We had an IDEA

Matteo Carbone

by Matteo Carbone

Where good ideas come from?

To introduce ourselves, we got inspiration from a Ted Talk of Steven Johnson which goes perfectly with the base principles of this new path of ours. In his conversation, Steven tries to identify the perfect environment where good ideas can born, a sort of "creativity space". Word is that the Illuminism was born following spreading of intellectual streams in the British cafes: the informal and open-space nature of the cafes would as a matter of fact bring toghether people with different backgrounds, skills and knowledge, allowing them to meet, talk and to share ideas or to create new ones.

“No, we are not opening a cafe — not yet.”

The dictionary is rich regarding terms which describe the moment of inspiration — the ideas: flash , stroke of genius, “Eureka!“ moment, lightbulb moment… those vocabularies share the assumption that an IDEA is a single entity, something which happens in a single, wonderful and enlightening moment.
To confirm or prove wrong this teory, the researcher Kevin Dunbar tried to observe, by installing video cameras and microphones in different research labs, the instant in which an IDEA concretizes and under which circustances it happens. What he discovered was that good ideas wasn't generated at the scientists and engineers' desks, but in the weekly meetings in which the researchers shared the data collected and they discussed everything that was working and all those things which weren't going as expected. That's why we love so much the Agile methodologies, Scrum and the retrospective moments.

Darwin, in its own autobiography, told about the moment in which, in October, 1838, had the "flash" about is theory of evolution while he was reading a paper of Malthus about the population. The lightbulb moment. Decades later, the academic Howard Gruber started to analyze Darwin's nootebooks and he had a major breakthrough: the scientist had the core of his entire theory of the evolution and natural selection monthsbefore his stroke of genius; all the information was there, already written on the paper.

“Darwin incubated the IDEA — the concept, long before, but it wasn't still able to "think it completely", to realize it.”

At a biological level, an IDEA is a network at its primitive level: a new configuration of our brain which didn't happen before. All of us have a lot of ideas at an embrional stage, in a little corner of our brain, incubated. Everything that is needed to concretize them is an external incentive — as in the case of cafes, another IDEA to combine to our own, to generate innovation. If you have an IDEA and you put it together to another one, in the right envirnoment, you can obtain somehting greater that the sum of their parts.

“We had an IDEA.”

Therefore, this is what we want to symbolize for you, by developing apps and web services: innovation by taking advantage of the newest technologies, contributing with our knowledge and passion to fuse with your intuitions and competences, obtaining something not reachable by working separately.

“We want to be your bright IDEA.”