DailyPost 692
IDEA DIFFUSION
We are living in a century of idea diffusion. The people who are capable enough to spread the ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. Otto Rohwedder invented the most popular food item of today, Sliced Bread in the 1910s. His focus was on the making part and the patent. Sliced bread for first 15 years neither had any customers nor did anybody know of it. The idea had to be made to bloom through a neat connect with the customer. It’s in a way like handholding, the idea being put on it’s own feet.
Then Wonder came along & figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread. From nobody wanting or knowing of it, it became a super success. TED, world’s leading public speaking platform works under the slogan “ideas worth spreading.” Though most of the ideas reaching there are well proven & fairly known, it spreads like wild fire globally, as it gets the TED stage. Millions of views transform the man, the idea & the product. It creates futher co-centric circles of exposure and acceptability, spreading the idea & consolidating it. TED happens to be one of it’s kind Knowledge Diffusion Platform. Chris Anderson realised the strength of the video format pretty early & aligned the TED platform accordingly. A yeomen service to mankind.
How many great ideas are garthering dust for the failure to get it’s propagators? How many of the doctoral thesis can be transformed into a viable business idea & later a enduring business entity. The Google founders transformed the core idea of a doctoral research into a company that is at the vanguard of global digital transformation. PageRank could have remained as an algorithm produced in a research. Similarly, ARPANET could have remained so to this day, if it’s creators & operators has not taken the internet route under humungous odds. Printing created the very concept of knowledge diffusion & henceforth it has found it’s platforms & mediums.
If we get into transforming our ideas, patents, softwares, algorithms etc., which though deserving have not been lucky to diffused, it would be the most wonderful revolution the world has ever seen. A humungous task needs a transformational strategy to bring the efforts already made to an optimum use.
AN IDEA NOT DIFFUSED IS NOT AN IDEA.
Sanjay Sahay