How to Invent the Future I - Stanford CS183F: Startup School

Yeah, I think you have a point. I'm not sure existing data is enough to generate ideas about all potential new products though, since behavior is shaped by what things/ideas/knowledge we have access to today. That is, what data is going to tell you that somebody wants a product that they can't even imagine yet? So I'd think consumer behavior data / demographic data / etc. is a useful guide, but I'm not sure it's sufficient in and of itself. All of that said, Alan Kay said something interesting in a set of lectures[1][2] he did a year or so ago. He brought up the idea of basing new product ideas on "Human Univerals", or universal aspects of human nature that really don't vary. A writer named Donald Brown wrote a book literally titled Human Univerals [3] which catalogs a number of these (a lot of them are pretty obvious though: food, shelter, sex, etc.). Kay suggested reading this book, pick one of the human univerals, and figure out a way to use technology to address that. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK]

I don't know that I can say I'm particularly good at this, but to the extent that I do have any original / good ideas, I think a big part of it is this: 1. Know at least a little bit, about a lot of stuff. 2. Know a lot about at least a few things. 3. Constantly trawl for new "stuff" (eg, read books, magazines, the web, watch documentaries, etc.) 4. Think about how to combine different bits of the "stuff" you have in your head. Take notes, write down lots of ideas, even if they're dumb at a first glance. Keep chewing on things, and eventually the penny drops and you see some connection between things that makes sense. 5. Related to that, and I don't do this well enough myself, is "spend a lot of time thinking about the kinds of problems people have". I've read a few books on creativity / innovation / etc., but I'm not sure I can say any of them specifically helped, although a few of the ideas may have been useful without my being consciously aware of it. I read some of the Lateral Thinking book and I vaguely recall thinking it seemed somewhat useful. YMMV. [LINK] I also recommend Alan Kay's video series on "How To Invent The Future". Part I: [VIDEO] Part II: [LINK] Another thing: I think sometimes ideas come out that are "ahead of their time" and seemingly die on the vine, or just get left behind. But sometimes when the environment changes, those ideas become ripe to get re-invented. There's a book title Rethink that sorta deals with this idea. [LINK] Anyway, I think there's

. Internet was still relatively new. I mean, if your approach is "find problem, add Internet, equals solution" then yeah, you're probably going to find it a tough row to hoe these days. But I'd challenge you to broaden your thinking and be more imaginative. There's a lot more to creating solutions that "mix in some Internet". Think about the staggering array of things you can do today, with almost no up-front investment at all, using AWS, GCE, Azure, etc., that would have cost millions 20 years ago. You can deploy a virtual super-computer running in AWS and throw it at a problem for crying out loud. Consider too the range of awesome open-source / free software packages that are out there, and all the capabilities they enable. Consider cheap, small, embeddable single-board computers, inexpensive software-defined-radio, cheap webcams, accelerometers, gps chips, and other sensors. Consider all the Open Data that's out there already, and everything streaming in minute-by-minute (see, SDR and receiving satellite data right off the air in real-time). Consider the 8+ billion people in the world who are mostly all potential customers given how interconnected we are with the internet and global payment systems. Look at how much easier it is now to get content in front of potential customers with Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, etc. Consider that you can prototype a physical item with a cheap 3D printer, using Open Source OpenSCAD software, ship a prototype off to an injec

Nobody's stupid because they're not sure about something. It's totally cool to ask for help or opinions when you're thinking through a hard problem. To answer your question you should understand what creativity and practicality mean in your context. I would generally think that being practical and creative aren't at odds with each other. When working through a problem for work I tend to err on the side of practicality. We could be coming up with a new way to do data transformations, building out distributed tracing tools, or trying a new way of scaffolding our projects. Each of those solve a real problem and have practical implications. They also require creative thinking to imagine and design new tools and workflows. These projects are practical in the sense that they need to solve an actual problem (e.g. deliver a net benefit to customer UX or development velocity). Contrary to how they sound, they often aren't obvious projects to take on or straight-forward solutions. It usually required days or weeks of lateral thinking to cook up one of these. In this context, creative thinking complimented practical thinking and produced a better result than one of those modes taken in isolation. Sometimes it's helpful to circle around the problem you think you want to solve to better understand what your actual problem is. Be careful reading other's ideas since it will affect the way in which you see the problem. Your view of the problem may be skewed after reading other information. O

I don't think there's one simple, straight-forward, cookie-cutter answer to this. There are a lot of different ways you could approach this, depending on ... stuff. But to start... I would say you should begin not by thinking in terms of identifying a problem, but by thinking in terms of identifying a candidate problem. That is, some hypothesis that you can then turn around and try to validate. (I won't get all Popperian here and point out that you can really only invalidate hypotheses, but instead will just lean on our intuitive notion of what it means to validate a hypotheses). Once you have a candidate hypotheses (or two, or three, whatever) there is a somewhat straight-forward process for how to validate it and (potentially) turn it into a business. That process is laid out and explained in The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup Owner's Manual . Anyway, back to our "candidate hypotheses". The most obvious way to generate one is from personal experience. Eg, if you have worked as, say, a surgeon, you will probably already know a lot about what problems surgeons face. OTOH, if you think you want to sell to a certain domain, but you don't have actual experience in that domain, you could make it a point to cultivate personal relationships with people who are in that domain, as well as doing a deep-drive into "the literature" of that domain, taking classes, watching videos, etc. But at the end of the day, if you're going to try to build a business selling something to,

I would say that the more generalized software is, the larger the audience, the more likely there will be Strong Boundaries between the Practical and the Theoretical. That said, Licklider was a very special person. This video from Alan Kay talked about him @ 32:42 [VIDEO]

Counterpoint is that they picked one thing (laser printing) out of the dozens of ideas coming out of PARC and capitalized on it to the point that they were found to be a monopoly [0] and forced to license their patents [1]. Watch Alan Kay's "How to Invent The Future" talks from Stanford about this [2] and he talks in more depth. I don't think any company could have built products around all of the ideas that came out of there and been successful, they would have been focused on too many things. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] and [LINK]

I don't think pg intended that crazy new ideas require someone to be a domain expert, just some expertise. Slight wording difference. In the case of music, one could have domain expertise on audio files, compression and domain expertise about file sharing and domain expertise about younger people's listening habits. That's just having some insights into the domain, several as is the case with Napster. Music industry execs in those days probably had domain expertise on contract law, revenue sharing models, marketing and didn't have a clue about file sharing or audio compression. Also want to mention the examples you mention seem to have not much "newness" to them to be "crazy new" in my opinion. When I think of "crazy new" ideas, I think of things like stuff that came out of PARC in the 60's. If you go watch the Stanford 2 part series "How To Invent The Future" with Alan Kay on youtube [0] it goes into a lot of detail about them. The challenge there with Xerox was they couldn't capitalize on every single idea that came out, just not logistically possible for a company to really do that. [0] [VIDEO]

How To Invent the Future, parts 1 and 2. [VIDEO] Alan Kay talks about the innovations that came out of PARC. I liked it because it confirmed my belief that true industry changing innovations are rare.

If I was really truly stuck for an idea and could not get anything to pop into mind, here's something I might try: Apply the "take an old idea and reinvent it in light of newer discoveries, new technology, or in application to a new problem" approach. To do that, read about old ideas in some area of interest to you, that didn't catch on, or were abandoned for whatever reason. Use Google, Wikipedia, Sci-hub, old print magazines, old newspapers, whatever it takes. Look at things through a lens of "Could I resurrect this idea with a new twist that wasn't available when it was first proposed?" Do that for enough "things" there's a chance it'll spark something. Extra hint: if you're looking for a startup idea specifically, Google for one of the multiple lists of "startup ideas that never work" that are out there. Of course it should go without saying to be very cautious about jumping into a project where many other people have failed with the same idea: there's probably a good reason for their failure. But IF you can find a new angle or hook that's "just right" maybe you can succeed. Or the whole exercise may actually bring a completely different idea to mind. Try to be open minded with this stuff. Also, find the two video series[1][2] that Alan Kay did on "Inventing the Future" and watch those. He shares a lot of great ideas in those. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]

One perspective Alan Kay had was that no company could really capitalize on so many different things that came out of PARC. Xerox picked laser printing and capitalized it to the point of being forced by the government to release patents. How to Invent the Future (2 parts), Alan Kay talking at Stanford - [VIDEO]

It was a common practice in the 90s for creative engineers to use extremely expensive "supercomputer" workstations to pay for productivity gains & live on the bleeding edge (e.g. Silicon Graphics workstations, NeXT workstations, and so forth). Question: What is the equivalent way to do this today? That is, is there a way to pay a lot of money to use a computer which is 5-10 years ahead of its time? Ok so I'm pretty biased here, but I think the answer lies in VR computing. There's no doubt VR computers are more expensive than their PC/laptop counterparts, but they allow you to adopt a bleeding edge technology which is essentially 5+ years ahead of its time in terms of where it is on the "commodity computing" frontier. A good quote from Alan Kay I find pretty inspirational on this front: [VIDEO] Here he basically advocates for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a computing machine, in order to compute on what will be a commodity product 10-15 years into the future. VR computers aren't this extreme on the cost curve, but I think there is something to this point of view which I find really inspirational.[1] [1] Caveat: I'm one of the founders of SimulaVR ( [LINK] ), so admittedly am very biased here. But I do think VR provides a way to convert money into "better compute" in a way that hasn't been available since the 70s-90s super workstation era.

Alan Kay's lectures on youtube are mostly about (critical) thinking and how to educate your own thinking. Each of his talks is aimed at a different audience but all address your question. For our HN audience the 1997 OOPSLA talk [1] is a place to start, or the "How to Invent the Future I - Stanford CS183F: Startup School" talks [2]. There are many recommendations of books to read to develop your thinking. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]

Related to inventing, reinventing, and adopting-the-already-existing: Alan Kay on inventing the future: [VIDEO] Jonathan Blow on "reinventing" your own game engines: [LINK]

Do you realize the concepts for computing tablets came out of PARC as well? Alan Kay gave a couple lectures at Stanford on "How to Invent the Future" and went over all the stuff that came out of there. [VIDEO] Much of what we use today was conceptualized 50+ years ago. PARC's outputs paid off immensely for Xerox over a very long period of time since they picked a tech (laser printing) that was perfect for their wheelhouse. Companies and our culture these days don't allow for exploration like PARC was allowed. There is too much focus on monetizing everything and having an ROI.

I'll repeat my answer to the previous iteration[1] of this question from a couple of weeks ago: ---- You might find something of use in some of this stuff: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] ---- In addition, the two videos on "How to Invent the Future" by Alan Kay might be inspirational to you (or anybody else thinking about this topic): Part I - [VIDEO] Part II - [LINK] Actually, this entire playlist is quite interesting, even if you're not looking to launch a startup right now - [LINK] [1]: [LINK]