TEDx NASA | Innovation Keynote | Stephen Shapiro

It's not rocket science. Now, we hear people use that expression all the time to describe something that's just not that complex. And I would never suggest that aerospace challenges are simple, but sometimes even rocket science isn't rocket science. The challenge is you are all experts, and it is that expertise that may be the very thing that is getting in the way of full creative potential. Let me give you a very simple example. I want you to imagine a time when you lost your keys. You were looking for your keys, you were looking everywhere, and after 15 minutes you find them. What do you inevitably say to yourself, can you believe it? They were in the last place I looked. Well, of course, who finds something and keeps on looking for it? The same thing is true when looking for solutions. When the brain finds a solution, it stops working. And guess what? If you are an expert, you are going to find a solution very quickly. So expertise is the enemy of creativity. What I want you to consider is that maybe the best solutions to your challenges don't reside inside of aerospace, but they might be from other disciplines. Someone else may have already solved your challenges. Let me give you three very simple examples. So 1. In the office supply industry, refilled toner cartridge is a high margin item. The challenge is getting customers to return those toner cartridges so they can be filled and resold. During a brainstorming session, I asked the question, who else has solved this problem? Who sends the customer something and the customer sends it back. The first answer was the irs, but the second answer was Netflix. Netflix sends you a dvd, you get to keep the DVD for as long as you want. When you're done, you return it, they send you a new one. So we investigated and implemented a Netflix style subscription model for toner cartridge. And it was brilliant because for the company, they were guaranteed the customer was going to return the toner cartridge. And for the customer, it was great because they never ran out of ink and they got great deals. It wasn't rocket science. Someone else had solved this problem or consideration. Engineers have been working on ways to locate and seal cracks in gas pipelines. This has been an issue that has plagued the industry for years. One day, a Scottish engineer, while working on this problem, he gets a paper cut. And unlike most of us who would get annoyed, he was thrilled. He made a connection. He made a connection between the capillaries in his finger and the gas pipeline and he developed an inert coagulation ingredient that went inside the gas pipelines and, and was able to seal the cracks. Again, it wasn't rocket science. Someone else, in this case the human body, had already solved this problem for him. Or consider a potato chip manufacturer who wanted to find a way of reducing the amount of fat in their potato chips. Now, the best solution didn't come from their laboratory. In fact, the best solution didn't come from any laboratory. In fact, it came from a guy who knows absolutely nothing about food production. It came from a musician. This musician realized that when he listens to loud music, he feels his bones rattle. And when he put a large loudspeaker over a conveyor belt of potato chips, he could actually see the fat in the potato chips drip off. That clearly was not rocket science. The key is that you can make connections, make connections to different areas. Or Steve Jobs from Apple would say, creativity is just having enough dots to connect. Dots being ideas or experiences. And the reason why creative people are so is they've either had more experiences or they've thought more about those experiences. Creativity is about connections. It's about connecting the dots. And that's really the great thing about this conference here. They could have brought up 29 aerospace engineers, but instead they brought up musicians, neuroscientists, artists. And this allows you to look at life through different angles. It allows you to connect the dots. Because guess what? If you're working on an aerospace challenge and you have 100 aerospace engineers working on it, the 101st airspace engineer is not going to make that much of a difference. But you add a biologist, you add a nanotechnologist, you add a musician, and maybe now you have something fundamentally different. Innovation is about connecting the dots. And I want to close with a picture from the Daintree rainforest in Australia. This is a beautiful place in the northeast corner of Australia. And inside the Daintree Rainforest, there's this bird called the cassowary. And the cassowary is a slow bird that has the unfortunate habit of getting run over. So throughout the rainforest, you see this cassowary bird speed bump. Right next to it is a speed bump. This really isn't the picture I took. That's the picture for those of you who can't tell. It's a before and after. This individual made a connection. And I use this because I want you to realize that your big breakthroughs will come by looking outside your area of expertise, by making connections. Everyone is jealous of your knowledge. You are some of the brightest minds in the world. But I want you to leave here and leave this conference recognizing that sometimes the most creative solutions aren't rocket science. Thank you. Sat.