Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Nicoletta Pedrana
You want to change the world, don't you?
We all want to change the world.
But how many times they told us
that to change the world we need a new technology,
a new application, a new digital platform.
Tonight we'll try to challenge
what I call the innovation rhetoric,
with three small, simple ideas.
The first: the idea that innovation is always a collective process.
We all participate in innovation, don't we?
We need to get rid of the concept of the inventor
locked in his lab.
We all, as users, contribute to the success of an innovation, for example.
Innovation is something more and different than any new technology.
They're not synonymous.
Also, innovation is not invention.
Every day, potentially,
there are millions of new ideas and new inventions, but only a few become...
What's an innovation?
It's a different way to do the things that delivers;
it's an invention that takes flesh.
It's a new way of doing things, which meets another change.
It shows us needs that we didn't even know we had.
So it's a moment of social and cultural change.
Let's look back in time.
It's the mid-1800s, precisely 1847.
A doctor of Hungarian origin arrives in Vienna,
at the
for his first important assignment.
Coming from outside, is struck by something
to which probably the most experienced colleagues
who had been there longer had become accustomed to.
It was something dramatic and unacceptable:
the death rate among women giving birth, ranged from 13% to 30%.
Almost one in three died.
Nobody had an explanation on why this happened.
They quoted stress, even the childbirth situation,
and pollution.
There were a number of hypotheses,
none of which convinced this young doctor.
His name was Ignác Semmelweis.
One day, a colleague
injured himself while performing an autopsy,
and died as a result of this wound.
Then Semmelweis checked the data better
and discovered that the hospital halls
where the same doctors practiced autopsies
and then assisted parturient women,
had much higher death rates.
So he launched his own battle to impose
a very low-tech innovation:
hand washing and disinfection with a chlorine solution.
It seems incredible, but he met
a great deal of hostility by his colleagues.
How does a newcomer dare
to say that it's we, the saviors, that cause death?
In fact, that was the meaning.
In the end, he won his battle.
Death rates among women giving birth immediately began to decrease.
A small gesture then saved the lives of millions of people.
Unfortunately, it didn't save that of the innovator.
In fact, Semmelweis was personally defeated after this battle.
His contract was not even renewed,
and he ended his life in a psychiatric hospital.
You can change the world even by observing nature in a different way.
I mean something we have under our eyes on a daily basis.
It's circa 1870,
in America, which we've seen in many Western films.
The country is expanding quickly Westward.
Among its many problems and challenges
is a very concrete issue: livestock protection.
Livestock, of course,
tends to move, may be stolen and brought away.
How can one delimit it?
By building palisades.
But then one has to continually repair and replace them.
And that's expensive.
Someone found out that a shrub called Maclura may work,
given its natural characteristics
that protect the cattle and prevent it from moving away.
However, of course, a shrub has its limits:
it tends to settle randomly
and attracts insects.
So, here's the observation by
a trader
and a farmer.
We can make an artificial Maclura.
We can design a metal wire interspersed with regular spikes.
One of the world' simplest, yet most impactful patents.
It consists of 13 words.
It's the barbed wire patented in 1873.
Of course, like all innovations - here comes a further valuable lesson -
it has an extraordinary, positive impact.
The United States wouldn't have become the nation it is
without this little, great innovation.
However, it has a dark side, which is dramatic.
I mean the trenches, the concentration camps,
and all that barbed wire was going to represent,
especially in the next century.
In the 1970s, the Japanese engineer Eiji Nakatsu
needed to solve a problem.
Now, when a Japanese engineer is charged with solving a problem,
he really needs to fix it.
Here's the problem:
the Shinkansen train, one of the first high-speed trains,
when entering and exiting a tunnel
causes a sound shock. Such a noise pollution
disrupts people's comfort in a very wide range.
Nakatsu understood that the problem deals with different air resistances,
i.e. outside and inside the tunnels.
So he questioned -
which of course is not for everyone -
"Is there an animal that solved this problem
of passing through two different air densities?”
Yes, there was: it was the kingfisher.
To capture its prey,
the kingfisher must pass from air, with its resistance, into water
without splashing too much so as not to alert its prey.
Hence the solution by Nakatsu,
which immediately solves or mitigates the problem:
he designs a "beak"
very similar to the kingfisher's one
for the Shinkansen.
I could give you many other stories like this.
Think of Velcro, for example.
This is also born by observing the burdock
that stuck to the dog's hair of the inventor of Velcro.
You can change the world
even by assembling two things
that apparently have nothing to do with each other.
The problem that this to-be innovator aimed to face
was the preparation of coffee.
It's the 1930s.
Preparing coffee at home is a rather complicated matter.
In fact, this coffee maker known as Neapolitan,
among other things,
needed to be overturned at the end of the preparation.
This created a whole series of inconveniences.
It wasn't exactly simple and enjoyable.
He lived in Omegna and had been observing
housewives.
Homes had no running water, let alone heat.
Housewives washed clothes with a tub that had a perforated bottom.
They put a mixture of ash and soap
on the tub's bottom.
Hot water made this mix boil.
So he questioned: can I apply this percolation process
to brewing coffee?
The answer was yes.
His name was Alfonso Bialetti.
The innovation that came is the moka, patented in 1933.
The name choice is excellent:
the city of Moka, in Yemen, is one of the coffee's commercial crossroads.
The material's choice is also excellent:
aluminum is an elegant but porous material,
so the more coffee you make with a moka, the better it becomes.
This adds to another discovery that made it into every Italian household:
the power of advertising.
My last example is about sports.
Sports are wonderful to observe innovation
from the point of view I'm suggesting.
It's 1968, at the Mexico City Olympics.
This guy's name is Richard.
Richard devoted himself to the high jump,
but he didn't have the right physique to jump as it was used at the time,
that is, jumping with the ventral style to face the bar frontally.
So what did he do?
At some point he couldn't take it anymore and said:
"I'll do it backwards."
He went against his coach's advice,
saying, "You're gonna get hurt. You're crazy!"
But he's also lucky - sometimes, innovators are lucky:
landing mattresses had just been introduced in those years.
Landing on sand, of course, he would've been hurt a lot more.
In short, he insisted, perfected his style,
and qualifies by the skin of his teeth at the Olympic final in Mexico City.
Now let's see - you may be curious or may know - how it ended.
Again, there's no new technology here.
Rather, it's a completely different way of doing things,
what's called a paradigm shift.
Fosbury questioned
like any world changer should do:
"Why does everyone do that?"
"Must I do it like everyone else, or can I do it differently?"
Tongue in cheek, we could say that he's made us understand
that sometimes, to move forward, we need to move a little back.
Then, in general, let's not forget
that sometimes, to change the world,
one needs to look at things differently
from the way we had seen them.
Thank you.
(Applause)