Work With Me On This

on this one, Joe. It's just me and you against Lauren. Well, we can hold hands and she can't. We can, that's true. She can only hold her own all right. So and by the way, Lauren can hold her own anyway. So we're going to talk about really collaboration and the sense

of how collaboration is contributing to innovation and invention. And this is something that's interesting to me because, for one thing, we tend to have this kind of concept in our minds about inventions are the product of a soul inventor, a man or woman who is working feverishly and all in a laboratory and suddenly shouts out eureka, and there and invention is is created out of thin air. But that's not really how it tends to happen. Yeah, who's

the person who invented the light bulb? Well, you know, the common answer is Thomas Edison, that Thomas Yison invented the incandescent lightbulb, the filament lightbulb, and that's not actually accurate. First of all, there were other people who are working on incandescent light bulbs before Edison was. Secondly, Edison had at his disposal a multitude of engineers who were working

on various projects projects, including the light bulb. He actually took something that had already existed and made improvements upon it so that it became something viable, something that the average person could actually use, as opposed to something that proved the principle was was sound but wasn't actually practical. Well, surely Alexander Graham Bell is solely responsible for inventing the telephone, right, No,

not exactly. In fact, you could also argue that not not only was Alexander Graham Bell working on something that other people were also working on, some with him and some independently, but or before him, he was he was building on technologies that had already existed. This is the same problem you have if you say, well, who invented the television or who invented the radio? Because as it turns out, these are actually very complicated stories. You could

easily say, oh, Marconi invented the radio. I'm sorry, I meant Tesla, Tesla invented the radio. Sorry Internet, But no, neither is actually true. It turns out that these are inventions that came to us because of numerous engineers and scientists working on basic scientific principles that led to the development of these technolog Yeah. I think it's almost a function of the way we like to hear stories. Sure that that gives us this way of approaching the history

of invention. Um, it's the fact that we like single characters responsible for actions anti hero Furthermore, I mean, you know, it's much more interesting if if Han solo invented the telephone, then if you know, I don't know, all of the Empire worked together on it, Han called first. So but also not only that, but that we'd like to have stories to have a beginning, middle, and end, right, we don't.

We don't like stories that have this bleed over where you don't really have a point that you can say this is exactly where it started and here is where it ended. It's just not the way that history actually works, but it's the way our minds tend to try and file information. Yeah. I think it's actually pretty rare, if not completely impossible, um to look at history and find an example of somebody who really invent did something in

a vacuum that they were just this person is solely responsible. Ironically, the vacuum is a great example of that. I'm just kidding. I couldn't take I had to had to take the vacuum. I honestly do not know. I just had to jump in on that one. D Yes, exactly. Why do you think it's called run by a man called Hohover? I think Richard James was the sole inventor of the slinky, So if that makes you feel any better, although because springs existed before the slinky completely, no, he didn't, but

he invented what what became the slinky. You know, he took he took something that was being used in the navy and made a toy out of it. Certainly, I mean there's there's usually some kind of inception of concept that people that that an inventor or a small team of inventors will kind of clarify and and put out there and go like this new thing tots works. Guys. The point we're trying to make is that mostly inventions that we are relying upon today are in fact the

result of collaborative efforts between many people. Even if it's it could be a formal collaboration where people are actively working together in order to achieve something specific, or it could be informal in the sense that someone picks up where another person left off and continues work that way.

But really collaboration is kind of the name of the game, or it's it's certainly becoming that way, and especially given that say things like the Internet are letting us collaborate more deeply and across further spaces, more and more distant spaces then previously it's it's becoming a much more rich field now, Lauren, I understand that you actually looked into some interesting statistics when it comes to patents that kind

of kind of illustrates this idea, right. Yeah. According to a patent law blog, since the nineteen seventies, the average number of inventors that's been listed on patents has crept up from from about one point six in nineteen seventy two about two point five in the year two thousand UM and overall, the number of one inventor patents has declined from again in about sixty down to about while the number of three plus inventor patents has risen from

ten to up to about So. I mean, that's only in the US, and it's a relatively small sliver of time, but I still think that it's it's it's an interesting trend. It does illustrate what we're saying here. The number of patents has also been going up also, Yeah, yeah, so the the sheer number is definitely increased year over year. Uh. And we're getting to a point now where entire industries are becoming multidisciplinary, meaning that there are industries that depend

upon contributions from people who specialize in very different fields. Now, this is also a fairly recent development if you look at all of human history, right, I mean, if you go back just a few if you go back a few centuries, you can get to a point where it's feasible for a human being to reach a point where they have learned more or less the cutting edge of of of human knowledge in a specific area, or even across a couple of areas, if you go back far enough,

like let's say, we'll go to the ancient Greeks, who were pretty smart guys. Right, you get back to right, thanks, Joe. Yes, In fact, some of the ancient Greeks were pretty smart guys. But you can get to you your point to someone like uh, Socrates or Plato or Aristotle, someone especially like Aristotle. Aristotle was the person who ends up inspiring things like

logic and biology as actual areas of study. At that time, you can have someone who not only is a specialist in a particular field, but actually has a body of knowledge that spans all fields of human knowledge. At that time, they're basically an expert on almost everything their culture knows. Right, and then as the cultures get more complex, as our body of knowledge grows, and those disciplines become deeper and more rich, it becomes increasingly difficult to be the master

of multiple disciplines. And today we have disciplines that are so incredibly vast and deep that even to be a master of a single discipline is covers a lot of different specializations within that. Right, you might not you might not find someone. I doubt you could point to anyone, anyone in the world who would be the leading expert on medicine. That's just too big a field you're you're talking about, you know, I mean, you could have a

leading expert in terms of just relative placement. Maybe this person knows more than anybody else. I don't know how you know who that person is, right, but you or someone who's a really good spokesperson and or a really

good researcher. But I'm saying looking at the top level. Off, if you got five specialists, right, you've got someone who was each oncologist, right, you know, you get you get oncology, you get you know, pediatrics, you get all of the different fields of medicine, the major fields of medicine together, and you get the leading expert in each of those, and then you take the person that you think is

the leading expert in medicine overall. I guarantee you those those people who are specialists are going to have a deeper, more nuanced, uh grasp of those fields than the you know, jack of all trades approach. Right, So you're not going to get someone who is the leading specialist or the leading expert in a huge discipline who is going to have that same level of knowledge as someone who is specializing. So multidiscipline approach is really necessary. Even within a single discipline,

you have these little subdisciplines. So if you have something as broad as as medicine obviously, and you want to tackle something like cancer, you actually are probably gonna be working with a couple of different specialists, not just an oncologist, but others as well, who are leading giving their expertise

to research and development of treatments. Certainly, and beyond that you need to start considering the other societal impact factors, which is a little bit of an industry pint I apologize for um that that are going to affect your research, like the laws of getting a drug out to the public, for example. Sure, yeah, I mean obviously there's lots of things to practically consider beyond just the research side. Yeah.

And one thing that's, uh, that's a big deal in medicine today is you can't just know about the body when you become a doctor. These days, you're you can't just know, well, here's anatomy, here's where this organ should be, here the symptoms of this disease, because lots of the treatments we have involved advanced knowledge of other fields. Say you might need to know a little bit about physics in order to give say a radiation treatment to a

cancer patient, and and more things about chemistry. Sure, also lots of drug therapies. You you really have to consider what comorbidities they're going to cover, you know, what other organs,

what other bodily systems, what other functions they're going to affect. Yeah, and as we get to a world where we have more and more personalized medicine, obviously, then you're talking about specialists who can actually understand a particular patient's needs, not just across an entire you know, we we have doctors who specialize in specific diseases. Now, right, We've got people who are specifically devoting they're all of their work to studying, understanding,

and fighting specific diseases. We're going to get to a point where we have doctors who are very much focused on specific patients, to the point where the treatments given to a patient are of tailored to that specific person their biochemistry based on their genetic code exactly. You're you're talking about, you know, having a level of specialization that is you know, it's it's unprecedented really, and medicine is

just one example. Obviously, there are other fields that require this sort of multiple, multiple discipline approach, Like I mentioned nanotechnology, that's a big one. So nanotechnology, you have computer scientists, you have engineers, you have biologists, you have physicists, you have chemists, you have lots of different disciplines that are interested in trying to develop this field of nanotechnology for multiple applications, not just for you know, the medical approach. Obviously,

that would be a big one. Again, fighting cancer, we've talked about using nanotechnology to do that, using some sort of nanodelivery system to deliver chemotherapy drugs to specific cells so that you can minimize any sort of side effects that the patient would suffer. But in order to do that, you might wind up having a human biologist working together with a material scientist working together with a laser specialist working together with and so on and so forth. Exactly

a lot of different fields would go into that kind research. Yeah, if you were to depend upon one discipline to just take over that, then the the progress of that field would crawl. But by leveraging the expertise of multiple disciplines and sharing that research across the disciplines. Not only do you progress the industry of nanotechnology forward, but you learn so much along the way. You know, we've always said on this show, even when you failed, you still learn. Well.

In this case, you're talking about multiple disciplines researching stuff to find out how to make it possible, and learning a lot along the way that can benefit the industry and other industries in ways that we did not foresee when we embarked upon that research. Absolutely, um I I know that we just kind of tried to conversationally transition

away from the field of medicine. But in the field of medicine, it's there's been really interesting developments like when um, when AIDS in the nineteen eighties became a very serious, very huge concern. I mean, we didn't we didn't know anything about it. We It wasn't even until four that we discovered the human human immune deficiency virus, and by seven a c T had been approved for use by the f d A. This was three years. This was an incredible leap in uh in drug development and research.

Before then, it would have been pretty impossible to to have seen a clinical trial of a new drug set up against a placebo, in a in a in a direct ratio or um or of a new drug set up against any any previous UH treatment therapy. It's you know, people came together because they realized that this was bigger than the specific monetary advancement of any given company and

um and that example has been translated out. I mean, big pharma companies are realizing that by trying to separate out all of their research and development teams they are they're wasting money and time, and that overall people can really benefit, they can benefit from coming together like that.

There's a a group of like the ten biggest pharma companies basically in the world right now are are going in on a not for profit organization called Trance seller a Biopharma, which is is trying to standardize the field of clinical research and that could lead to amazing advancements. Sure, and we we've also talked before about the artificial intelligence movement, this idea of developing artificially intelligent UH constructs, whether robots

or computers or combination whatever. UH that actually that field

also involves multiple disciplines. You would think computer science obviously would be one, but neuroscience is certainly one that has looked into artificial intelligence, and I think it's really important too, because I think there's some futurists out there who have this concept that artificial intelligence in the in the sense of having a a machine that is, and I don't know how you would specifically define this, but as intelligent as a person, so that they think like a person,

I think is the way that they usually try and frame this. That a computer would think in the same way that you and I would think that that will be We're right right on the cusp of it, you know, ten to twenty years away because because of the rate of the of development as far as computer power goes. But neurologists have often pointed out that it's not just a question of computer power, that making a machine that is powerful enough to mimic what a human can do

is not necessarily the real barrier there. It requires a deeper understanding of how our brains work before we can make a machine that can mimic brains work. And interestingly enough, by trying to make that machine, I think we might

learn things about how our brain works we didn't know before. Right, Yeah, we've already seen scientists set up and work with neuroscientists to computer scientists neuroscientists working together to build virtual models of neuron neurons and neural pathways, so you know, essentially a model of like on a very tiny scale of a human brain to see how things like memories form and how uh these pathways activate during with certain stimuli.

Keeping in mind that the computer virtual models are absolutely tiny compared to the average human brain, and the time scale is much longer, so you have to really scale things in a in a wacky way to see how it works. But it shows progress toward that. And so again it's a multidiscipline kind of field where if we really want to push the industry forward, if we want to push that whole area of study forward, it's going to require more than just computer scientists sitting down and

writing some new code. So uh. In in the video episode for this week brand New special episode where I did not appear in my nebulous white environment where I can control everything with just a wave of my hand or a certain thought, it was actually kind of a Hey, you've seen the episodes, Joe. I mean if I am in that environment, I can make stuff happen. Did you not see. I made myself fold up like oregamy. Do

not test me on this. But for this particular episode, I shot it here in the office, which was, you know, strange and unusual for me. But uh. It also is one of the episodes of our second season of Forward Thinking, which kind of interrupts our first season of Forward Thinking. That's okay, because we're good. Yeah, we're a little will wibbly wobbly. We were actually broadcasting from the future as

we speak. But anyway, that in that I had a discussion with Chuck Goulash, senior executive engineer with Toyota's Collaborative Safety Research Center, and Toyota is a partner of Forward Thinking, so they were able to put us in touch with them. The interesting thing I found about the c s r C is that although Toyota was the company that that put that into motion, the actual research is open to everyone.

So it's not like they are having this collaborative effort among various institutions and then Toyota is hoarding all the information and only only the that company will benefit. Anyone can benefit from that information, including all the collaborators. So you have medical facilities learning more about the human body and trauma and and how to treat it and how to prevent it. You have engineers learning how to design vehicles in a better way that can be shared across

an entire industry. You have governments learning what sort of industry standards should be put in place for the next generation of vehicles that will apply again across the board to all vehicles. Um. That I think is the really exciting thing about collaboration, This idea that it's not in an effort to get ahead of some one else, it's in an effort to improve things across an entire swath, industry, industry, customers, whatever. Yeah, exactly, it's it's this idea that through this work we can

improve conditions. That's what I find really exciting about it. So honestly, at that at that stage, you know, it doesn't matter to me who it was that put it into motion. If it means that everyone benefits, would would perhaps at some point someone who helped put it into motions say I deserve more credit or more money than these other people. I don't see how that would happen, because you're talking about research information back. Yeah, this is this is just research that people are going to use

to make improvements. So it's not not even in the in that industry specifically, but I you know, I just feel like that's a potential barrier to to collaboration, this concept of ownership of of of a concept. There there are some barriers to collaboratetion. I mean, there's there's one where you're wondering who's in charge, right, who ultimately is

in charge? But if you're talking about research where you have a specific goal in mind, but knowing that the research is going to uncover information that's going to benefit in ways that you can't even necessarily foresee when you get into it means that even with just that one goal, even if that one specific goal benefits a specific party more than another, ultimately everyone benefits. So that ends up being kind of a non factor in the long run.

But the other obstacle that you brought up earlier, Lauren, when we were talking about this episode beforehand, was the idea of getting so many people involved in something. How do you keep that, how do you keep that under a control so that you are actually making progress and you're not having you know, people of getting each other way too many biomedical researchers and the biomedical kitchen and

the laboratory. That's what yeah, And I think I think in that case, what we really need is you need to have for whatever research facility that you you know you've built h that you have a specific focus, that you have a specific goal in mind that everyone is working toward. And again, knowing that you're going to generate information outside of that that will be a benefit in some way or another is fine. But to kind of have that that that end goal in sight, I think

helps a lot. And and all obviously, in all of these collaborative relationships that we're talking about, you usually have some sort of team leader that is in charge, which that also helps when you actually do have a hierarchy there and it's not just a free for all of you know, let's throw a bunch of brilliant people into a room together, and surely something amazing is going to come out of it. Uh. That amazing thing might end up being the scientific version of the Thunderdome, which I

don't argue would be amazing but not necessarily productive. Eighteen scientists enter, one scientist leaves aside for entertainment purposes. I bet some I bet some those research scientists could build some really interesting weapons. Oh yeah, no, I mean just the robot Wars alone would be exciting. But uh no, seriously though, that is one of those things that's interesting is that I don't know how many well all of us here obviously have worked collaboratively. We're doing it right now.

We're collaborating on a podcast, but we don't have any relevant knowledge or now we're not we're not actually contributing to society in any meaningful way, so the pressure is off. But no, seriously, though, we've all had that experience of learning to give and take and collaborate with each other in order to have our end goal being producing and

entertaining and informative podcast. Well, one thing I have learned about collaborating with different people is that collaboration itself involves a kind of expertise, like that it's a skill that can be developed. Sure, And I almost wonder if between different scientific disciplines, if, like we were talking about earlier, in the future, you see a continuing end of just more and more specialization. The more we learn about these disciplines,

the narrower each expert's focus gets. If collaborative projects will need to be controlled by people who sort of specialize in scientific collaboration. Collaboration is is kind of a field of study certainly, Um, multidisciplinary fields of study are I mean, they're they're scientific journals for that thing, and um, and there is research being done into into case studies of

collaborative efforts to create create stuff and um. So you know, I've seen it mentioned colloquially that that people have an interest in being a collaboration scientist. How that's really cool. I think what we're going to see is that a lot of these projects are going to get their own version of Jen Barber, who of course is the relationships manager in the documentary series The I T. Crowd. You would love it. Yeah, So but anyway, she's a relationship

manager because she has absolutely no nala jovity whatsoever. But she does know how to handle people. So that's how she joins the I T team. Um. But yeah, I mean that, well, that's a comedic example. That's sort of what we're talking about here. Someone who has this ability to kind of be like the hub, you know, the connector for all these different pieces that can make sure that everyone's on task and working towards a similar goal. But so Lauren you're sort of saying like this isn't

even necessarily like a maybe in the future thing. You're saying like, right now, this is already reality. The groundwork of it does in fact exist. And I think that it's going to become an actual facts thing very shortly. I mean within the next like three years, not not even within ten to twenty. Keep in mind, just like maybe maybe five years ago, we didn't even have such a thing as like, there was no no such title as social media manager, and now there is. Nobody had

social media Ninja's now, and now we do. I I do want to say that I think that one of those barriers to collaboration at the moment is the the paywall that a lot of academic research is being trapped behind. Yeah, and have you seen the surveys that have said that scientists have often, uh not read nearly as much research as they wanted to because there was a paywall in front of the journal that they were trying to access.

And and you know, and I respect the the these academic institutions for wanting to make money off of this amazing research that they're publishing. I mean, you know, they the researchers want to be paid for their publications and and that's groovy to only that, but it does cost

money to actually distribute this stuff. It does absolutely. I mean, you know, speaking as someone who has edited medical papers before, it's you know, you really need someone outside of and the the academic institution to proof read something and go like, you did this math wrong. Your idea is solid, but this math is that just went somewhere else, that was nowhere, and you know, and that kind of thing is is

critical to the industry. And I liked getting paid as a proof reader in that case, so you know, I I believe in money for everybody. But how exactly to monetize that kind of thing in the future is I don't know how it's going to work, right, because I mean, you know, opening it up for like the advertising model is also tricky, right, because then you have the the perception of bias even if there is no bias there.

If you have advertisers showing up against a paper on say a drug study, and it's a drug company's ads that are showing up on that page, which would be the logical logical advertiser for that paper, so you would argue that that's a conflict of interesting to unexpected side effects in one drug and then a competitor's drug is advertise. Yeah,

that's another example. So yeah, it's tricky. UM. I mean, obviously the paywall situation where scientists are not reading papers that they really need to read because it's behind a paywall. That is something that we need to but that kind of study was really terrifying. Actually, they're they're over in the European Union. They've got an Innovative Medicines Initiative that

started in two thousand eight. Um, there's recommendations for the US to start up a counterpart to this, and and I mean it's it's groups of both governmental and private and public research going into stuff like combating bacterial resistance and uh, curing diabetes and autism therapy and chronic pain research. You know, big, huge, multi multi disciplinary stuff. And I think that that you know, that's great. Yeah, I mean, you know, I certainly hope you were against collaboration when

it benefits her, she's all for it. I'm against whatever. Jonathan says. That's fair pretty much every anyone who knows me long enough that that does tend to happen. Uh. Part of this is also an argument that could be made that we need to we need we as in the United States in this case, need to invest more in science in general. And in fact, we've seen the opposite happening year over year with budgets issues like that.

But that's a tough sell, right, It's tough for it's tough to sell it to Congress, and it's tough for Congress to sell it to constituents. So it's one of those things where even though I'm sure you know, the three of us and even NOL I'll agree that no will just gave me a dirty look. But I'm sure we would all agree that. Obviously, again, scientific endeavors have the potential to benefit us in ways that we cannot even anticipate. I'm sure that many of our listeners agree

with that as well. But getting a large population for holding up an apple and an empty hand and saying, and you know, the empty hand represents future apples, which is better? It's hard to It's it's the marshmallow experiment, but on a grand global cancer scale. Wow, yeah, I'm gonna eat this marshmallow right now. In fact, because delay gratification is something I don't believe in. Uh, all right, Well,

we're gonna wrap this up. Guys, if you have anything you want to weigh in on as far as collaboration goes, maybe you want to get with some of your friends and write an email together. That would be fitting. Uh, why don't you Why don't you go over to f w thinking dot com. That's our website where you're gonna find all the podcasts, blogs, the articles, you're gonna find the videos, and we have all of our content right there. You can get in touch with us through that. We

have our social media. Look for fw thinking on Facebook and on Twitter and even on Google Plus. We're all over the place. Give in touch with us, let's know what you think. You're part of the conversation. We want to hear from you, and we will talk to you again really sooner. We're more on this topic and the future of technology. Visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places.