Examining The Concept Of “Big Stuff”
“Big Stuff” and “Innovation”, these two terms sound familiar with us in our daily life, right? Big stuff is the “thing” that we are trying to invent and make it be useful, become a great thing that contribute to our society. We are innovating other things, that means we are trying to find a new way of doing something, different from those has existed long time ago. After reading the article “Innovation Starvation” by Neal Stephenson, I find it important to innovate the world and understand the concept of “Big Stuff”.
There are many stories about in which science and technology have been improving the world, instead of destroying it. Hence, this leads Neal to become a founder of Hieroglyph project, a project where scientists and engineers are trying to describe the future world in which big stuff gets done. In my perspective after reading his article, Big Stuffs mentioned in the article are all the science’s products such as the creation of aircraft, the automobile, nuclear energy, computers, geostationary satellites, credit cards… those things are contributing to improve and make the world in the higher level. Neal came with the believe that we have lost our ability to get big important things done due to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. Big stuff links with the innovation, that’s true. We innovate the new thing, make it important to our society, and contribute to the human being. People want new thing, but innovation can’t happen if they don’t accept the risk or the fail. There are many factors that help to establish the innovation, which are: challenging work, organization motivation, resources. For the challenging work, we have to accept the risk that may be caused, if we fail, we can learn from that and redo again. Neal said that a technology company may employ hundreds of workers, and each of them can perform a small task of the problem. They will create an organization, in which they motivate together and get those big things done.
I believe that human being has many great ideas for our future, and we must carry them out. The resources are also the decided factor than lead to innovation. We can spend many years on the idea that enhances the world, but then get stuck because the main scarce resource is money. It stops us from developing and putting our idea in the practice. If there were more capital, we would carry out the idea and change the world.
