Translator: Alexandra Masgras Reviewer: Michele Gianella
Good morning.
Well, let's get straight to it.
I'd like to invite you all to tiptoe very quietly
back into 18th century England.
We all have, under our arms, a book written years ago
by a talented writer from New York, Dava Sobel.
The book is called
'Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved
the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time'.
England, at the time, was ruler of the waves,
but had not mastered the determination of longitude.
Position calculations were imperfect, ships sank,
cargoes were lost,
and the human toll was very, very heavy.
So the British government
decided to launch a competition, a race.
The winner, who came up with the appropriate solution,
would receive the equivalent of about $6 to 7 million in today's money.
Of course, the challenge was taken up
by those with the required knowledge:
scientists, astronomers.
Among others was Nevil Maskelyne, whom you see in this image, in this slide,
who was the Royal Astronomer, and therefore also
Commissioner of Longitude, judge of the competition.
All appropriately educated participants
naturally felt a strong sense of responsibility,
feared making mistakes,
feared the consequences of errors,
so they looked over, studied, examined maps
showing the state of knowledge as it was.
They did research and analysis.
But it wasn't the way to solve the problem.
They thought that by observing the stars,
the movement of the planets and satellites,
it was possible to find the solution.
But it wasn't the case.
However, among the competitors was a craftsman,
a person of little education, a carpenter,
who however had a love of the clock mechanisms of the time.
His name was John Harrison.
He was the one who solved the problem, with a marine chronometer.
But it took decades to admit
that Harrison had the right idea.
Astronomers, scientists said
'Bah, he's uneducated, ignorant. Could we ever give him credit?'
Facts showed that Harrison was the winner.
But for years ships continued to go down.
Neil Armstrong, not many years ago, in a fine speech,
I think in the presence of the President at the White House said,
Without Harrison and his chronometer,
we would never have got to the moon.
This episode, this anecdote, admirably told by Dava Sobel,
leads me to go on to say
that the great English writer and critic, William Hazlitt,
was probably right in what he maintained.
He lived between the 18th and 19th centuries,
and said that poorly educated people
were endowed with an exuberant inventiveness,
were free from prejudice and did not lack conceptual flexibility.
Such qualities he attributed to Shakespeare,
who, notorious for little formal education,
created wonderful works.
He contrasted Shakespeare to John Milton,
the author of
a person with great academic knowledge,
in many ways similar to the astronomers and scientists
who lost the competition with Harrison.
Well, with Dava Sobel we can now travel
to Comfort Island, the Island of Comfort,
that you see here on the left.
It is an island inhabited by people who are very knowledgeable.
However, it is an island
where it's difficult to get to and live on in an age of knowledge.
It may seem paradoxical: why so?
Because in this age of knowledge, an infrastructure is needed
which is missing on Comfort Island.
This structure, to use the English jargon of today,
is 'knowledgification'.
Knowledge in action,
knowledge which drives innovation in companies
that break the state of the art.
Knowledgefication needs a central source,
and this is creative ignorance,
ignorance that does not precede,
but follows knowledge and overcomes it.
However, on this comfortable island
there is something very precious:
the Philosopher's Path.
There is such a path, it exists, in Tokyo
- sorry in Kyoto, in Japan.
It [was originally] called the path of meditation:
the seasons go by, people walk along it,
the phenomena of nature repeat themselves
and you have a sense of security, a sense of order
that cushions surprises or even eliminates them.
It's a bit like when the Maya of Yucatan,
seeing Cortès' ships appear on the horizon, said:
How strange, there's a bizarre weather condition.
They did not recognize the ships.
But on Comfort Island there's a minority,
and this minority is formed of the creative ignorants.
They don't like it on Comfort Island much,
they consider it a kind of penal colony.
So they take a ship, the ship of creative ignorance,
and set sail. The ship heads towards a land
where extraordinary things happen.
The ship really exists;
it was launched to sea by the Unreasonable Institute,
built in Boulder, Colorado, a few years ago.
Who are the passengers on this boat?
They are saplings, or are like saplings.
A sapling says to its father: When I grow up
I don't want to be a tree, I want to be a book.
Preferably an e-book,
so that my family does not have to die,
because one must cut down trees in order to make the paper.
So they are rebels, people who do not follow
the paths traced out by the knowledge maps
of their parents.
However, the same saplings, while rebels,
don't like passive ignorance.
Who does not want to climb the pyramid that leads to knowledge?
But here there is a difference between people
who are very passionate about their knowledge
and those who rebel.
The passionate ones descend inside the pyramid
going thoroughly, in great detail,
and gradually descend missing the light, losing the vision.
They increasingly know more about less,
until they know everything about nothing.
And the more they know, the less truly new things are done,
what actually doesn't happen to creative ignorants.
And so we have, as I call it, the Syndrome of the Well.
There are some striking examples.
Blackberry, on the appearance of the iPhone said, this is a toy.
And there are many examples of these syndromes,
and Blackberry, now, in the end
is trying to recover by taking other points of view.
Not to mention Nokia, recently, and so on.
So what is the next big thing to put in motion?
It is precisely this kind of ignorance, an ignorance that is learned,
which is aware, genuine, full of purpose,
of motivation, of imagination, that is creative.
But these gentlemen, these rebels, are they isolated examples?
No, they have a long history,
from Socrates to St. Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa,
who wrote about ignorance that is learned;
to the German philosopher Fichte, who said that
the conquest of 'not knowing' is an infinite journey;
to the reformer of education in the United States, Dewey,
who wrote about how important genuine ignorance is
in changing understanding.
And today, Hans Magnus Enzensberger,
a German polemicist, polemical political scientist,
has written that creative ignorance comes from gestures of refusal
of maps of acquired knowledge.
And a colleague of ours, of mine - I'm an academic myself,
Professor Stuart Firestein,
famous biologist at Columbia University,
gives a course called Ignorance
and wrote a book called
He tells his students to acquire the negative capability,
to live in mysteries, in the unknown and in the unexplored.
I myself am holding, at my university, in Dublin,
a dialogue, a conversation on ignorance
and will probably do the same thing this winter
in another school in Paris.
Of course, the passage from the house of knowledge
to the house of creative ignorance
is one that is very difficult, dangerous:
it requires the abilities of an acrobat, a very experienced acrobat
because over him, against him, blow the winds.
And what are these winds?
They are the winds of the traditional school,
and above all, in countries like ours, of professional orders
that fix, as in the Middle Ages, rules, standards
that hinder the creative ignorant
in the creation of new paths outside the maps of knowledge.
And speaking of the traditional school, I would like to remind you
of an Italian intellectual of the early 20th century, Giovanni Papini.
Giovanni Papini, in the 1910's, wrote
that schools should not have desks and chairs anymore,
that it was necessary to replace the classes
with an experiment laboratory,
where students, among themselves and with the teachers,
talk about their studies and their research.
Dialogue, conversation, even telling a colleague,
Look, I use your idea
in a field where you don't, in a different field.
Thus beginning a game that is at the same time
one of cooperation and competition,
a co-opetition, as they call it in Asia.
But did real Papinis sort some effect?
Yes, but unfortunately not in Italy.
You will have read, some of you, in Corriere della Sera, some weeks ago,
that the Rector, the President of Stanford said,
No more lessons. They are all online,
all the material is free online.
The Stanford campus serves to allow discussion between students and teachers.
(Applause)
Thank you.
This is what Stanford has done, but it's not enough.
While we want to reform our universities,
in the most advanced nations, universities are redefined, not reformed.
It is the futurists, the technologists, the scientist entrepreneurs
who are creating the university of the third millennium.
And the Singularity University, who some, especially young people, know,
has also landed to some extent in Italy.
For this university, we have invented, with a colleague of mine,
who is the vice-president of the Intel Corporation,
this formula, which is vaguely reminiscent of the physics of Einstein.
It is a metaphor.
A university that creates, is an entrepreneurial energy source (E)
which is equal to a mass (M) of the motivations
of the participants to move knowledge to action
multiplied by the three creativities (C)
of Akio Morita, founder of Sony:
creativity in technology,
creativity in product planning,
and creativity in marketing.
The Minerva Schools have revived, are reviving,
the epopee of the wandering clerics,
which had its centre of gravity in Bologna,
when, in 1088, the first university of the second millennium
came into being.
The community of Minerva students, who come from all over the world,
take the first semester in San Francisco.
They all stay together, live together - the lessons are online,
even if the teachers are from San Francisco.
In the six subsequent semesters they will move on
to six different cities of the world
considered key cities for learning the processes
of disruptive innovation.
Finally, there is the Unreasonable Institute,
that of the famous ship.
This is the ship which, riding the seas, brings the saplings
in those cities
which are considered key ports of innovation in the world today.
One thing I would love to see also in this country.
The interesting thing with all these phenomena
is that the participants, not knowing that a thing cannot be done,
and that if you do, you are wrong,
do it and succeed,
like Dropbox and PayPal founders did.
So, to conclude my talk with you,
I would like to say this: I wish those people with much knowledge
not to descend too deep into the well,
to use maps to do incremental innovation,
to do better what they already know, that's great,
but not to descend too deep into the well.
Respond to consumers' demands.
To the creative ignorant who abandon the maps
not to respond to consumer demands,
but in order to grasp their latent needs,
I wish a pleasant ignorance, but one that is creative.
To all of you, and to them,
I wish a time rich of the wonders of the unexplored.
Thank you.
(Applause)