The Myth of Eureka: Great ideas aren't born out of the blue

Many of us who run our own companies often get calls from very successful people managing other people’s big companies that they want to quit their job but haven’t got the ‘perfect idea.’

I’d like to make the case that this represents a misunderstanding of the entrepreneurial process because entrepreneurship, like science, is hypothesis testing. You can’t prove anything right but can only prove something wrong. Thisiterative process also means that what you finally implement will be nothing like what you started.

The ‘Wow’ moment
But this notion of creativity as a ‘Eureka moment’- a sudden
surprising illumination that produces a breakthrough - has deep roots starting with Archimedes jumping out of a bath tub. But Gutenberg supposedly got the idea for the printing press while watching a wine press during a grape harvest in the 15th century. Isaac Newton apparently visualized the law of gravitywhile watching an apple fall from a tree in the 17th century.Alexander Fleming, while culturing Staphylococcusbacteria in a petri dish spotted the bacteria killing mould that become thefirst antibiotic penicillin. Dmitry Mendeleev is said to have awoken from a dream while taking a nap from writing a chemistry textbook in 1869 and wrote the periodic table of the elements.

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[caption id=“attachment_75155” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The breakthroughs achieved by successful entrepreneurs are the work of human grit, not the product of superhuman grace. Photo: Thinkstock Images[/caption]

An interesting book by Andrew Robinson, Sudden Genius?, looksback at history to examine all the above cases and suggests thatit often seems that a great idea has come ‘out of the blue’ but in every such experience the mind seems to have prepared itself by long study.

Fleming, for example, had been working in the bacteriologydepartment of a London hospital for two decades before his breakthrough in 1929. During the First World War, he had tried to find drugs to treat the sepsis in the wounds of servicemen and in 1923 he discovered the antibiotic enzyme lysozyme.

The Last Supper completed in 1948 by Leonardo Da Vinci hadits origins as far back as 1881. Einstein’s special theory of relativity of 1905 began with his thought experiments involving light rays in 1895.

And Satyajit Ray’s 1955 movie Pather Panchali originated in illustrations he made for the original novel in 1944.

Robinson believes that the only widely respected ’law’ of creativity is really the so-called ’ten-year rule’ which is the amount of hard work and persistence required for great performance.

Corporate terra firma
This notion is not different from current stories of entrepreneurship in India. Lupin built its first US FDA drug plant in the late 1980s even though it started in 1967 with a focus on domestic markets. The idea of transforming a sleepy private bank marinated in the head of Vishwavir Ahuja and his team at Bank of America for a decade before he took the reins ofRatnakar Bank.

Pramod Bhasin spent many years running GE’s back office before morphing into Genpact.William Bissell of FabIndia spent decades perfecting productsbefore becoming the national retail powerhouse it has become.And the Munjals spent decades in cycles before becoming themonster motorcycle maker they have become. In each case, theyhad to first go as far as they could see so they could see further.

This has important implications for current and potentialentrepreneurs. To paraphrase Robinson: “Entrepreneurship isnot a myth, and it is worthy of our aspiration. But it comes at the cost to the individuals-expressed in the ten-year rule-that most of us are unwilling or unable to pay.There are no short cuts to becoming an entrepreneur. The breakthroughs achieved by successful entrepreneurs did not involve magic or miracles. They were the work of human grit, not the product of superhuman grace.”

So next time you think about the building a great company, forget worrying about having the perfect idea but start thinkingabout the next ten years.

This article first appeared in Entrepreneur India magazine.