Just a few minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford. I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England in 1650. That's its great claim to fame, and I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tour of historic England, but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment.
就在几分钟前，我在离这里大约十条街的地方 拍了这张照片。 这是牛津这里的大咖啡馆。 我拍这张照片是因为它年代久远 始建于1650年，是英国第一个 咖啡馆 相当有名。 我想展示给你照片， 不是因为我想给你星巴克式的 英国历史回顾， 而是因为 在过去500年间， 英国咖啡馆对 所谓的启蒙运动 发展和传播 起到至关
And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment, in part, because of what people were drinking there. Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank -- both elite and mass folks drank -- day-in and day-out, from dawn until dusk was alcohol. Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice. You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin -- particularly around 1650 -- and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. That was the healthy choice -- right -- because the water wasn't safe to drink. And so, effectively until the rise of the coffeehouse, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day. And you can imagine what that would be like, right, in your own life -- and I know this is true of some of you -- if you were drinking all day, and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life, you would have better ideas. You would be sharper and more alert. And so it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and coffee.
重要的 作用。 究其原因，部分是因为人在那里喝的东西。 因为，在咖啡和茶在英国文化中 广泛传播前， 无论是精英与大众 每天从黎明到黄昏 人们喝的是酒 酒是白天的首选饮料。 在1650年左右，早餐你会喝一点啤酒，午餐喝一点葡萄酒， 晚上来一点杜松子酒， 并在这一天结束时喝啤酒和葡萄酒。 那时水是不能饮用的， 因此酒是健康的选择。 基本上，在咖啡馆的兴起前， 所有人整天 都醉醺醺的。 而你能想象你的生活会是什么样子， 我知道对于你们中的一些是真的 - 如果你喝了一整天， 然后放下这个抑制剂，改成别的使你兴奋的饮料 你会更好的想法。 你会更清晰，更警觉。 所以当英格兰人改喝茶和咖啡后 创新的兴起就不是一个意外了
But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space. It was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. This was their conjugal bed, in a sense -- ideas would get together there. And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story.
但是，其他的东西如咖啡馆 空间结构也很重要。 在这里，来自不同背景 不同专业领域的人们 分享想法。 如马特雷德利谈到， 在这里，想法交织在一起。 在一定意义上，这是它们的夫妻床。 想法将聚在一起。 而这一时期的数量惊人的创新 发源于咖啡馆。
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years, because I've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? What's the kind of environmental -- what is the space of creativity? And what I've done is I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse; I've looked at media environments, like the world wide web, that have been extraordinarily innovative; I've gone back to the history of the first cities; I've even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rainforests, that involve unusual levels of biological innovation; and what I've been looking for is shared patterns, kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments. Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives, or our own organizations, or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative? And I think I've found a few.
在过去的五年我花了很多 时间思考咖啡馆， 因为我一直 试图 找到好点子的来源。 哪些环境因素 导致不寻常水平的创新， 不寻常水平的创造？ 有什么样的环境 什么是创造力的空间？ 而我所做的就是 我观察环境，如咖啡馆; 媒体环境，如万维网 已经非常有创新性; 我又回过头来看早期城市的历史; 我还观察了生物环境 如珊瑚礁和热带雨林， 那里有超凡的生物创新; 我一直在寻找的是它们共通的模式 一种标志性的行为 一次又一次显示在这些环境中。 是否我们可以从这些不断重复的模式中学到东西 进而可以应用于我们自己的生活， 或组织， 或环境，使他们更具有创造力和创新力？ 我想我已经找到了一些。
But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea-creation. We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. We have the kind of the flash of insight, the stroke of insight, we have epiphanies, we have "eureka!" moments, we have the lightbulb moments, right? All of these concepts, as kind of rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing, it's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment.
但是你为了 真正理解这些原则， 你必须做的是远离 我们传统的方式的隐喻和语言 引导我们 到某些想法产生的概念。 我们已有非常丰富的词汇 来形容的灵感瞬间。 比如我们有闪光 洞悉， 顿悟，“我发现了！”瞬间， 我们有灯泡时刻，对吗？ 所有这些概念， 作为一种华丽修辞， 分享一个基本假设， 那就是一想法是一个单一的事情， 灵感经常发生在 一个美妙的照亮时刻。
But in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level. I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. An idea -- a new idea -- is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It's a new configuration that has never formed before. And the question is: how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form? And it turns out that, in fact, the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain.
但事实上，我会说，首先你得理解 想法是一个网络 最基本的就是一个网络 它就是在你的大脑里发生的事情。 一个想法，一个新的想法，是一种新的大脑神经元 互相同步放电的网络 一个从来没有形成过的新的配置。 而问题是：你如何将要你的大脑进入环境中， 更可能的形成这些新的网络？ 而事实证明，对外部世界的网络模式， 模仿了很多人脑的 内部世界的网络。
So the metaphor I'd like the use I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent -- a lot more recent than the 1650s. A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero, who has a company called ... an organization called Design That Matters. They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of, you know, the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that we know, by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically -- it's very simple -- we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments. So, the technology is there. These are standard in all the industrialized worlds. The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to a mid-sized village in Africa, it will work great for a year or two years, and then something will go wrong and it will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don't have a whole system of spare parts, and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment. And so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries, and then it ends up being useless.
所以，我想用一个伟大想法的 故事举例， 是相当近期的- 比1650年代近得多。 有个人叫提摩太·普莱斯泰罗的人 他拥有一家名为设计关键的公司。 他们有一个非常迫切的问题来解决， 即发展中世界的婴儿死亡率 较高的问题。 其中令人沮丧的东西是， 我们知道在任何情况下， 现代新生儿恒温箱 保持早产儿温暖，基本上 - 非常简单地， 我们可以在这些环境里使婴儿死亡率减半。 因此，技术上是可行的。 这些是所有工业化世界的标准。 问题是，如果你买了4万美元的保温箱， 你把它送到 非洲的中型村庄， 它能正常工作一年，或两年， 然后某件东西会出问题，机器将破损， 因为你没有整个系统的备件， 它将永久破损， 并且你没有当地专业人员来维修 这种4万美元的设备。 所以你最终有这个问题，你把所有钱 用于获得援助和运送这些先进的电子设备的钱到这些国家， 而它最终失去使用价值。
So what Prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see: what are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts? And what they noticed was they don't have a lot of DVRs, they don't have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. There's a Toyota 4Runner on the street in all these places. They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. So they started to think, "Could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts?" And this is what they ended up coming with. It's called a "neonurture device." From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you'd find in a modern, Western hospital. In the inside, it's all car parts. It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got door chimes for alarm -- it runs off a car battery. And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight, and you can repair this thing. Now, that's a great idea, but what I'd like to say is that, in fact, this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen. We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are like that $40,000, brand new incubator, state-of-the-art technology, but more often than not, they're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby.
那么莱斯泰罗和他的团队决定做的是研究： 在这些发展中世界的背景下，什么资源 是丰富的？ 他们注意到的是那里没有很多的数字录像机 没有很多的微波炉， 但似乎他们的汽车保养得很好。 在这些地方，到处都有丰田的 越野车。 他们有养汽车的专业技能。 于是他们开始思考， “我们能不能做一个完全 是用汽车零部件组装的新生儿恒温箱？” 而这是他们最后想出的。 这就是霓虹育儿设备。 从外面看，它就像一个会在一个 现代化西方医院找到的普通小东西。 在它里面，全由汽车零部件组成。 它有一个风扇，有取暖灯， 有门报警钟。 它靠一个汽车电池运行。 因此只要你有丰田汽车的零部件， 和修复大灯的技术， 你就可以修复它。 现在，这是一个好主意，但我想说的是，事实上， 它很好地隐喻了想法发生的方式。 我们喜欢认为我们突破性的想法，你知道， 就是这样的4万美元，全新的育儿箱， 有最先进的技术， 但往往不是，它们是由周围 随便什么地方的零件拼凑起来的。
We take ideas from other people, from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That's really where innovation happens. And that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right. I mean, this is one vision of it. Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge. This is a statue from Oxford. You know, you're sitting there thinking a deep thought, and the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity. In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this, right. This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then. This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions -- people from different backgrounds. So, if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that -- strangely enough -- look a little bit more like this. This is what your office should look like, is part of my message here.
我们从别人获取想法， 从我们所研究的人身上，从我们在咖啡厅里碰到的人 然后我们把它们融合成新的形式，来创造新的东西。 这才是创新发生的地方。 这意味着我们必须改变目前的真正的创新 和深入思考某些机制，是的。 我的意思是，这是一种观念。 另一例子是在剑桥的牛顿和苹果的故事。 这是在牛津的一座雕像。 你知道，当你坐在那里深刻地思考， 这时苹果从树上坠落，于是你发现了重力理论。 事实上，曾经在历史上产生创新发展的空间 往往是这样的，没错。 这是荷加斯的一张酒馆吃饭那种政治名画， 但是这就是当时的咖啡馆的样子 在混乱的环境中， 想法有可能走到一起 来自不同背景的人很可能有 新的，有趣的，不可预测的碰撞。 因此，如果我们试图建立更具有创意的组织， 我们要建设的空间，奇怪的是，看起来有点像这一点。 你的办公室应是这样子 这是我想表达的。
And one of the problems with this is that people are actually -- when you research this field -- people are notoriously unreliable, when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their best ideas. And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job. So when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler, and all these things. And he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas, where they happened. And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image -- you know, they're pouring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue sample. And "oh, eureka," they've got the idea.
当你研究这个领域， 而与此的问题之一是， 人们实际上是 众所周知的不可靠， 他们有自己的好想法， 或者其历史上的最好的想法，他们真正的 自我报告。 而在几年前，一个研究员叫凯文·邓巴 决定去 用大兄弟的方法找寻出 好主意的来源 他去了世界各地的科学实验室， 给工作人员的 日常工作录像。 当他们坐在显微镜前， 当他们和同事谈论水冷却器，以及其他东西。 他记录了所有这些谈话， 试图找出在哪里产生 最重要的想法。 在实验室的科学家经典形象是， 他们是专注于显微镜， 观察一些组织样本。 “噢，我发现了！”他们有这个想法。
What happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope. They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings, oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise in the signal they were discovering. And something about that environment -- and I've started calling it the "liquid network," where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other -- that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation.
实际上，邓巴在磁带观察到， 几乎所有的重要突破性的想法 并不仅仅发生在实验室的显微镜的前面。 它们发生在每周的实验室 会议桌上， 当大家聚在一起，分享他们的最新的数据和调查结果， 分享他们的错误， 偏差，他们发现信号的噪音。 还有环境的一些因素 我已经开始将其称为“液态网络” 当很多不同的想法在一起的时候 不同背景，不同的利益， 互相冲撞，互相反弹 其实， 是环境导致创新。
The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter time frames. So they want to tell the story of the "eureka!" moment. They want to say, "There I was, I was standing there and I had it all suddenly clear in my head." But in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods -- I call this the "slow hunch." We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them. They spend all this time working on certain problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in, but they can't quite solve.
另外一个问题是， 人们喜欢把他们的创新故事浓缩到 较短的时间框架。 因此，他们想告诉这个故事的“发现了！”时刻。 他们想说的是：“我站在那里， 在我的脑子里突然清楚有了它。” 但事实上，如果你回去看看历史纪录 事实证明，大量的重要思想 有很长的孕育期。 我称它为“慢的预感”。 我们已经听到了 很多关于最近预感和本能 明晰闪烁，像突然的时刻， 但事实上，有许多伟大的想法 挥之不去，有时在人们的心中 长达几十年。 他们花这么长的时间对某些问题的工作， 但还有另一个 挥之不去 的东西， 他们感兴趣，但他们不能完全解决。
Darwin is a great example of this. Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic "eureka!" moment. He's in his study, it's October of 1838, and he's reading Malthus, actually, on population. And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head and he says, "Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work." That's in his autobiography. About a decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period. And Darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch. And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany, reading Malthus in October of 1838. There are passages where you can read it, and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has this epiphany. And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he had the concept, but was unable of fully thinking it yet. And that is actually how great ideas often happen; they fade into view over long periods of time.
达尔文是一个很好的例子。 在他的自传里， 达尔文讲述了 自然选择的产生， 作为一个典型的“发现！”时刻。 1838年十月份的， 他在他的书房里， 阅读马尔萨斯的人口论。 突然间， 自然选择的基本算法在他脑海里浮现， 他说：“哦，我终于有一个合理的理论了“。 这就是他的自传中描述的。 大约十年或二十年前， 有个学者叫霍华德·格鲁伯 他在流览达尔文这一时期的笔记本 达尔文保留下丰富的笔记， 他写下了他的每一点想法，每个小预感。 格鲁伯发现，1838年10月 达尔文在阅读马尔萨斯著作 并顿悟数月之前， 已有了自然选择的 充分理论。 你可以阅读段落， 你以为你是从达尔文教科书阅读， 从他有这个顿悟之前的一段期间。 你了解到，在某种意义上说， 达尔文有了想法，他有了概念， 但尚未完全思考透澈。 这实际上是伟大的思想经常发生， 它们进入视野消失了很长一段时间。
Now the challenge for all of us is: how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life, right? It's hard to go to your boss and say, "I have an excellent idea for our organization. It will be useful in 2020. Could you just give me some time to do that?" Now a couple of companies -- like Google -- they have innovation time off, 20 percent time, where, in a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization. But that's a key thing. And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches; that's what often happens. You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property, you know, building barricades, having secretive R&D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will remain valuable, and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas, and the culture will be more innovative. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them.
现在我们所有人面临的挑战是： 你怎么创造环境 允许这些想法有这样长的半衰期，是吧？ 很难去跟你的老板说， “我有一个好主意给我们机构。 它在2020年将见效益。 你能不能给我一些时间做它呢？“ 现在，有几家公司，如谷歌， 们有创新的休息时间，百分之二十的时间， 其中，在某种意义上，这些都是直觉的培养机制。 但是，这里有一个关键环节。 而其他的是让那些预感 可以与其他人的预感联系，这是经常发生的事情。 你有一个想法的一半，别人有另一半， 如果你们在合适的环境， 它们变成自己的东西比部分的总和更大。 因此，从某种意义上说， 我们经常谈论 知识产权的保护， 我们去设置障碍 搞秘密的 研发实验室 并且去申请专利，保存这些想法的价值， 我们认为这样做人们会更有动力去创新 不过，我觉得我们应该至少 花相同多时间，甚至是更多时间 去将一些人们已有的想法连接起来 而不仅仅是保护它们，但它们相互不得个沟通。
And I'll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot of these values, and it's just wonderful kind of tale of innovation and how it happens in unlikely ways. It's October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched, and we're in Laurel Maryland, at the applied physics lab associated with Johns Hopkins University. And it's Monday morning, and the news has just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet. And of course, this is nerd heaven, right? There are all these physics geeks who are there thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is incredible. I can't believe this has happened." And two of them, two 20-something researchers at the APL are there at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach. And they start talking, and one of them says, "Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? There's this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. We could probably hear it, if we tune in." And so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues, and everybody's like, "No, I hadn't thought of doing that. That's an interesting idea."
我给你们讲个故事 我认为它体现了很多个我要表达的理念 并且它是一个美妙创新的故事 还有它是以不可能的方式发生的。 1957年10月 人造卫星刚刚上天， 在马里兰州劳雷尔的 应用物理实验室(APL)， 约翰霍普金斯大学参予其中。 一个星期一早上， 卫星环绕地球飞行的 消息刚传开。 当然，这是书呆子的天堂，对不对？ 所有这些物理怪才在那里想： “噢，我的天哪！这是难以置信的。我无法相信这真发生了。“ 他们中的两个 二十多岁的 研究人员 在食堂闲聊。 他们是圭尔和维芬巴赫。 他们开始交谈，其中一个人说， “嘿，有谁试图监听这个东西吗？ 你知道，人造地球卫星在太空， 显然在广播某种信号。 如果我们调对频率，我们也许可以听到它 “ 于是，他们四处向他们的同事打听， 大家都说，“不，我没想到这样做。 这是一个有趣的想法。“
And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he's got a little antennae set up with an amplifier in his office. And so Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach's office, and they start kind of noodling around -- hacking, as we might call it now. And after a couple of hours, they actually start picking up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track. It was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily, because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax, basically. So they made it really easy to find it.
恰巧，维芬巴赫是一个 微波接收专家， 在他的办公室设了 小天线与放大器。 因此圭尔和维芬巴赫回到维芬巴赫的办公室， 开始试着与卫星联接 - 像我们现在称作黑客。 过了几个小时，他们真的开始找到信号 因为苏联的人造卫星 很容易被追踪。 就是在20兆赫，你可以真的很容易把它接受到， 因为他们害怕人们会觉得基本上是一个骗局。 因此，他们把它真的很容易找到它
So these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal, and people start kind of coming into the office and saying, "Wow, that's pretty cool. Can I hear? Wow, that's great." And before long, they think, "Well jeez, this is kind of historic. We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this. We should record it." And so they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder and they start recording these little bleep, bleeps. And they start writing the kind of date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. And they they start thinking, "Well gosh, you know, we're noticing small little frequency variations here. We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling, if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect." And then they played around with it a little bit more, and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of specialties. And they said, "Jeez, you know, we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it's farthest away. That's pretty cool."
当这两个家伙正坐在那里听来这个信号， 人们开始到他们的办公室参观， 说， “哇，这很酷。我能听听吗？哇，太好了。” 不久之后，他们认为，“嗯呀，这是历史性的一刻。 我们可能会是在美国的听到它的第一批人。 我们应该记录下来。“ 于是他们用一个大而笨重的模拟磁带录音机， 开始录制这些讯号。 他们开始写下每个小信号的 日期和时间。 他们便开始想，“好吧天哪，你知道，我们注意到 频率变化很小。 如果我们利用多普勒效应， 做一些基本的数学计算， 我们也许可以计算出 卫星的旅行速度。 然后他们还做了别的一些尝试 而且和有其他专长的 同事交谈。 他们说：“哎呀，你知道， 我们觉得我们其实可以用多普勒效应的斜率， 算出卫星离我们的天线 最接近和 最远的位置。 这是非常酷的想法。
And eventually, they get permission -- this is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job description. They get permission to use the new, you know, UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room that they'd just gotten at the APL. They run some more of the numbers, and at the end of about three or four weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this one little signal, going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do over lunch one morning.
“最终，他们得到许可 这是一个小的副业项目，不是正式工作的一部分。 他们得到使用新UNIVAC计算机的许可， 它占用整个房间，APL刚刚引进。 他们进行更多的运算，并在大约三，四个星期后， 基于在午餐时的 启发， 仅凭监听卫星信号， 他们已制订了卫星的 精确轨迹。
A couple weeks later their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them into the room and says, "Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you were working on. You've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. Could you go the other way? Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground, if you knew the location of the satellite?" And they thought about it and they said, "Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here." So they went back, and they thought about it. And they came back and said, "Actually, it'll be easier." And he said, "Oh, that's great. Because see, I have these new nuclear submarines that I'm building. And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow, if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So we're thinking, we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean. Could you work on that problem?"
几个星期后他们的老板，弗兰克麦克卢尔， 把他们拉进了房间，说： “嘿，你们这些家伙， 关于该项目我有些东西要问你们。 你们已经从地面上的已知位置 找到了卫星 未知地点。 你们能反方向去做吗？ 如果你知道卫星的位置， 能找出一地面上不明地点吗？“ 他们想了想，说， “嗯，我想也许可以。让我们算一下。” 所以他们回去，他们研究此事。 他们回来说，“其实，它会更简单些。” 弗兰克说，“哦，太棒了。 因为，这些新建造的 核潜艇。 如果你不知道潜艇在太平洋中部的位置， 真的很难找出如何让你的导弹 准确降落在莫斯科的上方。 因此，我们在想，我们可以发射一些的卫星， 并用它来跟踪我们的潜艇并找出 它们在海洋中的位置。 请问你们能解决这个问题吗？“
And that's how GPS was born. 30 years later, Ronald Reagan actually opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform, left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it. And now, I guarantee you certainly half of this room, if not more, has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space. And I bet you one of you, if not more, has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last -- (Laughter) in the last day or last week, right?
这就是全球定位系统是如何诞生的。 30年后 罗纳德。里根把它公开，并使其成为一个开放式平台， 任何人借此都创造和革新， 建立新的技术， 并向任何人 开放， 做他们 想要的。 而现在，我保证 这个房间的有一半人，如果不是更多， 在他们的口袋里有一个设备现在 正和外层空间这些卫星中的一个在联络。 我敢打赌，你们中的一个，如果不是更多， 在昨天或上周使用了那些设备和卫星， 以找出附近的咖啡馆 （众笑） 对不对？
And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson in the power, the marvelous, kind of unplanned emergent, unpredictable power of open innovative systems. When you build them right, they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of. I mean, here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch, this little passion that had developed, then they thought they were fighting the Cold War, and then it turns out they're just helping somebody find a soy latte. That is how innovation happens. Chance favors the connected mind.
我想 这是极好的一个案例 它显示出了开放的创新体系 所蕴含的潜在的 非常惊人同时又不可预测的力量 当你把这些系统完善，它们将把创造者指引到 甚至从未梦想的崭新的方向。 我的意思是，这些家伙基本上 只是跟着这个预感， 这个小激情， 那时候他们在想他们是在打冷战， 到今天，他们的发明就被用来 帮助你们找到一杯大豆拿铁 。创新就是这么发生的！ 机会垂青相互联系的脑袋 。
Thank you very much. 非常感谢。
