My apologies to my Greek friends, I'll be speaking in American
and I'm going to begin with an arresting image, that any of you who saw 'the Hurt locker' will remember vividly
this is Jeremy Renner playing a sergeant James, a brilliant expert in diffusing improvised explosive devices
and I'm gonna use this as an example
of how innovation is happening all around the world especially for people in times of extraordinary adversity
in ways that are surprising
These scary devices are everywhere in the world and made by unbelievably affordably and easily in bazaars that you can easily order
This is an early generation improvised explosive device, some explosive material
connected to a trigger, that you can either phone or trigger in some other means
and I want to tell you how it actually works
An improvised explosive device is a very dangerous artifact
when you look at the last 10 years, of warfare with combined forces acting against this insurgents a 157,000 of these IEDs have blown up
and or been detonated or detected, 3 times more likely to die or be injured from one of these devices than any other way
that's the condition that soldiers are in, anywhere in the world where they're these kind of conflicts
now I want to take through a really interesting story of innovation,
a story of innovation that I think will surprise most of you,
if you don't know the facts of where improvised explosive devices come from
and actually how they work
above the line are the choices of the insurgents, below the line are the choices of the Americans and other combined forces
what you're going to see, is a by and large the insurgents are extraordinarily innovative and by and large,
the Americans see it constantly as a challenge in technological shifts, ok
so above the line is an early generation improvised explosive device, a simple way to trigger explosive substance
with a voice over IED kind of technology
the Americans learned how this technology worked and their response was to whelm big fat iron plates under their jeeps they were trying to protect
the insurgents loved this, cause those plates heat up easily, easily detectable
and you can use an infrared trigger to automatically blow up something that's that hot and it appears over an IED
Americans figured out that this was going on and they created a little device that it'll be 10 feet out in front
of the convoy called a rhino
the insurgents paid attention to the Americans' response, and they created a delayed trigger
the Americans, no dummies, paid attention to that phenomenon and added, a longer rhino (laughs)
this ladies and gentlemen is of how the game of a technological arms' race constantly involves
over time, the insurgents learned to use RF triggers, the Americans developed and eye watering expense
a jammer, that would jam every possible frequency in the war zone and very expensively trained and developed materials
and expertises to try and detect those RF triggers
The insurgents figured out how and developed a completely new kind of ammoniun nitrate bomb
and then an explosively formed penetrator this technology that you see above the line, is
and I'm not making this up, the most advanced and swift re-invention of industry in history
it's been fundamentally re-invented five times in ten years and nothing like it, it's ever been seen before in human history
and that's, on the side of the insurgents. The Americans response to that final development of course
was to create a staggeringly expensive super truck
that would allow soldiers to have a fighting chance of getting to their intended destination in a war zone
Now ladies and gentlemen lets see if we can back up and snap this into perspective
What you see when you examine it with care, is that the people with the most inventiveness in this particular scenario
are the ones that are improvising from nothing,
that see themselves as hopelessly, massively, outgun by people with vast amounts of money
this ladies and gentlemen is an important lesson for us now.
The most interesting and useful forms of innovation can, believe it or not, can more correlate with resource scarcity
than they're with resource abundance. Indeed it is still possible even now to see this as an American mistake constantly looking at is as one form
of innovation, specifically technological innovation in the center of this model
where as the insurgents are constantly creating and reorganizing around an impossible detect impossible to deconstruct
responsive hyper imaginative Turkish bazaar, it is possible for you in one of these war zones to order up
a very sophisticated improvised explosive device, with all the technology that you want
it will be fulfilled for you by a bunch of individuals whose names you'd never know
and it'll cost you less than a modern day ipad
to get that improvised explosive device
now, let's step back and look at the asymmetry of investments.
If you look at everything that has been expended by the insurgents over the last 10 years
it turns out to be 36million
Americans to defend spend 13billion USD, and yes these two things are in proportion.
Standing back from it, looking beyond the improvised explosive devices, ladies & gentlemen, for every one dollar the insurgents have spent,
in the so-called "War on Terror", US tax payers have spent $6.6million
This, ladies & gentlemen, my friends of Greece,
is the reason why you shouldn't be taking any military, technological, consulting, or economic advice from Americans [laughs and applause]
and so I come to you as someone to talk about innovation today. I'm gonna break it into three basic topics.
The first I want you to think about it is Big Ideas, what the world wants, what the world notices, what the world rewards
is big ideas, not little ideas
The second thing that I want you to give you a sense of, is that the heart and soul of any great innovation is finding the things
that are driving you crazy. Finding the things that you know to be stupid at the core, that you know to be unsustainable over time
that's why the roots of the greatest innovation are nearly always at some form of current adversity
and the third and final thing I want to give you a sense of that sophisticated forms of innovation, the way we de-risk these efforts.
the way we do something interesting, important and bold, in a time when we are in fact feeling like there is nothing to be gone
and there is no place to go but down.
Now, one of the things economists do tell us,
and there is enough analysis behind their assertions that are actually buy this piece of assertion from economist
is that the people that create jobs and new opportunities, are in fact small businesses not large businesses
If we look at the great history of large businesses of all around the world, we'd discover that their zeal for productivity
causes them to constantly reduce headcount over time.
The people that build businesses are the people that start small enterprises, trying to create something that the world needs
but doesn't know it needs, until such time serves as evidence.
And there is a tiny little problem, according to the World Bank that you're experiencing here in Greece
And that it's hard to start businesses and getting worse over time not better. In 2010 you ranked 97th in the world, in 2011, you rank 109th.
OK, this is not a good thing, you want to try and figure out how to remove the friction to allow the people in the room
and the people in the virtual room at the TEDxAcademy, to bring their good ideas and to create things that are vibrant.
I heard many of those in the course of previous presentations, but I want to give you a sense of the modern nature of inter-contectiveness.
and the ways in which intercontectiveness is the source of the power of new ideas.
It's how you take an idea, even if you have no resources and amplify it through an eager world to try to create something that's vivid and valuable
Let's start with a simple example, some individual who has got a product idea in mind.
You see here Scott Wilson. designer in a firm in Chicago called Minimal. Scott is a product designer
for all of his life he had good product design ideas, for the likes of Nike
and one day, he was seating in Moscow, sketching a little idea that came to him,
he had basically a jet lag case, he was up late all night, so he sketched his idea, then he took out his flip camera
and he made a video to tell the story of this little idea that he sketched and he put that story on a website in the United States called Kickstarter
The sketch that he did was of this little device that you see here. In the center of it, is a standard ipod nano.
And what he surrounded it with, was an aluminum, or in a cheaper case, rubber housing
with a little watch band, that would allow you to wear your ipod nano
When he told the story, he had not anywhere near the amount of money he'd need to tool
in order to produce either the rubber band or the aluminum housing. He needed about 10.000 dollars.
and telling the story, in a brief video, on a flip camera all of what he did with no professionals, no assistants, no script, nothing
just a story on a video. His goal was to raise 10.000 dollars. In Kickstarter you tell your story, you hope people will donate
They don't have to donate a dime if you don't hit your goal. His goal of 10.000 dollars I remember, and he got $941,718
The man made a fortune off of telling his story, and when he produced it, some amazing things started to happen.
First, within just the first week, $400,000 came from by 5,000 different backers, add a couple more weeks
and what you get 13,500 people eager to donate
In most cases they were donating $50, in some cases people would donate $500 for the hope of they would get a rare red ionidized aluminum block, ok
He sold 21,000 units on Kickstarter and another 20,000 more on lunatic, about this time Apple noticed
I know, they called up Scott 'how you'd like to sell your watch band here at the Apple store?" He said 'no thanks,
They said, why not? You charge people 30% to sell things on the apple store
I discovered that 76% of the people that like my watch band, buy the nano, afterwards.
So I'm not gonna give you that, So, they say... umm ok mubble, mubble, mubble, and they finally agreed to give him, a larger cut of the profits
and now, Apple sells this because it sells Apple ipods, ok
So when we looked at this from the different lens of innovation, five distinct types of innovation allowed one guy, in a hotel room in Moscow
to create a robust business with no other resources except his own imagination.
That's on an individual product scale, let's now look at the scale of a community, a population
people in various conditions of adversity, not that would ever happen in Greece of course,
but the kind of things happening all around the world that people get upset about things
and these days, thanks to the ushahidi platform it is possible to report, whatever it is you're upset about.
Police violence, or challenges at polling booths, or whatever, and
immediately have it graphed in different arenas so that the whole world can be watching the kind of things that occur.
an other simple idea, leveraged by powerful connections
Here is interesting one, also driven by adversity
Those of you who've ever been in Mexico City know that it's famous for the world's worst traffic jams.
This company, one of the greatest cement companies in the world
had the challenge of delivering wet loads of cement to different people in Mexico City a midst the world's worst traffic jams.
Think about yourself, as a truck driver, delivering a wet load of cement in a traffic jam,
Somewhere between hour three and hour four, of that traffic jam, the wet load of cement turns into something like, a ROCK
This is bad for the trucks, ok.
Trying to figure out how to deal with that, Cemex built the world's most sophisticated algorithm
to fill the trucks in new places, to fill them in different ways, to route them around traffic problems in a dynamic optimization
capability that it is really quite sophisticated.
When they solved that problem for Mexico City, it turns out that they solved it for every crowded narrowly nasty traffic problem in the world
and so, after they proved this capability in Mexico City, financiers showed up, you know how they do once the idea is proven and good,
Citigroup, and Goldman & Sachs, learned how to scale it up worldwide using six distinct types of innovation
now Cemex makes more money off of the cement optimization algorithm than they ever made selling cement
Ladies and gentlemen, flipping adversity to advantage is the heart and soul of great innovation challenges
All around the world bureaucrats and cities have vast amounts of data that they've been trying to figure out what to do with them.
San Francisco alone, they need 7 or 8 million dollars that they didn't have to try and get consulting contracts to do data analytics
They finally gave away the raw data for free, and they posted a $50,000 prize for people to do something interesting with it
and in weeks, they had 47 new applications of various kinds that would track pot holes or describe parking problems,
or optimize the city in vary vary profound ways, London is doing this too
Is this happening in Greece yet? It's beginning
As recently as 2007, the amount of money that was available for first stage investment for startups, was €0
Openfund, is a local hero that some of you may know about and two others, and as of 2011 seed stage capital is already risen to €2 million a year
this is small by some national and international standards, but it is a very important beginning. And the beginnings of leveraging connections
What I see for this great region, for this great country is the beginnings of new and optimistic possibilities
If I were doing innovation here I would be fostering, powerful new platforms in eco and historic tourism in brand new ways,
new models of land development, profound new ways to create commodities networks,
and scalable or scale independent educational networks, about everything from history to math to democracy,
New kinds of signature agricultural exports are possible from here, energy generation stories, and hybrid towns.
This ladies and gentlemen are the things that the world is eager for, that authentically can be build here in Greece.
I'm reminded of something George Bernard Shaw said 78 years ago,
He said, God may had made this world but that's no excuse
for us, not to make it better. Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to do the most important form of innovating,
the kind that makes the world better, for all of us as we try to learn together to flip adversity to advantage.
If you want the notes to this talk you're welcome to them at clientweb.doblin.com, login as TEDx, password Academy,
We'll work with Niki and everyone else to make sure that anyone can get the file
It's been distinct pleasure, to be here, at this extraordinary place, at a time of extraordinary anxiety
I'm very eager to see what happens, as we unleash the talent of Greece, around the troubles that we have to reinvent. Thank you.