But… That was My Idea!

The Jakarta Post, 16 July 2006

In the early days of Kayee’s life in Jakarta, she has a ‘bug’: She loves Chinese fast food, but could not find it in Jakarta. She started to ask around about the possibility of opening up a Cantonese style noodle shop. She had great discussions with friends about how the restaurant would look, but like in most cases that you can perhaps relate with, the conversations stopped there.

About a year later, she discovered a new restaurant in town – specializing in Chinese fast-food; a restaurant that can whip up her comfort food at affordable prices. Her initial reaction was ‘but that was my idea’. But was it her idea? She didn’t do anything with the idea – but someone else did and turned the idea into a big prosperous business. The business card of the restaurant now proudly proclaims branches in most of the major cities in Indonesia.

Gosh, as if that doesn’t sound too familiar already. Well here is a short article to convince you that something can be done, if you needed more convincing. The message here is straightforward and something that Kayee’s friend Ben commonly reminds himself: “ideas are cheap without action.”

Here is another one, if just to prove that this happens all too often than not. Kayee was inspired by her observation that Indonesian people love to drink lemon tea and fizzy drinks. Working on the principle of combining old ideas to make new ones, she thought “why not combine the two?” – carbonated lemon tea.

Eventually, she found the exact drink on sale in supermarkets. Someone else’s imagination obviously took them down the same path as Kayee’s had, except that someone else added the creative ingredients of knowledge, motivation, hard work, persistence, creating and following a plan of action to realize an ‘internal image’ into ‘external reality’.

We have just finished reading “The Creative Economy” by John Howkins in which he describes “how people make money from ideas”. Ideas, being intellectual properties, “belong to someone”. Now, even the most common description of intellectual properties, which includes patents, amongst others, “… are not issued for an idea, but for a specific device, process, or machine that is presumably workable…” (World Book Dictionary).

Well, here is something practical that could bring home the message. Thomas Edison is famous for ‘inventing’ the light bulb, but not many people know that it wasn’t his idea in the first place (the idea belonged to Humphry Davy, an English chemist who in 1809, made the first arc lamp). In 1880, more than 70 years after the idea was born, Edison was granted a patent for his light bulb. Little known is that Edison’s light bulb evolved from a 1875 patent he purchased from other inventors, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans.

Along the way to receiving a patent for his light bulb, Edison famously ‘failed’ over a thousand times and famously persisted until he arrived at a workable design. We can say that Edison embodied the ‘creative attitude’ of daring to fail and according to Torrance (1995) who quoted Chuck Jones: “probably the only trait that is characteristic of all creative people is persistence.”

In 1892, Edison’s company, the Edison General Electric Company merged with the Thomson-Houston Company led by Charles A. Coffin, to form the General Electric Company, nowadays known as GE, the enormous multinational conglomerate. Edison enjoyed financial success from his many inventions because of his persistence in working on ideas – even when he did not originate them.

Since the patent was granted to Edison, we can translate this to mean that it’s people who put ideas into action – people who make ideas work – who have real claim to ownership of ideas. As most of us know, the joy of the ‘aha’ moment of being enlightened with an idea is most often than not followed by a time of hard work and persistence in the realization of an idea. As Edison succinctly puts it “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

We tend to agree with Dr. Ruth Noller, Professor Emeritus of the International Center for Studies in Creativity, who defined creativity as a function of attitude multiplied by knowledge, imagination and evaluation. As we have seen in the examples given above, having any one of the elements listed by Dr. Noller without the others will unlikely turn ideas into successful realization.

In layman’s terms, creativity is more than just coming up with new ideas. “Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes the difference” proclaims Nolan Bushnell. Just try convincing the patent office that you deserve a patent for an idea that has yet to be realized.

But having just an idea, which is only perceived to be workable, may not be “good enough.” Indeed, being granted a patent does not provide instant wealth, as in the case of the pneumatic (air filled) tyre. Robert Thomson was granted the first patent for the pneumatic tyre in 1845. However, his design was too expensive and too impractical for commercial use to be a success. It wasn’t until more than 40 years later, that John Boyd Dunlop developed the idea further and in 1888 was granted a patent for his ‘Improvement in Tyres of Wheels for Bicycles, Tricycles, or other Road Cars’. Dunlop’s patent was later revoked on the grounds of Thomson’s earlier patent. Despite the ensuing competition, the Dunlop Rubber Company continued to be a success. ‘Workable’ and ‘usefulness’, it seems, are what ultimately brings financial success.

Kayee’s lack of action can be explained by Teresa Amabile’s (1996) componential theory of creativity. According to Amabile, creative production requires internal motivation, relevant skills and creative thinking skills. For us, that means: although she has the creative thinking skills, she lacked intrinsic motivation and relevant skills (in this case, her culinary or business skills) to bring the idea forward.

We don’t think there actually is a shortage in new ideas that can potentially enrich us financially (and/or emotionally). What our friend Ben means about “ideas are cheap without action” is that he and his team have so many ideas, that having good ideas glaring at you but not working them render them useless. Ben’s attitude is “where is the action?”. An idea without action is akin to an organization having a vision without the action. If we have three components of internal motivation, relevant skills and creative thinking skills, there is no reason not to act upon our ideas. As Henry Ford so elegantly summed it up when he said ‘You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.’

So ownership of ideas can potentially make you rich – with the proviso that you make them work and turn them into something useful. The action plan and action are as important as the idea itself. Kudos to people who have the knowledge, skills, motivation and persistence to realize new and useful ideas.

Remember: “Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there” (Will Rogers).