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Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

like to 'sleep on it'. Stephen Hawking distracts himself by working on a
different problem for a while. Anything that avoids focusing directly on
the problem itself seems to allow our creative freewheel run.
Environment can be important. The campuses created by Steve Jobs
for both Apple and Pixar are designed to foster creativity. The physical
environments build team behavior but also cause people to bump into
each other. Cross-pollination drives creativity.
There are also some myths to dispel about creative people. Inventors
are portrayed as eccentric and hopelessly disorganized, but Feynman
kept notes of every idea he ever had. I have kept a series of notebooks,
now computer based, since I left university. I still have almost all of these
on a shelf at home. Creative people may be a little mad, but the successful
ones are rarely disorganized.
You must allow your brain to free wheel. J.K. Rowling has said the
characters in the Harry Potter novels write themselves. I come to my
computer each morning having not thought too much overnight and
just write. Creation is just that; you must allow yourself to do it. It's not
a process.

The Innovator's Dilemma
Why don't big companies create? In 1997, Clayton Christensen of
Harvard Business School wrote The Innovator's Dilemma, the seminal
work on creativity within organizations. In it, he shows us why established
companies tend not to innovate and why startups exist. Christiansen's
academic research examines how companies handle discontinuous
change in technology, focussing on the hard disk industry.
You might not think this a very sexy sector. Microprocessors and
game consoles would be more fun, but the great advantage with the hard
disk is there is a single industry journal that has tracked the progress of
every player over 30 years, collecting detailed annual data on every facet
of their business. For an academic, this is gold dust.
IBM invented the hard disk drive in their research center near
Winchester, England. The first prototypes were, consequently, called
Winchester Drives. When Christiansen examined the industry, he found
something very strange. As the size of disks reduced first from 8" to
5¼" and then from 5¼" to 3½", the dominant players in the previous
era went out of business and new startups colonized the market. This
fallout was not confined to a few small companies. It affected large, well-
established, publicly-listed organizations, too. They failed en masse at
each discontinuity. At first this made no sense to him. Surely a skilled

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