Pete Peterson on Inspiration | Big Think

Pete Peterson on Inspiration

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Peter Diamandis believes that ideas need to do two things: be crazy, and know one another – you know, in a Biblical sense. Matt Ridley perhaps said it most provocatively in his book The Rational Optimist when he wrote that it’s vital for ideas to have sex. This is the sweet spot that true innovation calls home: someone has an idea or a problem, they share it with somebody else, and it gets built upon and made stronger with every new perspective that touches it.

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PETER H. DIAMANDIS:

Peter H. Diamandis is the Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and launching large incentive prizes to drive radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. Best known for the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for private spaceflight, the Foundation is now launching prizes in Exploration, Life Sciences, Energy, and Education. Diamandis is also the co-Founder & Executive Chairman of the Singularity University, a Silicon Valley based institution teaching graduates and executives about exponentially growing technologies and their potential to address humanity's grand challenges.

Along with fellow Big Think expert Steven Kotler, Diamandis is co-author of the New York Times best selling hardcover book Abundance—The Future Is Better Than You Think which was #2 on the NYTimes List and #1 on Amazon. Their latest book is titled Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World.

Diamandis has founded or co-founded many of the leading entrepreneurial companies in this sector including Zero Gravity Corporation, the Rocket Racing League and Space Adventures. He also counsels the world's top enterprises on how to utilize exponential technologies and incentivized innovation to dramatically accelerate their business objectives. Dr. Diamandis attended MIT where he received degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering, as well as Harvard Medical School where he received his M.D. Diamandis' personal motto is: "The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!"

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TRANSCRIPT:

Peter H. Diamandis:  When I think of innovation and I teach this at Singularity University and Abundance 360, we focus on this at XPRIZE. Innovation is when an individual has an idea from reading a book or having a problematic experience and then takes that idea and shares it with somebody. And that person builds on the idea and shares it back and it’s a going back and forth. It comes from that building of ideas rapidly and rapid experimentation. Burt Rutan taught me something. He said the day before something is truly a breakthrough it’s a crazy idea. And so I ask CEOs all the time where inside your company are you trying crazy ideas? And if you’re not trying crazy ideas, if you’re trying sort of incremental ideas you’re stuck in incrementalism. You’re never going to innovate, you’re never going to expand. And so innovation really is this rapid experimentation of trying 100 ideas, 99 are failing and one works. And then you build on that one. You try over and over again. So, you know, the traditional way of solving a problem, a grand challenge, has been as a philanthropist or as a company you grab a chunk of money, you grab an innovator, you give it to them and say fix this problem. Very traditional but pretty linear.

What we do at the XPRIZE is we say here’s a chunk of money. I don’t care where you went to school, what you’ve done before, your race, creed or color, man or woman. It doesn’t matter. If you solve this problem you win. And so what we do in this sense is we’re running hundreds of experiments in parallel. And so while the Ansari XPRIZE had 26 teams from seven countries, some of our competitions have thousands of teams that have registered. And it’s sort of this Darwinian competition going on where crazy ideas get a chance to see the sunlight and get experimented with. And you only pay the winner. And so it’s really a wonderfully new and fresh mechanism of innovation.

The concept that we use at the XPRIZE and I use a lot is crowdsourcing. And it’s really being clear about what your goal is. If you don’t have a goal you’ll miss it every time. And so if you’re brainstorming or you’re trying to innovate around what, you know. You might say listen, we want a million dollars’ worth of revenue and we want it to be very specifically in this area and we want whatever it might be – we want to sell books, we want to d...

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