The New Idea Generation

I think my life is too busy, because I keep having all these good ideas and then later someone else beats me to market because I am so busy having new ideas. Do I simply lack the time to deal with the old ones or am I not making the most effective use of my time. I believe that success in a new market niche is not so much about quality but getting there first. I can also see that there is a wide gap between the people who generate ideas and people who need new ideas, often people from both groups not understanding the depth of their potential or their need. Human society seems to be very fragmentary, since nations, companies and social groups build barriers to block loss of their ideas to the competition, and yet by the same process block soultions to their problems from outside.

Imagine you have a small company and you need some good ideas to really make your business stand out. You cannot afford to employ someone to generate ideas, and anyway what is the chance that you could trust them anyway since whoever you employ is unlikely to understand your needs or your business field. Part of the problem, and a significant part at that, is what I call 'classicalism', the philosophy of giving things names, breaking them down into smaller parts like a child pulling the petals off a daisy and then giving those parts names. Eventually, people come to believe that these named categories, and their names, are more important than the material they attempt to describe. An example is the catergorising of fields of study: "Let's call this area of study 'physics', and let's call this part of physics 'nuclear physics', and lets call this part of nuclear physics 'xxx' etc.". You then create an education system to fit these fields and soon you have specialists who are unable to communicate or, as a consequence, trust specialists from other specialisms. If you spend you life in one specialism it becomes easy to believe that the further away that another specialism is, the less it resembles yours.

We can observe the problems with classicalism in the alienation of science from art, for example, an alienation that is totally dependent on the catergorising of some things as art and others as science.