Question Conventional Wisdom; or “What Color Is an Alligator?”

Conventional wisdom is defined as “A widely held belief on which most people act.” It’s the stuff that “everybody knows.”

Take, for example, alligators. Thanks to countless images in children’s books, cartoons, and comics, as well as all the toy versions, “everybody knows” that alligators are green.

Except they’re not. Not even a little. Take another look at the picture above. That one is black. They’re all black (except for the albinos).

You see, much of conventional wisdom, the stuff that “everybody knows is true,” isn’t necessarily true.

Conventional wisdom is sometimes an assumption that nobody questions, because nobody even realizes that it’s an assumption. Sometimes it’s close to the truth, but it misses a tiny but important detail. And sometimes—as in the case of alligators—it’s just plain wrong.

What happens when someone begins questioning the conventional wisdom? Innovation.

Microbiogen is an Australian company that has developed a way to greatly increase the output of ethanol production, and they did it by questioning the conventional wisdom.

Ethanol is usually produced by taking something high in sugar, like corn or sugar cane, and fermenting it with the yeast saccharomyces cerevisiae—basically the same yeast you use to make bread, and that brewers and vintners use to make beer or wine. The yeast eats the sugar and excretes ethanol.

However, there’s a lot of stuff left over afterwards. The ironic thing is that about 75 percent of the biomass left over after fermentation is actually made of sugar, but it’s locked up in complex long-chain molecules. The plants have turned the sugar into polymers, and yeast doesn’t eat them.

Now, you can break these sugar polymers down using current technology, but then you end up with two different types of sugars: glucose-type sugars (the stuff you sprinkle in your coffee), which yeast likes, and wood sugar, or xylose. And yeast doesn’t like xylose.

The conventional wisdom among companies experimenting with ethanol production is that yeast can’t eat xylose, that you have to genetically tweak saccharomyces cerevisiae to get it to eat xylose. So dozens of companies are spending millions of dollars trying to genetically engineer a new kind of yeast.

The scientists at Microbiogen questioned that conventional wisdom. They mixed some yeast with pure xylose, and after a time, noticed that some of the yeast cells had grown. They were feeding on the xylose. Geoff Bell (CEO of Microbiogen) explains:

“So the scientific dogma that says this yeast that we all use today can’t grow on xylose actually was not true. It could, but at such a slow rate that it was economically and industrially unimportant, but what it did do was it allowed us to use our special breeding technologies to breed these yeasts so they got better and better and better at using xylose, to the stage where we now have yeast that are actually pretty happy to be with xylose and they will grow on it and they will grow on it quite quickly.”

The conventional wisdom, that yeast could not ferment xylose, was almost true. But that almost left enough room for Microbiogen to selectively breed the yeast, creating a strain that is quite happy to ferment xylose.

Question the conventional wisdom. Identify the assumptions that everyone shares, and begin to test whether they’re true or not. You may be surprised at how much room even almost true gives you. Room enough to create something new.

For more information about Microbiogen, you can listen to an interview with Geoff Bell on Radio Australia’s Innovations site.

Image credit: Sheila Lovett/Stock.xchng.

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Quote of the Day: “…a person’s mind-set has the power…”

Science has demonstrated unequivocally that a person’s mind-set has the power to dramatically affect both short-term capabilities and the long-term dynamic of achievement.

—David Shenk (in The Genius in All of Us: Why
Everything You’ve Been Told About
Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong)

(This quote seemed appropriate as a follow-up to yesterday’s post.)

Rule Zero: It All Begins With Mindset

Let’s call it Rule Zero (because it comes before Rule One): Creativity and innovation begins with your mindset.

You have to think of yourself as a creative person, as a person who comes up with innovative ideas.

Consider this story: The management of an oil company knew that they had two different groups of engineers: They had creative engineers, and non-creative engineers. What they didn’t know was what set the two groups apart.

So they commissioned a team of psychologists to study what set apart their creative engineers from the less-creative ones. For three months they studied the engineers: their background, their educations, their emotions, their likes and dislikes, and so on. And they found the one thing that set the two groups apart: The creative engineers thought of themselves as creative, while the less creative engineers didn’t think they were creative. That’s it.

Why is that belief—that you’re a creative person—so important? Because, if you don’t think of yourself as being creative, you won’t put yourself into positions that require creativity. You don’t make yourself think creatively, to think playfully, to look for associations between diverse fields. You don’t ask “Why?” or “What if?”

The fact is that we were all born to be creative. Just spend some time playing with children, and you’ll see what I mean. Somehow, somewhere along the line, we’ve forgotten how to be creative, what it feels like, and what it means.

Creativity is not an inborn trait, like hair or eye color, that you either have or you don’t. Creativity is a set of skills that anybody can learn and develop.

And that process begins with your mindset, with deciding that you are going to learn the skills of creativity and innovation.

Image credit: Gabor Kalman/Stock.xchng.

Fun: An Antidote For “The Way We’ve Always Done It”

Think there’s not much new you can do with going up and down stairs? Try injecting some fun.

Going up:

And going down:

(Hat tip to Dan Pink.)

Quote of the Day: “…restrictions get the mind going.”

“Sometimes restrictions get the mind going. If you’ve got tons and tons of money, you may relax and figure you can throw money at any problem that comes along. You don’t have to think so hard. But when you have limitations, sometimes you come up with very creative, inexpensive ideas.”

—David Lynch
(In Catching the Big Fish: Meditation,
Consciousness, and Creativity)

Ideas Alone Won’t Cut It: The Value of Hard Work

Many of us are always on the lookout for shortcuts: Ways to make things easier, faster, less strenuous. (Hence the popularity of sites like Lifehacker, and book titles that feature phrases like “The Easy Way to…” or “…Made Easy.”)

To be sure, there are frequently ways that we can make things easier, faster, and less strenuous. But shortcuts can cut only so much effort out of things. In the end, there’s no substitute for hard work.

Quote of the Day: “…prepared to be wrong…”

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

—Sir Ken Robinson

Music from a hydrogen fusion reactor (the sun)

I love stuff like this: Astronomers from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom have made music based on the oscillations they observed in the sun’s corona:

They found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere, known as coronal loops, vibrate like strings on a musical instrument.

Ignorance is innovation fuel

In one of his recent Monday Morning Memos, Roy H. Williams offered some excellent advice for people who are seeking to “think outside the box:” Talk to someone who doesn’t even know what box you’re talking about.

Quote of the Day: “…superluminal quantum interconnectedness…”

“I throw around the term superluminal quantum interconnectedness as a state of being I hope to  achieve one day.”

—Arthur Plotnik