Marc Abrahams is a connoisseur of ideas: the good, the bad, and especially the ugly. As a cofounder and editor of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, Abrahams—together with a merry band of scientists that includes eight Nobel laureates—rescues from obscurity such academic toast crumbs as a study of peanut butter’s effect on the earth’s rotation. He also presides over the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annual celebration of quixotic achievement in the sciences. His latest book, The Ig Nobel Prizes 2: An All-New Collection of the World’s Unlikeliest Research, is being published this month by Dutton Adult. Is there such a thing as a bad idea? Of course. But often there are ideas that people react to badly because the ideas aren’t explained clearly or because that particular group on that particular day isn’t receptive. So be tenacious. Keep lists of rejected ideas that you find intriguing, and then bring them up again. Often, in our meetings to assess Ig Nobel candidates, some nominee gets a tepid response; then two or three years later someone suggests that candidate again, and everybody decides this is the best thing they’ve ever seen. Are there reserves of rejected ideas waiting to be tapped? Yes. Most companies could ban all new ideas and still have enough good—but abandoned—ones lying around to keep thriving for years. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot has made a career out of looking at ideas that others abandoned. He resurrected whole branches of mathematics from things nobody cared about 80 years ago. And look at pharmaceuticals and chemicals. Many professors will tell you about good, working products or processes that could have become gigantic industries by now. But in the early stages, some company decided the new project wouldn’t be quite as profitable quite as soon as something unrelated they had. Now those things are just sitting there, waiting for someone to turn them into an industry. How do companies miss those things if they are actively looking for innovation? We say we want innovation, but when something actually is innovative, it’s also odd. And for most people, odd isn’t good. For the Ig Nobel Prizes, we look for things that are a special kind of odd—things that first make people laugh, and then make them think. Looking at ideas that way—seeing if they stick in your head, no matter how they affected you in that first moment—is a useful habit. Here’s a gaudy parable. Last year we gave an Ig Nobel to Daisuke Inoue, who invented karaoke. In 1971, he was a not terribly good drummer in a mediocre rock band. He managed to sell a few of his machines. But most people just chuckled. Inoue faded out of the picture. Then a few people in a few companies started to take out patents related to karaoke. Now there are more than 1,500 karaoke patents in Japan, and more than 1,000 in the U.S. And companies have made billions on Inoue’s idea, because a few people laughed, and then thought—and then didn’t let their amusement deter them from making money. So familiar ideas trump innovative ones? That’s the usual order of business. Years ago, when Lotus had just made a huge splash, I was starting a software company doing something very different. I got introduced to some VCs. And eight out of nine of them said to me almost the identical thing. “We are looking for the next Lotus.” And I said, “Right—you are looking for the next small company, doing something unique that’s going to become gigantic.” And they said, “No, we are looking for the next Lotus.” And I said, “So, you are looking for the next company that has a niche all to itself and might be able to crowd out all potential competitors?” And they said, “No, we are looking for the next Lotus. We want a new company that will make spreadsheets.” They wanted to invest in the same product and the same market Lotus already had. That was their notion of innovation. The thing to remember is that almost every breakthrough discovery or invention—the lightbulb, antibiotics from bread mold (of all things!), the PC—once seemed foolish. Those who suggest innovative ideas sometimes get laughed at, lose their jobs, or worse. And later somebody focuses on one of those ideas, puts some resources into it, puts some little twist on it—and maybe ends up with a funny and richly satisfying tale to tell.
