Stanford Online
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2018–2024
58:02 · 40K views · May 25, 2017
Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture covers his career at Xerox PARC and how to think about inventing the future. He goes through what came out of PARC and why companies fail to capitalize on such ideas.
It is HN's standard answer to questions on creativity, finding problems and PARC history, valued for Kay's thinking about thinking.
16 comments from Hacker News
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: this 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
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]: this video [2]: [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] this video
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. this 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.
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] this video and [LINK]