-coloured cotton in the field itself.” And, according to recent reports that have been made possible now by agri-scientists.

Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb quoted the Bhagwad Geeta after the first atomic explosion in New Mexico. He exclaimed, "if the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one."

Films 

Some sci-fi films, too, included many technological devices that became realities. Here is a short list:

• Metropolis, 1927 -  Robots

• Star Trek, 1966 - Mobile Phones

• Total Recall 1990 - Self-driving cars

• Blade Runner 1982 - Flying cars

There are many other sources of vision and creativity like nature, memoirs of star wizards, on-the-job insights, lists of new patents’, academic papers and, above all, unmet needs.

Wizards of the World!

Ignite and Inspire Minds to Create New

Wonders of World

(Some ideas here have been re-purposed from my earlier blogs as they remain relevant in the context of the World IP Day.)