Researchers Build Upon The Works Of Those Who Went Before
Valuing Research Part II: Creativity and information sharing over time are at the heart of new discoveries
Welcome to the gazebo! Take a seat. I’m honored you’re here!
Ed Note: This is the second of a multi-part series on the value of research. Today’s part talks about the process of research creativity and how it results from the open sharing of information between researchers, over time and between disciplines. The amazing advances we enjoy today are the result of the combined knowledge of many. 1
We will return to business planning after this series is completed. I hope you find it thought provoking and that you become more aware of the precarious state of future research. Let me know by posting a comment.
This Week’s Summary:
Creativity extends beyond the arts like music and paintings
Technological creativity has improved (mostly) all of our lives
Today’s researchers build on the work of prior researchers
Without prior research the discoveries of tomorrow will not happen
We never know who will make the next discovery and when
A robust research community benefits every American and global citizen
Picture an early 1990’s community college evening classroom in Austin, TX full of adults looking to start or improve their businesses. I had been asked to co-design and teach the new “Street MBA” program which was intended to teach core MBA concepts to adult students in a practical, applied way. One of the topics we included was creativity and that was my topic for the evening.
“When you think of creativity, what comes to mind,” I asked?
“Music.” “Painting.” “Movies.” “Ceramics.” These were the majority of responses, and the heads were shaking in agreement around the room.
Image copyright © 2025 by Ed Paulson. All rights reserved.
“OK. I get those,” I said. “What about engineering?” They all knew I was an engineer, and this brought chuckles from around the group. “What? You all picturing guys with white shirts, colors that don’t match, and pocket protectors? Dilbert types, right?” They laughed and agreed.
“Think for a minute. How do we know when we’ve seen something creative?” Folks thought for a moment and replied, “The song isn’t like anything I have ever heard before” or “The painting is so unique that I know who created it just by looking at it.”
“So, something creative is something that didn’t exist before someone made it up?” Heads shook in agreement. I then held up my cell phone. “What about this?” The entire group looked confused. “It’s just a cell phone,” one person said. “So true. Who has one?” Everyone raised their hand. “How many of you had one 10 years ago,” I asked? No hands went up. “Isn’t the cell phone something that exists today but did not exist before, until somebody had the idea for it and then made it happen?” Hesitantly, they shook their heads in agreement. I think they were all a little afraid that I was conning them into something.
“Think about it for a moment. You can pick up your phone and in an instant, from wherever you are, call someone else and find them wherever they are, at any time, from anywhere. This was huge, radical change from how it was just a few years ago. It transformed our lives and much of society into something completely different from a communication perspective, didn’t it?” Heads nodded in agreement. They were getting the point.
“Science and technology are amazingly creative endeavors that don’t really get credit for being so. Someone, somewhere, at some point in time, had the idea for a portable phone, and here we are. Just like the artist created a new type of painting style, engineers and scientists have created a vast range of scientific and engineering breakthroughs that all combined at one point in time to become a device that allows me to call my sister and find her wherever she is. I think that is amazing, pretty cool, and incredibly creative.” They got it.
Technological breakthroughs like the cell phone, the Internet, digital music, streaming movies, and the like, have transformed many industries and impacted our lives in many ways. But, and this is an important “but” for today’s topic, they didn’t happen in one sitting, at one point in time, by one person. They all happened as a result of years (decades?) of prior work that at one point in time coalesced into an idea in the mind of a person, who then took the steps to make their idea a reality. This creative process has kept me fascinated by entrepreneurship for my entire career.
We have all seen it happen in movie streaming (Netflix), digital music (MP3 player), space exploration, robotic surgery, remote meetings (Zoom), targeted cancer treatments (proton therapy), new Mexican themed fast food (Chipotle), and so on. Someone, somewhere, saw how things were and wondered if they could be combined to create something new.
Uncovering these moments of inspiration has always been a treat for me that never grows old.
Do you have an ah-hah creative moment you would like to share? Put it in the comments so we can all learn from you.
At Plantronics, we used technology to free up folk’s hands by letting them speak and hear through a headset that fitted behind the ear, initially for pilots and eventually for telephone company operators.
At Seagate we radically increased the data storage capacity of a PC computer by creating a hard disk drive which transformed the way that people computed at work.
At Telenova/Wang we not only offered high speed data to the desktop, using an award-winning designer phone, but we also enabled the telephone system to talk to the computer which enabled a huge shift forward in call center capability and customer service.
These were all companies that combined existing technologies in a creative and unique way to move an aspect of business technology incrementally forward., usually solving a problem for large groups of people.
This all reminds me of a conversation I had with my 98-year-old grandmother a few years before she passed away. “Grandma,” I said, “You have been alive for a long time. What changes have you seen in your life that you thought were the most profound?” I don’t know exactly what I expected, but her answer surprised me. “The radio,” she answered quickly. “Really? Why?” She told this story.
Image copyright © 2025 by Ed Paulson. All rights reserved.
“I was walking down the street with some other girls, and we saw this box in front of a store that had music coming from it. The man from the store asked, ‘Where do you think that music is coming from?’ to which we replied, ‘From a phonograph player in the store.’ ‘Nope,’ he replied. ‘That music is being played live in a studio on the other side of town.’ We were stunned. That made no sense at all. How could music travel that far and still sound so good coming out of the box, so we asked him. ‘It’s a new invention called radio,’ he said. ‘It takes the sounds and sends it electrically through the air to this box so we can hear it.’ It was amazing!”
“So, television must have really been amazing,” I said confidently! “Heck, no,” she replied. “With television you could just see them too. Radio was really amazing!”
Notice that in her mind, the breakthrough was being able to hear a person without a physical connection over a long distance. Being able to see them too was just an add-on to the original radio breakthrough.
I call the original breakthrough (radio in this case) “Quantum” creativity because it moved thinking from one level to another, completely new one, with little transition in between.
It is conceptually similar to a “Quantum leap” in particle physics2 (not the TV show).3 The transition from radio to television, built upon radio’s original quantum change.
I call this “incremental creativity” because it moved thinking in smaller steps from one level to another, with each new stage building on those that came before. The vast majority of commercial creativity happens at the incremental creativity level, not quantum. There are good business reasons for this which might be a future topic.
When I was at DAVID Systems, we were the first company to transmit high speed data over standard telephone wire, which most people believed impossible at the time. What we were selling at DAVID Systems was quantum. Nobody before DAVID Systems had offered high speed data transmission capability over standard telephone wire and a common perception at the time was that the maximum data speed was limited to 9,600 bits per second (bps). With the DAVID technology, we were offering 2 megabits per second, nearly 200 times faster!
The speed breakthrough over standard telephone wire was amazing for that time, and candidly, I didn’t believe it myself at first. It was only after talking, engineer to engineer, with the DAVID design engineers that I started to see where my thinking had previously been limited. They then showed me experimentally that it was working right then and there, in the lab. It was true. Amazing, and true!
My job at DAVID Systems was to find companies who would be willing to be the first test sites for our new technology, the “Beta” sites. I recall making an early sales presentation to a major company when an engineer got up from the table and started to leave the room saying, “I can’t sit here any longer and listen to him lie to you all like this. What he is talking about is impossible.” “OK,” I said. “Are you willing to take a moment to talk, engineer to engineer, about why what I am talking about is real? And then for me to show it to you experimentally?”
Begrudgingly, he sat back down and listened as we talked geek-to-geek about capacitive reactance, inductance, resistance, bandpass filters, etc. And then I showed it to him experimentally right there in the conference room. He was stunned. “My goodness. This actually works! We should do the Beta test,” he said. I shut up and took the order.
There are few key points that you should take away from this story:
1. The quantum nature of the change was hard to believe, even for an experienced technological person like the engineer in the story, and for me too at first.
2. It took two highly knowledgeable people with a lot of experience, talking in their own special jargon-soaked language to communicate in such a way that the new engineer’s perspective could be shifted. We talked about technological “facts” that we both accepted as true.
3. As soon as the company’s key technology person agreed that this could work, the rest of the management team that relied on his judgement got excited and moved forward with the project.
4. After they started to believe that higher speed data rates were possible, my saying that we could offer not only data connections but also complete telephone capabilities through the same wires became much easier for them to believe. These additional capabilities became “incremental” shifts after the first quantum shift happened, sort of like television built on radio.
5. Oh yeah. When the customer is ready to buy, stop talking and take the order! 😊
Going back to the invention of the radio, Guglielmo Marconi is credited with having invented the radio, by turning electromagnetic radio waves into a wireless communication system. But electromagnetic waves were discovered by Heinrich Rudolph Hertz who connected electricity and magnetism. Hertz’s work was based on the work of James Clerk Maxwell who developed a theory of electromagnetic radiation (4 equations actually, if memory serves me correctly). Maxwell’s work was based on other electrical and magnetic research that preceded his findings.
Image copyright © 2025 by Ed Paulson. All rights reserved.
Can you see from this trail of knowledge and shared discovery that the radio which my grandmother found so remarkable and that was credited to Marconi was, in reality, based on the prior shared discoveries of Hertz, and Maxwell, and those who preceded them? Without the work of those that preceded Marconi, and their willingness to share those discoveries, the radio would likely not have been invented at that time, if at all!
This point is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT in today’s world where research budgets are being slashed under the guise of “efficiency” and “cost cutting.” This rash and blunt approach is incredibly short-sighted. The researchers of tomorrow will be severely hampered without the ability to create based on knowledge generated today.
Think about it this way. Marconi would have had to first discover the findings of Hertz, Maxwell, and those that preceded them before coming up with the idea of the radio. Additionally, Hertz may not have imagined that someone later, like Marconi, would build upon his ideas and create the radio. It just happened in a free flowing, information sharing, way that is fundamental to a thriving research community that defines the cutting edge. We give that up by turning off the money faucet at our own peril.
If the research cuts being enacted today are allowed to remain in place, it will take years (decades) to recover American research exceptionalism, if we ever recover it at all.
I will write more about this on my Grifter Chronicles page (grifterchronicles.substack.com) which I hope you will visit and become a subscriber. (It is still free as of this writing.)
Of all the actions that I disagree with that the current White House has taken, slashing research funding goes way beyond one political party or the other. It affects all of us as Americans and citizens of the world.
Cancer treatments benefit everyone. Music played over the radio benefits all of us. Robotic surgery will benefit those in rural areas as they can access specialized surgeons from more urban areas all across the country. The Internet allows for information sharing not only in America but around the world as well.
RESEARCH DOESN’T HAPPEN IN A VACUUM - IT NEEDS FUNDING AND RESEARCHERS
Next time we will look at how the industry-standard structured approach to research and information sharing has enabled amazing breakthroughs in a wide variety of fields. These future breakthroughs will stop should the USA continue down the self destructive path of deciding that research is no longer valuable. Why is this important?
Think about the next generation of medical or technological advances that we all intuitively expect will be coming, but will never exist, because a few ideological zealots in power decided to turn off research funding. Poof. Gone. No kidding. This is truly harmful stuff happening right before our eyes.
Until next time … Thank you as always for stopping by.
Peace.
What do you think are some of the most amazing technological breakthroughs that have happened in your lifetime? Share it below with a comment so we can all learn from you.
It means a great deal to me that you took time to stop by today and read this week’s newsletter. I hope you got value from it and if you did please comment and/or share the BizDoctor’s Gazebo with a colleague or friend. Ed
Copyright © 2025 by Ed Paulson. All rights reserved.
Given the drastic cuts to research being enacted by the White House, I felt it important to explain why this is a very big deal that has the potential to erode all of our quality of life, and the lives of our children.
Quantum Leap: an abrupt change, sudden increase, or dramatic advance. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quantum%20leap
I liked the show by the way. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096684/