WBW 29: Great Ideas come from Old Ones and Building from Them

There is no one pure new idea and that includes our multi-gazillion eureka. But hey, it doesn't take out the fact that yours may be a super great idea. From all time's greatest inventions and innovations - steam engine trains, cars, computers, etc. - all came from past ideas in which genuises borrow and build from past knowledge to make their names unforgetable. As great entrepreneurs learn and leverage from the wisdom of others, watch and listen as Fredrik Haren, renowned author, speaker and co-founder of interesting.org, talks about his learnings on the importance of creativity, and how he applied these in the success of his book, The Idea Book - acclaimed 100 best business books of all time.

Who is Fredrik Haren?

An entrepreneur, publisher, author and speaker from Sweden who now lives in Singapore, Fredrik is the founder of a creativity company called Interesting.org and has been invited to speak on creativity in over 1000 sessions to people in more than 30 countries. He was awarded “Speaker of the Year” in Sweden 2007, and was selected as one of “Sweden’s 100 most inspiring persons” by the magazine “Leva” in 2008. In 2009 he was selected as one of Sweden’s most sought-after business speakers. Fredrik has written a total of 7 books and he lectures around the world and gives speeches in more than 25 countries ranging from China and Japan to the USA and Canada.

This August, Interesting.org officially launched Fredrik's book, The Idea Book, here in the Philippines. So far, the book has sold over 200,000 copies to readers in more than 40 countries and has been translated into 9 languages – including Mandarin, Japanese and Filipino. The Idea Book was recently launched in Singapore and quickly made it to the bestselling shelf of Borders, Kinokuniya and even the book shop at Changi Airport. When the book was launched in Japan, it made it to the top 5 on Amazon.jp’s list of best selling management books. During the book launch in Iceland, more than one percent of the population bought The Idea Book within a month. Lastly, it also been included in the recently published American book “The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You.” The Idea Book is one of only ten presented under the category “Innovation and Creativity”.

Show notes:

What is an Idea?

• An idea is formed when a person takes at least two formerly known things and combines them in a new way.
• This is the basis of creativity.
• It’s impossible to come up with a brand new idea. An idea is always a combination of previously known things.
• Creativity is the ability to combine what you already know in a new way, and make it simpler to understand.

Books on Creativity

• All creativity books teach, “do things differently and you will be successful.” Even this book (i.e. The Idea Book) teaches that.
• How different is The Idea Book? If you write a book telling everyone else you should be different, shouldn’t your book be different?
• All creativity writers in the world are hypocrites. They tell everyone else to be different, but they are not different themselves. So when I decided to write a book about creativity, it should not only be about being different, the book itself should be different.
• So I took the concept of a book, and I took the concept of a notebook. And what did I get? I get The Idea Book. It’s not a Nobel Prize-winning idea. But that’s the point.
• Ideas don’t have to be Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci crazy innovative to be good. You just have to be a little bit different.

Why Is The Idea Book a Good Idea?

• When you read a book, you usually get ideas. So it’s good if you have a place to write them down.
• All other books are monologues. You listen to the author, but you never get the chance to say anything. It’s like a seminar. My book is a dialogue, a creative dialogue. That makes my book more interactive. That’s one advantage.
• What’s the big advantage for me as an author? I only have to write half a book. Which means I make twice as much money as any other creativity writer.
• Another advantage is that people don’t carry books around, but people bring notebooks around. The reason people love this book is not because I wrote it, but because of what you wrote in it.
• When people find a book interesting, they ask you if they can borrow it when you’re done reading it, and usually you say yes. And that’s good for you and for your friend, but not for authors, because that means less revenues.
• But what happens when someone borrows your notebook? You say no, because it’s your notebook.

Creating Your Own Category

• There are 11,000 management books published every year. A company usually only buys two. So if you publish a management book, there’s very little chance that it’s your book they’ll buy, because there’s so much competition.
• But my book is not a book. It’s a notebook, and it goes into the stationery account. I sell more than the average management book because I sell it straight to companies.
• When we sold the book in Iceland, we sold 3,000 copies in 30 days. That’s 1% of the population of Iceland.
• In the American book, “The 100 Greatest Business Books of All Time”, only 2 books are non-American, only 1 book is self-published, and that is the Idea Book.

Walking The Talk

• I think it makes sense that if someone comes and talks about creativity,  that person should not only talk about how other people are doing things successfully in business. He should also be a person who’s actually done what the book says, by himself. I call it credibility.
• My talk today is about business creativity. And now maybe you think I’m gonna do a creative talk. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I will talk for an hour and you will sit and listen.
• I’ve done one thing differently. Usually you first introduce yourself to get some credibility. Then you tell people what you’re gonna talk about, then you talk about it. Then you summarize what you just said, and then you have questions at the end.
• That’s how you do a speech, and that’s how you’ve been doing speeches for two thousand years. I just changed that. I ask questions in the beginning. Any questions?
• The reason is this: to ask questions at the end is a bad way to do a speech, because I first talk for 55 minutes, and in the last 5 minutes you suddenly get a chance to tell me what you really wanted me to talk about. What if I talk about the wrong thing?

Are There Any Questions?

• “From among your talks, what’s the most common question that people commonly ask?”
• I’ve never heard that before. This is very interesting.
• The most common question I get is “why did you, as someone from Sweden, move to China and then to Singapore?” The answer to that, I will talk a little bit about that, I believe that developing countries are the most interesting place to be when it comes to creativity and innovation.  I was talking about developing countries in my seminars and I thought to myself, I should go there. So now I’m here and I’ll never go back.

Creativity: The Most Important Skill

• Knowledge and information are important, context is important. But the ability to combine knowledge in a new way is the most important skill that you can have.
• The number of ideas should equal the number of people, times the amount of knowledge and information that these people have access to. The number of people is exploding at the moment. We were 2 billion a hundred years ago. We were 6 billion 10 years ago. We are 6.7 billion people now. And we will be 9 billion people before you die.But just because you have people doesn’t mean you have ideas. These people need knowledge and information.

Explosion of Creativity

• So what is happening to the number of people who get knowledge and education? That is increasing faster than we are increasing in number of people.
• What about the access of information? It has boomed too, thanks to the Internet.
• I am arguing that the world right now is witnessing an explosion of creativity, innovation and discoveries, thanks to developing countries.
• I gave a seminar at the world’s largest paint company. I was told that they now have more people doing R&D work on paint in India.
• More people working on paint R&D means more people doing paint research and development, right? More people who do paint research means more paint research results, which means more innovation and discoveries and ideas that people in the paint industry can use.
• You can’t imagine how quickly the paint industry is innovating right now. They have just invented paint that is just one color, but every human being sees another color. The problem is they don’t know what to use it for.
• The price of knowledge is going down. Everyone has access to the internet today, so the value of information is going down.
• There’s only one way to figure out something new, and that is with creativity and imagination. So the value of knowledge and information are going down, but the value of creativity and innovation are going up.
• One just needs to find a use for the color-changing paint. It could be a multibillion-dollar industry and we just don’t know it yet. This is similar to the laser – it was just invented, they didn’t know what to use it for, until someone else did.

Idea Perception and the Industrial Revolution

• This is a specific type of creativity. I call it idea perception. That is your ability to see new ideas that are being produced in the world today, understand what these ideas mean, and figuring out how we are going to use these ideas. This is a specific skill.
• The problem is, most people are terrible when it comes to realizing that the world now has access to new technologies.
• The last time we had an idea explosion in the world was during the Industrial Revolution. In the 1900s, suddenly, we had all these new discoveries at the same time. Steam engine, train, all these things at the same time.
• The people who lived then, didn’t see it. The people who built trains were the same people who built horse carriages and steam engines. So they built trains that looked like horse carriages – with people sitting on top. What’s the problem with people sitting on top of a train? You get smoke in the eyes. So how did they solve that problem? They raised the chimney. They were so stuck on the idea that some people should sit on top. They didn’t understand that people shouldn’t sit on top of trains.
• But the problem isn’t smoke. What’s the bigger problem? Falling off. Because trains are not horse carriages, and trains started going faster and faster. What happens when you sit on top of a train going 90 kilometers per hour and you fall off? You die. People have to die before they realize that they were wrong.

Idea Perception Exercise: The Car

• Let’s try to improve the car – which is just a more elegant horse carriage – by not thinking of the car. Let’s think of the mobile phone. You came up with five ideas in one minute. The guys at Volvo came up with one idea in five. They just couldn’t do it, because they thought they had thought about everything about a car. All the ideas they came up with were ideas that made a car with.
• The more experience you have, the more knowledge you have about an industry, the more sure you are that you know how things work. And then when new technologies, new innovations come, you don’t look at them as what they are. You look and say, it’s never gonna work.

Internet Entrepreneurs of the 90s

• All the entrepreneurs who put up their own Internet/IT related companies in the 90s dropped out of university.
• When you are at university, you have enough information about the things going on in the world, but you don’t have enough information about how things should be done.
• Almost all the Internet entrepreneurs were young people who saw the new technology and saw how it could be used, had idea perception.
• When I went out of university, one technology exploded – the Internet. When you go out from university, this explosion of ideas happen in all industries at the same time. You have an advantage because you know how things should be done.
• Being young and well educated, you have a specific advantage because you live in a developing country. I moved from a developed country to a developing country. My next book, The Developing World, will be about why you have an advantage over a 25-year-old Swede.

Don’t Focus On Your Problems

• Focus on your strengths, and using that for the most positive effect.
• When it comes to creativity, when you live in a developing country, the first and overarching advantage is this – in the developed world, we made a mistake when we defined ourselves the “developed world.” The words we use are very important. The words we use define how we think.
• “Developed” means “done”, “finished”. We have built our house, we have baked our cake. We are now done. We have reached the finish line.
• What does “developing” mean. Growing, expanding, dynamic. It’s i-n-g, it’s an active thing. I’m running. We finished. When you stopped running, there’s less motion, there’s stagnation. But we are not done.
• In the 19th century, the tallest building in the world was in Europe. In the 20th century, they were in America. In the 21st century, they are all in developing countries in Asia.

Your Advantages Over a 25-year-old Swede

• First, you can see change. For you to have idea perception, you first have to see that the world is changing.
• Europe is standing still. The biggest problem you have in the Philippines is that your view of the developing world is wrong. You think that all of America is Steve Jobs. But they’re not. America has only one Steve Jobs.
• We are not as good as you are in adapting to change.
• Second, you know more than us. You have a knowledge advantage over us. Normally we hear the opposite. You don’t have enough facilities, universities, problem problem problem.
• Remember the definition of an idea. People from developing countries know about their cultures, but also know about the West. You know about your world, you know about mine, it’s about taking the best from each, combining that into something new.
• But we don’t know shit about you, or your culture. We don’t know anything outside our country and culture.
• Third, you have the potential to be more creative than us. People in the developing world tend to copy but not innovate. This is not a problem. This is an opportunity.
• Remember the definition of an idea. It means that it is impossible to create without copying. Every invention is a copy of another invention.
• People in the West keep on talking about copyright. It’s not about copyright. It’s about copying right.
• The American auto industry thought they were the best, but they’re now going down the drain because they’re not innovating. The Japanese auto industry was known for copying. But now they are innovating. They copied in a new way.
• When you look around you and see what everyone’s doing, and do the same, that’s not copying. That’s duplicating. It’s copyright infringement or counterfeiting.
• Creativity is looking at what everyone is doing in the world, taking the best of that and combining it into something new. And you have more knowledge where to look than we do.

Potential To Be More Creative

• The mobile phone was invented by a Swede, Ericsson. We invented SMS; you perfected it. But in the Philippines you can use your phone to send money to another phone. This is also available in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, South Africa, India and Zimbabwe. That is not available in Sweden. How come? Because we think that we have the most advanced solutions in the world.
• But if you don’t have a credit card and you have a mobile phone, you use the more recent technology because you’re not stuck on the older technology.
• 90% of the motorcycles in Beijing are electric motorcycles. Why? Because they moved directly from bicycles to electric vehicles. Who is more open to buying electric cars – someone who’s been riding an electric motorcycle for five years and can now afford his own car, or someone who’s been driving a petrol car for a hundred years?
• You are now adopting new technologies faster than we are in the West. Internet banking is more advanced in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. The airports in developing countries are more advanced, more beautiful and easier to land in than those in the West. You’re not stuck in looking at how things are done, you’re looking at how things could be done.

Creativity Doesn’t Just Happen; It Is Developed

• It cannot be learned in the university. It’s not up to the professor or the university. It’s up to you. You have to learn how to develop it. You have to learn how to question everything.

Questioning The Concept of The Book

• A book should have pages. It is sold in bookstores, on eBay, in schools, on Amazon, in coffee shops, airport shops, hotels.
• In China, they don’t have Bibles in hotel rooms because they’re not Christian. They don’t even have a single book in their hotel rooms. So I said, why don’t you put a book in your room? They said, which book? I said, mine.
• So now the top hotels in China do not have the Bible still, but they have The Idea Book.
• On the first page, because it was blank, they wrote, Guest Book, so that you won’t steal it. No one steals a guest book. But the good thing is that people read what the others have written, and do express interest in buying a copy.
• So in three months, they sold a hundred copies. That means one copy of my book is sold per day. There’s no bookshop in the world that sells one copy of my book everyday. And it all started from a stupid idea of beating the Bible.
• So now we’re talking about 100 hotels selling 1 copy per day. That’s 100 books per day. 3,000 per month, 36,000 books per year. It started as a crazy joke.

Developing Countries

• I think two developing countries have an advantage over other developing countries, and that’s India and the Philippines. First of all, democracy. You can say what you want about your democracy, but it is a democracy, and freedom is important to be creative. Second, you speak English really good. You are more in tune with the West than other countries are. Third, you are young. Trends start in countries that are developing, that are growing, and that are young. Innovation comes from these countries.
• Today’s most creative people dropped out of university 25 years ago. That’s where you are today. So all you have to do is buy the Idea Book, get some tools, and go out and rule the world.

Lessons

• Creativity has never been more important than now.
• The developing world has more potential to be more creative than anyone else.Creativity doesn’t come just because you have the potential. You have to develop it.

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