The world is conservative. We can attribute this
to the “follow the world trends” ethos that many countries seem to play by when
it comes to being “innovative about innovation”. Such a self-defeating culture
and ethos is not good, especially in the age where money is no longer hid under
your mattress and wealth is not measured by the number of cows and sheep you
have.
At some point, the circle has to end. It has to be broken,
smashed, purified by fire, and left to scatter into the ether and, God forbid,
the children of now should not even have to know about it. I figured children are
good grounds to start introducing the culture of innovation because innocence
and virtue is a dynamo of breakthrough ideas with no strings attached. It seems
that the older we get, the more that innocence is bled out of us by the weight
of time in return for fear of failure largely disguised as a spectrum of
experience. Yet to some point we all
still hold a kernel of innocence so every one of us is a potential source of
innovation but the problem is that our innovative ideas are entwined with too
much self-seeking desires (will it take my fortune to its zenith? Will elevate
my name to such heights as those of Mark Zuckerberg?) so much so that
eventually, if the idea doesn’t seem to hold potential for such regal status we
convince ourselves the idea is not worth it, and just abandon ship. We have
even gotten to a point where there are companies who make money off telling you
that your idea isn’t good enough.
Children on the other hand still hold a wealth of innocence,
virtue. And virtue is imaginative. Small wonder why children learn languages so
easily. While teaching them to read and write French and if innocence is the
great divide why not throw in machine languages to the lessons(HTML5, jQuery, C)? Even the
basics will be indelible and, whenever they come across a well-made web page it
will instantly set off an alarm of recognition. Formula one teams start to
breed their future drivers when they’re as young as 7. That used to be called
social engineering (or The Matrix) but hey, we cannot escape the fact that interaction
between humans and, utilisation of machines is the future of man-kind. And that
says a lot coming from me, an old skool guy who would rather be home planting
lilies than attend the next Linux expo.
I am convinced that Google drew inspiration from children;
they just acquire the wildest, most audacious start-ups even if they are
acutely aware of the possibilities of failure (they’re almost always there),
inject resources into them and if it works we get things like Google Glass, if
it doesn’t, they just try another one. Failure is legacy. Failure is a stepping
stone which later becomes the capstone.
It would be extremely good (moral) business if big
corporations with all these big solutions that are supposed to make our lives
easier in the long run, were to involve more of those who will be there in the
longest run; children, supposing they don’t all die young. I could tell you an
array of acronyms in IT jargon; RFID, NFC, VR, LTE. In the motor industry
jargon you get ABS with EBD, CST with ATC… you get where I’m going with this.
Most of these acronyms are a fabric meant to sound inscrutable to the common
person. But if they started to, at least, thoroughly lay individual threads
bare about how these things are made up, how they work, explain the basics of
their sinew to young minds even in primary school, it really wouldn’t destroy
the integrity of said fabric but would at least raise the mean knowledge of the
average child thus a better future for man-kind.
Children are lumps of untapped potential for brilliant
ideas. If the people who hold the cards for education and influence know how to
play those cards (morally) well, they would see to it that said untapped
potential will be tapped sooner than later. That is innovation about
innovation.
Innovation is good, innovation about innovation is even
better. ..
