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LUIS PEREZ-BREVA: Don't start small.
Start with what you have.
At the start, nothing is new, often not even the idea.
The origins of the Greenpeace Foundation
illustrates this point really well.
Greenpeace changed how we think about the environment.
That was their innovation.
The founders of Greenpeace got started
by trying to stop the United States from testing
a nuclear bomb, all with a fishing boat.
They got everyone's attention.
It was certainly a bold idea.
It was also not new.
The Golden Rule expedition had tried the exact same thing
10 years earlier, and the founders of Greenpeace
knew about it.
The Golden Rule was the name of the boat another group of people
had tried to use to stop the United States from testing
nuclear bombs.
There are many more examples of innovations born out
of repurposing old ideas.
Blockchain, the laser, Tesla, Ford's affordable car,
biotechnology all started out as a combination of things
that were not new.
You can find more about these and others
in the first two chapters of my book,
Innovating, A Doer's Manifesto, and in the other materials
I have shared online.
This gives you a new way to think
about innovating as reshaping and repurposing
old ideas and technologies.
In fact, because one technology can lead to many ventures
and there are multiple ways to chip at a problem,
you do not even need to come up with that great an idea.
You can go looking for things that someone else left
half finished, technologies on the shelf
or ideas that did not pan out the first time around and start
big.
This is a bit of a mental shift from how we imagine innovation.
We tend to believe that innovations have to start small.
That's because the emphasis is on the word new, which everyone
associates with unproven.
But if all you're going to use is old,
this frees you to think about how
you start in a different way.
You can start big, as big as your current resources
allow you to.
The reason why I put the emphasis
on starting with what you have is to make you
realize that you do not need to start small.
Of course, I'm not asking you to put your entire fortune into one
single project, but I'm inviting you to consider,
what's the right amount of resources to demonstrate
what you want to do?
Whether you start from a hunch about a problem
like the founders of Greenpeace did,
or a well-researched technology coming
from a lab, or any in between, repurposing
ideas and technologies and starting with what you have
is how you chip at the problem.
You might still wonder about how to start,
when to seek more resources, and how much.
More on that in the next video.
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