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Ideas Not Worth Spreading | Barmak Heshmat | TEDxBeaconStreet


electric jumper jet it’s a sport gear

that list you jump high about 5 to 6

meters and land safely at its core is

the yet to be invented search battery

which provides short bursts of

high-intensity current to drive those

high-speed propellers this is one of

those ideas I’m going to show it does

look fascinating but there are a lot of

question marks around it I think it will

take about 10 years before you can get

one of these ideas ideas ideas ideas

worth spreading that’s what r is below

the Tet logo which notifies that you

know what some ideas are just not worth

spreading some some ideas are just gone

and I’m not talking about the Batman

snuggie and the pet rock because because

those sell millions people millions

those are two brilliant ideas right

there I’m talking about legit

engineering or business ideas that will

never see the light of the day we all

have a lot of them especially us

engineers at MIT have too many of them

lots of ideas that will be forgotten

coming from academia I can tell you that

only about ten percent of the ideas will

be published in the form of a paper in

academia only one percent will be

patented and only about point one

percent will actually become a business

and do some good out there now these are

rough numbers but if you ask any

academic or innovator he or she will

probably agree with me this means that

only one in a thousand ideas will

actually do some good out there which is

an insanely low yield it takes about 10

to 15 years to publish hundred papers in

academia or come up with thousand ideas

even in top schools

so why is this happening why is it that

ninety percent of ideas just go nowhere

well you may say because some ideas are

dumb remember the Batman snidely handed

bedrock or use a fair answer but in fact

a very subjective one these two examples

show that an idea that might be

considered ridiculous and useless from

one’s perspective might actually be

interesting and successful from others

perspective Plus even if half of these

ideas we’re not working and just plain

wrong you still have forty-five percent

of good ideas that for some reason don’t

make it out there you want to know why

the majority of ideas actually don’t

make it out there because we don’t put

them out there the problem is not just

with the ideas but also with us

innovators we tend to abandon our ideas

because we don’t have enough confidence

in them or we don’t have immediate

interest or we tend to possess them and

lock them up because we think there are

too precious and there’s no other

options really i mean academic

publications are too time-consuming and

extremely narrow for these types of

ideas and patenting is expensive so I

turned to using online platforms I tried

using blogs youtube tedxtalks and none

of them work as efficiently as I wanted

to all these platforms takes a lot of

production a lot of cameras and gears

and all these lights and people behind

the scene to convey to you a single idea

and this heavy production actually puts

a lot of pressure on the idea tur so I

was losing hope on this I mean I have a

busy job and I couldn’t afford to spend

this much time on each idea until one

night as I was going through my older

idea sketchbooks I saw this design from

1999 which was an apparatus that was

supposed to let me see my gameboy color

screen in 3d this was basically my

earliest version of virtual reality

headset at the age of 16 which by the

way wouldn’t work because there was no

power

in the scene but the fact that I could

look at this one picture and understand

an idea from 17 years ago just hit me I

was like hmm a picture is worth a

thousand words what if he could fit

every idea into one picture one

beautiful comprehensive sketch that says

it all sounded like a great idea so I

started to build up my sketching skills

over the weekends and thanks to online

tutorials oven from something like this

to something like this in about a year

then I started to get connected to other

concept artists online and I discovered

this amazing platform called computer

graphics Society or CG society which is

a online platform that allows millions

of artists to share the illustrations

with each other in high resolutions this

is a great website for for artistic

studies it’s full of cool pictures of

aliens and robots but there’s not much

science going on here really and that’s

exactly what i want to change to get a

religious society we basically want to

bring the brains of MIT to the hands of

model studio artists how cool is that

the result is what we call the

imaginarium of technology a platform

that matches scientist with artists to

communicate ideas in beautiful pictures

a place where engineering ideas can come

to life and inspire you can upload your

idea in the form of an illustration if

you’re illustrating is good or if you

can describe it to an artist to

illustrate it these ideas are tagged and

organized into this gallery of sketches

so if you are interested in any of them

you can just click on it and learn about

the idea or even start a conversation

with the Creator some of these ideas are

published online immediately the others

are cherry picked by a panel of artists

and scientists from Marvel Studios and

MIT these cherry-picked ideas are then

showcased in met in events such as this

one or em IQ member

week where there are a lot of companies

present this gives these poor ideas the

chance to reach the right audience every

idea is tagged so it has a unique ID so

whoever is interested can directly

contact the creator and endorse the idea

or support the idea based on a mutual

agreement so far we have had three

exhibitions on different topics such as

future of virtual reality and autonomous

cars and these idea exhibitions have

been received a mail amazingly well

because pictures are powerful and they

can go beyond language barrier even yes

if you’re a company and you have IP

sensitive materials or if you’re if you

have conflict of interest then this

might not be the right platform for you

but if you are a creative individual

trying to impact a world by resurrecting

some of your other ideas let me assure

you that this is the best place to put

those kind of ideas into some use ok

I’ve been talking about 10 minutes now

to convey to you one idea of the

imaginal of technology in the Ted format

I will take now one minute to give you

two ideas in the form of two pictures

two pictures that can make an impact and

potentially save lives are ready for

this ok so here’s the infinity ladder

it’s a rollable ladder that is stretched

by your set of drums the drones fly up

to the wall and latched onto the top of

the wall and then you can climb up this

stretch letter there stretch ladder the

tagline reads no walls can ever stop

we can doesn’t work and the work that

way guys the simple engineering so

here’s another idea it’s a centimeter

sighs Mike robot it’s a centimeter sized

robotic pill that lives in your stomach

and is charged wirelessly some features

predict that you will have microbots

injected to our bloodstream in the

future but being an engineer I think

that’s far-fetched I think this is a

more practical solution so these robotic

pills will stay in your stomach and

monitor your diet and they will filter

out all the excessive toxins and things

like fat and sugar that is in there so

in the future you can feel less guilty

about your junk food diet the tagline

reads every diet is perfect okay so I

cannot suddenly quit my job and follow

all of these random ideas I think you

get the point now right but I hope you

know someone somewhere you know follow

these ideas and work on them okay one

all right i want to kick i want to thank

everyone who jumped on board with me and

made as possible this is really a call

to my fellow scientists and artists let

us come together and communicate

something at the peak of intellectual

value something that is both beautiful

and functional let us take another look

a second look at ideas not worth spreading thank you so much

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