KENNETH’S KREATIVITY KONFETTI: Creativity & Innovation — "Standing On The Shoulders of Giants"

by Kenneth Nwabudike Okafor

Ideas are ineluctable inputs and outputs of both the creative and innovative processes. Ideas in essence are the business of the blog on creativity and innovation; it would be a recurring theme and topic as long as NAIJAGRAPHITTI BLOG exists.

Starting March 10 to April 15, 2015, we posted three separate articles on how they emerge, preparing the ground for teaching blog readers and enthusiasts how to harvest their ideas.

This post is the third of three posts which we wish to use to establish the collaborative nature of ideas birthing. In the article, Where Original Ideas Come From, Greg Satell made the point on the nature of and results of communal effort in the emergence of scientific revolution. With clear examples he defines the collaborative nature of ideas which have transformed human history across millennia. Rowan Gibson established in How Big Ideas Are Built that Einstein stood on the on the shoulder of more giants to revolutionize physics among other facts.  In this post, Steven Johnson in this 2010 TED talk Where Good Ideas Come From takes us through history to show even more examples of collaborative idea birthing and growing. People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web. 

In this post, I wish to build on the theme of collaborative pursuits for ideas birthing and highlight the gaps in the African ideas marketplace going back as far back as 5,000 years ago.

Winning Ideas – Outcomes of Collaborations

In his article, Where Original Ideas Come From, Greg Satell named Sir Isaac Newton and made reference to how Sir Newton, the greatest scientist of his age and not one known for his false modesty, acknowledged, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Newton wrote this line in his famous letter to his friend, Robert Hooke, himself an English natural philosopher, architect and polymath, in February 1676.

Several scholarly and mainstream studies and other works exist which were undertaken to establish the collaborative emergence of ideas.

Singh and Fleming (2010) in the work Lone inventors as sources of breakthroughs: Myth or reality? published in Management Sciences journal stated "The “lone inventor” is a myth: even geniuses benefit from exposure to ideas of others."

While a number of other scholars and practitioners in creative design practice including Dow, Fortuna and Schwartz agreed that "Seeing ideas different from their own broadens people’s perspectives, sheds light on obscure connections, and inspires people to come up with ideas they might not have thought of alone."

Scholars Pao Siangliulue, Kenneth C. Arnold, and Krzysztof Z. Gajos all of Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and Steven P. Dow of Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pasadena, USA reiterate the same point in their work Toward Collaborative Ideation at Scale—Leveraging Ideas from Others to Generate More Creative and Diverse Ideas.

Now let me elaborate on Sir Newton’s works. Science historians explain that Sir Isaac Newton’s work had built on a long chain of theory and works including those of Nicolas Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei.

Specifically, they believe that Newton's work represents the finale in a long chain of theory and discovery that evolved throughout the Scientific Revolution. The beginnings of progress had come in the sixteenth century. Nicolas Copernicus suggested that perhaps the ancient concept of the Earth's position in the universe was flawed. Giordano Bruno went one step further to claim that the universe itself was far different than the ancients and the Church perceived, and that it stretched out infinitely. Next, Johannes Kepler reduced the motions of the planets to intelligible mathematical rules. Galileo developed the system of earthly mechanics that he hinted might be applied to the heavens. Newton's work was the culmination of this chain of science, inspired by the ideas of these men and the methods and tools developed by them and others of his predecessors. Sir Newton’s seminal work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy") linked the last two remaining pieces of the puzzle—Galileo's physics and Kepler's astronomy—and emerged with the 'grand design' so many before him had sought. The design seemed not to have been established by any planning or simple geography, but rather by the interaction of the forces of nature, principally gravitation, on an enormous scale (SparkNotes, 2014). In the long run, Sir Newton set off FOUR scientific revolutions. 

In turn, Rowan Gibson in How Big Ideas Are Built wrote how Albert Einstein studied the work of his predecessors and peers—from Isaac Newton to James Clerk Maxwell, David Hume, Ernst Mach, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré, and Max Planck—either building on or refuting their ideas.

Culture Enables, Deters Or Euthanizes Ideas Emergence

What is less explicit from Satell’s and Gibson’s write-ups is the influence of culture in enabling or disabling ideas birthing.

Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From gives us a good expose to how culture fosters ideas birthing or leads to idea refining. He shares how the London’s coffee houses played significant role in the age of The Enlightenment.

From experience, this blog and its publishers have established that this has not been the case for efforts in the African ideas marketplace even from prehistoric times. It should bother every African.

Africa lost out on key advantages where great ideas are concerned. There are ample proofs ancient Africa empires’ lost their learnings, knowledge stores, sciences and wasted competitive advantage. How?

Did you know that this brilliant man Euclid who theorized Euclid’s geometry though Greek actually spent a lot of time in Africa at the Royal Library in Alexandria, Egypt, one of the most ancient places of learning in the world at the time?

Euclid was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the "Father of Geometry". He wrote the most enduring mathematical work of all time, the Stoicheia or Elements, a thirteen volume work. This comprehensive compilation of geometrical knowledge, based on the works of Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Menaechmus and others, was in common usage for over 2,000 years.

At the time of its introduction, Elements was the most comprehensive and logically rigorous examination of the basic principles of geometry. It survived the eclipse of classical learning, which occurred with the fall of the Roman Empire, through Arabic translations. Elements was reintroduced to Europe in 1120 c.e. when Adelard of Bath translated an Arabic version into Latin. Over time, it became a standard textbook in many societies, including the United States, and remained widely used until the mid-nineteenth century. Much of the information in it still forms a part of many high school geometry curricula (Encyclopaedia.com, 2014).

Euclid was active in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic Dynasty in reign of Ptolemy I (323–283 BC). Again from history we learn that Ptolemy I Soter I was the person credited with creating the Royal Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Ptolemy I Soter I was a Macedonian general under Alexander the Great, who became ruler of Egypt (323–283 BC) and founder of both the Ptolemaic Kingdom and the Ptolemaic Dynasty. In 305/4 BC he demanded the title of pharaoh. The Royal Library was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. It was dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts. It functioned as a major centre of scholarship from its construction in the 3rd century BC until the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC. With collections of works, lecture halls, meeting rooms, and gardens, the library was part of a larger research institution called the Museum of Alexandria, where many of the most famous thinkers of the ancient world studied. The Library at Alexandria was in charge of collecting the entire world's knowledge, and most of the staff was occupied with the task of translating works onto papyrus paper. It did so through an aggressive and well-funded royal mandate involving trips to the book fairs of Rhodes and Athens (Wikipedia, 2014).

Euclid’s contemporaries include Archimedes (287 BC - 212 BC), Ptolemy I (born 367/366, Macedonia – died 283/282 BC), Egypt, Conon of Samos (280 BC - ca. 220 BC), and Apollonius of Perga (born c. 240 BC, Perga, Anatolia – died c. 190 BC).

Archaeologists have not found evidence that Euclid’s works enjoyed wide spread familiarity in ancient Egyptian society which was more interested in promoting aesthetics, mysticism and magical knowledge, and revelling in promoting the grandeur of these knowledge.

Euclid’s work was also not renowned in the neighbouring kingdom, Aksum.

Archaeologists have determined that the Kingdom of Aksum (or Axum), also known as the Aksumite Empire, was a trading nation in the area of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, which existed from approximately 100–940 AD. Historically, the ruins of the ancient city of Aksum are found close to Ethiopia's northern border. They mark the location of the heart of ancient Ethiopia, when the Kingdom of Aksum was the most powerful state between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia. The massive ruins, dating from between the 1st and the 13th century A.D., include monolithic obelisks, giant stelae, royal tombs and the ruins of ancient castles. Long after its political decline in the 10th century, Ethiopian emperors continued to be crowned in Aksum.

The Kingdom of Aksum was ideally located to take advantage of the new trading situation. Adulis soon became the main port for the export of African goods, such as ivory, incense, gold, slaves, and exotic animals. In order to supply such goods the kings of Aksum worked to develop and expand an inland trading network. A rival, and much older trading network that tapped the same interior region of Africa was that of the Kingdom of Kush, which had long supplied Egypt with African goods via the Nile corridor. By the 1st century AD, however, Aksum had gained control over territory previously Kushite. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea explicitly describes how ivory collected in Kushite territory was being exported through the port of Adulis instead of being taken to Meroë, the capital of Kush. During the 2nd and 3rd centuries the Kingdom of Aksum continued to expand their control of the southern Red Sea basin. A caravan route to Egypt was established which bypassed the Nile corridor entirely. Aksum succeeded in becoming the principal supplier of African goods to the Roman Empire, not least as a result of the transformed Indian Ocean trading system (Wikipedia, 2014).

In spite of the greatness of these civilizations there are no records of educational and scholastic knowledge interactions, no exchange of learning between ancient Egypt, Kush and Aksum!  

Now what bothered me was why with all this rich resource of manpower, learning and viable platform of learning in ancient Egypt, Kush and Aksum, why did no African built on what Euclid did while in Egypt?

Gaps in the African Ideas Marketplace

The answer that came to me was an admixture of several concepts: culture; curiosity; purpose and access to the works of other great minds.

If you wish to stand on the shoulders of giants, you need to be curious, purposeful, collaborative and systematic; the prevailing culture must also engender clement environment and motivation.

There were other compelling reasons. A study of the historicity and social geography of Egypt reveal that the Royal Library of Alexandria and the whole notion of scholastic excellence was first and foremost a prestige factor to the grandeur and wealth of Egypt than anything else. Ancient Egypt’s elite and leadership were more enamoured of esoteric arts and mystical writings in that era.

Then there was the emergence of writing which did not spread uniformly for all the kingdoms, to enable their knowledge workers capture their learnings and knowledges. Some wrote things down and others still depended on oral history and folklore with confining limitations.

There were other reasons like atomistic ethnic cleavages, cultural alienation and linguistic barriers.

For me, curiosity is key; interestingly I recall the words of a controversial American advertising magnate Carl Ally of Ally & Gargano (formerly Carl Ally Inc) who had thoughts of why curiosity is vital in birthing ideas when he said "The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea." 

Still on curiosity, it was possible that others around Euclid in Africa were not interested in what he was doing, perhaps because they did not place much store by it. Or his African contemporaries did not have the same purpose as to add to the store of human knowledge.

Or, lastly, Euclid’s brilliant scholarship was not readily accessible to his contemporaries and scholars within his immediate environment, by geographical limitations or by language barriers.

Access is a big challenge for a number of reasons some of which are closely tied to language (Okafor, 2015).

Language as Barrier for Ideas Cross-pollination

Even from prehistoric times, Africa never has a language of tinkering, social thought and scholarship like Latin and later English. Arabic would come the closest in the last 5,000 years (Okafor, 2015).

Translation of foreign languages has proven to be a particular hurdle to scholarship (Okafor, 2015).

Sir Newton’s book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published in Latin, the language of scholarship in his day. Later when English would overtake Latin in importance, there were grants made available by wealthy patrons and governments to undertake massive translation projects which would make these books and their contents widely accessible.

Africa has endured many stitch-ups in this instance. African ideas exchange has been hobbled by strictures of mother tongue and foreign languages, with no structures and funding specifically for rapid translations (Okafor, 2015).

For instance, the Timbuktu manuscripts (large number of historically important manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in private households in Timbuktu, Mali; the collections include manuscripts about art, medicine, philosophy, and science of the late Abbasid Caliphate, as well as priceless copies of the Quran; the number of manuscripts in the collections has been estimated as high as 700,000) written mostly in Hula and Arabic have yet been completely transcribed for African (and other) scholars!

Africa Rising?

We have new vistas to reverse the generations of wasted opportunities, if we should refuse to believe our own myth.

Try as much as you can, Africa cannot leapfrog critical thinking and problem solving. These are empirical.

Shimon Peres the former Israeli President gave an insight into Israel making oasis out of a desert, when he said "In Israel, a land lacking in natural resources, we learned to appreciate our greatest national advantage: our minds. Through creativity and innovation, we transformed barren deserts into flourishing fields and pioneered new frontiers in science and technology."

Now can you dust up your tucked away ideas and let’s head to the NAIJAGRAPHITTI BLOG "coffee house" or any other place we can keep these ideas conversation going?