Tim Scarfe: belief

Transcript context

…g is that Italy is no longer allowed to manufacture aircraft. Okay? That's forbidden. The second thing is that the factories had been bombed. You know, aircraft factories are primary military targets. They're not hospitals, they're not schools, they're you know, they're weapon factories. So they got bombed, so all of that capital let's say was destroyed or whatnot. The third thing is that the bridges, you know, the roads had also been bombed and destroyed. Know, it was a war zone. You know? So people in Italy needed a way to move around. They they wanted to arrive at work without being all muddy, know. And in that process, know, people start thinking about vehicles that they could create to satisfy that need. So first Coradino goes to work with Inocenti, was a competitor. Inocenti wanted to do motorcycle based on tubular, you know, metal. And Coradino wanted to do sheet metal, they they don't get along, they had a falling out, and he goes back to the Piaggos. And then they create a motorcycle in which the mudguard, you know, is the body, the engine goes in the back so you can sit with your feet together, you know, and the wheel in the front comes on and off the same way as the it would come on and off in a helicopter. Now, you might think that's a nice anecdote. Look, these guys were manufacturing aircraft, now they cannot manufacture aircraft anymore, they do motorcycles. But if you go to Japan or if you go to Germany, you see the same example like, you know, miles and miles away. You see companies like Kawanishi going into light vehicle manufacturing after not being able to produce jet sorry, fighter aircrafts anymore. Heinkel in Germany, the same story they produce the Heinkel tourists when they're not able to produce, you know in their case they they were even able to produce jet aircrafts during, you know, the war. So what that tells you is when push comes to shove and you have to get out of your industry because in this case these guys had no option, they could not stay aircraft manufacturers and they have to jump into something else, they all jump into something similar. So if they're all jumping to something similar, well, it means that they're moving along the same map, you know, and it's a map in which motorcycles were close to aircraft and aircraft maybe was not close to blouse manufacturing. So they all ended up in the same parts because the diffusion of knowledge is also constrained by the geography of knowledge itself. There are signals for knowledge diffusion. So you know prestige is what is 1 signal. So if if children kind of there there was an experiment where if children see a particular person as prestigious then they're more likely to transfer knowledge. But what I wanna get to with with creativity though is a lot of people think that it's completely serendipitous. So YouTube started as a video dating website and, you know, like the way microwaves are invented to, you know, took quite a divergent and weird and wonderful path. And we might we might conclude from that, oh, it's just a random walk through in the epistemic space. And that's not true at all. There are like these analogical jumps that that you can make when you perform creative actions. And I think the examples you gave just kind of pointed to that. So the jumps are still very much dependent on the history but they are kind of like obvious stepping stones that can be taken from the previous position. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. So I would agree that, for example, a video dating website and a video streaming website are quite related. There are trees that are close by in that product space, know? What is interesting about this story is that since this principle has been so much established in the economic geography literature, now we talk about strategies that involve, for example, targeting related or unrelated activities. And we know for instance that migrants are better at developing unrelated activities while locals are better at entrepreneurial activities that are related to the current, you know, economic structure. So we even kinda have a ways to connect these 2 stories, you know. Migration is gonna be something that is gonna help you jump far in the product space. Like the migrant monkeys might land in a tree that is not near your trees and might help you develop a new area.…

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