History of Indian Science & Technology

Syllabus for End Term Exams &

TED Transcripts for 7 talks that were shown in the class

S No. CORE TOPICS DISCUSSED SUB TOPICS DISCUSSED

1. Ancient Indian Tradition and (1) Objective of the course
Culture. (2) Ancient Indian Scientific Tradition and Culture
Indian contributions (3) Timeline of ancient scientists
(4) Contributions
(5) Science of Aura (an ancient Indian science)
(6) Science of Sanskrit language
(7) Science of Cymatics

2. Development of (1) Introduction to Surgery

Surgery in India (2) Ancient Indian Surgical Mechanism
(3) Relevance of Indian Surgery
(4) Impact of Indian Surgery on World
(5) Rise of Sushruta
(6) Understanding the medicine practiced under Charak
(7) Learning the surgical tools
(8) Studying practical implications of surgical science of that
time
3. Ethno Medicine : An (1) Introduction to Ethno medicine
Overview (2) Importance of Ethno medicine
(3) Evolution of ethno medicine
(4) Medicine and Religion
(5) Medicine and culture
(6) History of ethno medical studies
(7) Scope of ethno medicine in India
4. Ayurveda: The Nature (1) Introduction to Ayurveda
Heals (2) Importance of Science of Ayurveda
(3) Evolution of Ayurveda
(4) Elements of Ayurveda
(5) Development of science of Ayurveda from ancient India
to Modern India
(6) Ayurveda: Therapies decoded
(7) Future of Ayurveda
5 Unani Medicine: Birth (1) Introduction to Unani Medicine
& Development in (2) Importance of Science of Unani Medicine
(3) Evolution of Unani Medicine
India
(4) Elements of Unani Medicine
(5) Development of science of Unani Medicine from ancient
India to Modern India
(6) Unani Medicine: Therapies decoded
(7) Future of Unani Medicine
 6. Middle-Eastern (1) Development of Medicine in Middle East and its impact
Influence On Medieval on Indian medical Science
(2) Idea and development of hospitals
Indian Medicine: An
(3) Development in the field of human anatomy and
Analytical Overview physiology
(4) Surgical developments in Middle East and its impact on
Indian medicine
(5) Medical techniques imported from Middle east in
traditional Indian medical science
(6) Anaesthesia and antiseptics
(7) Development of Indian Pharmacy having Arab influence
7. Why is History TED speakers are
important to us as a (1) Arvind Gupta
citizen / student / (2) Anil K Gupta
aspiring professional? (3) Anupam Mishra
(4) Sugata Mitra
- We watched and (5) Bunker Roy
learnt from 7 TED (6) Steven Johnson
Speakers. Read their (7) Simon Sinek
transcripts

1. Arvind Gupta: Turning

trash into toys for learning
0:11 My name is Arvind Gupta, and I'm a
toymaker. I've been making toys for the last 30
years. The early '70s, I was in college. It was a very
revolutionary time. It was a political ferment, so to
say students out in the streets of Paris, revolting
against authority. America was jolted by the anti-
Vietnam movement, the Civil Rights movement. In India, we had the Naxalite movement, the [unclear]
movement. But you know, when there is a political churning of society, it unleashes a lot of energy. The National
Movement of India was testimony to that. Lots of people resigned from well-paid jobs and jumped into the National
Movement. Now in the early '70s, one of the great programs in India was to revitalize primary science in village
schools.

1:01 There was a person, Anil Sadgopal, did a Ph.D. from Caltech and returned back as a molecular biologist in
India's cutting-edge research institute, the TIFR. At 31, he was not able to relate the kind of [unclear]
research, which he was doing with the lives of the ordinary people. So he designed and went and started a village
science program. Many people were inspired by this. The slogan of the early '70s was "Go to the people. Live with
them; love them. Start from what they know. Build on what they have." This was kind of the defining slogan.

1:32 Well I took one year. I joined Telco, made TATA trucks, pretty close to Pune. I worked there for two years,
and I realized that I was not born to make trucks. Often one doesn't know what one wants to do, but it's good
enough to know what you don't want to do. So I took one year off, and I went to this village science program. And
it was a turning point. It was a very small village a weekly bazaar where people, just once in a week, they put in
all the vats. So I said, "I'm going to spend a year over here." So I just bought one specimen of everything which was
sold on the roadside. And one thing which I found was this black rubber.

2:08 This is called a cycle valve tube. When you pump in air in a bicycle, you use a bit of this. And some of these
models so you take a bit of this cycle valve tube, you can put two matchsticks inside this, and you make a flexible
joint. It's a joint of tubes. You start by teaching angles an acute angle, a right angle, an obtuse angle, a straight
angle. It's like its own little coupling. If you have three of them, and you loop them together, well you make a
triangle. With four, you make a square, you make a pentagon, you make a hexagon, you make all these kind of
polygons. And they have some wonderful properties. If you look at the hexagon, for instance, it's like an amoeba,
which is constantly changing its own profile. You can just pull this out, this becomes a rectangle. You give it a
push, this becomes a parallelogram. But this is very shaky. Look at the pentagon, for instance, pull this out it
becomes a boat shape trapezium. Push it and it becomes house shaped. This becomes an isosceles triangle again,
very shaky. This square might look very square and prim. Give it a little push this becomes a rhombus. It
becomes kite-shaped. But give a child a triangle, he can't do a thing to it.

3:10 Why use triangles? Because triangles are the only rigid structures. We can't make a bridge with squares because
the train would come, it would start doing a jig. Ordinary people know about this because if you go to a village in
India, they might not have gone to engineering college, but no one makes a roof placed like this. Because if they
put tiles on top, it's just going to crash. They always make a triangular roof. Now this is people science.

3:34 And if you were to just poke a hole over here and put a third matchstick, you'll get a T joint. And if I were to
poke all the three legs of this in the three vertices of this triangle, I would make a tetrahedron. So you make all
these 3D shapes. You make a tetrahedron like this. And once you make these, you make a little house. Put this on
top. You can make a joint of four. You can make a joint of six. You just need a ton. Now this was you make a
joint of six, you make an icosahedron. You can play around with it. This makes an igloo. Now this is in 1978. I was
a 24-year-old young engineer. And I thought this was so much better than making trucks. (Applause) If you, as a
matter of fact, put four marbles inside, you simulate the molecular structure of methane, CH4. Four atoms of
hydrogen, the four points of the tetrahedron, which means the little carbon atom.

4:38 Well since then, I just thought that I've been really privileged to go to over 2,000 schools in my country
village schools, government schools, municipal schools, Ivy League schools I've been invited by most of
them. And every time I go to a school, I see a gleam in the eyes of the children. I see hope. I see happiness in their
faces. Children want to make things. Children want to do things.

5:03 Now this, we make lots and lots of pumps. Now this is a little pump with which you could inflate a balloon. It's
a real pump. You could actually pop the balloon. And we have a slogan that the best thing a child can do with a toy
is to break it. So all you do is it's a very kind of provocative statement this old bicycle tube and this old plastic
[unclear] This filling cap will go very snugly into an old bicycle tube. And this is how you make a valve. You put a
little sticky tape. This is one-way traffic. Well we make lots and lots of pumps. And this is the other one that
you just take a straw, and you just put a stick inside and you make two half-cuts. Now this is what you do, is you
bend both these legs into a triangle, and you just wrap some tape around. And this is the pump. And now, if you
have this pump, it's like a great, great sprinkler. It's like a centrifuge. If you spin something, it tends to fly out.

6:04 (Applause)
6:06 Well in terms of if you were in Andhra Pradesh, you would make this with the palmyra leaf. Many of our
folk toys have great science principles. If you spin-top something, it tends to fly out. If I do it with both hands, you
can see this fun Mr. Flying Man. Right. This is a toy which is made from paper. It's amazing. There are four
pictures. You see insects, you see frogs, snakes, eagles, butterflies, frogs, snakes, eagles. Here's a paper which you
could [unclear] designed by a mathematician at Harvard in 1928, Arthur Stone, documented by Martin Gardner
in many of his many books. But this is great fun for children. They all study about the food chain. The insects are
eaten by the frogs; the frogs are eaten by the snakes; the snakes are eaten by the eagles. And this can be, if you had
a whole photocopy paper A4 size paper you could be in a municipal school, you could be in a government
school a paper, a scale and a pencil no glue, no scissors. In three minutes, you just fold this up. And what you
could use it for is just limited by your imagination. If you take a smaller paper, you make a smaller flexagon. With
a bigger one, you make a bigger one.

7:17 Now this is a pencil with a few slots over here. And you put a little fan here. And this is a hundred-year-old
toy. There have been six major research papers on this. There's some grooves over here, you can see. And if I take
a reed if I rub this, something very amazing happens. Six major research papers on this. As a matter of fact,
Feynman, as a child, was very fascinated by this. He wrote a paper on this. And you don't need the three billion-
dollar Hadron Collider for doing this. (Laughter) (Applause) This is there for every child, and every child can enjoy
this. If you want to put a colored disk, well all these seven colors coalesce. And this is what Newton talked about
400 years back, that white light's made of seven colors, just by spinning this around.

7:58 This is a straw. What we've done, we've just sealed both the ends with tape, nipped the right corner and the
bottom left corner, so there's holes in the opposite corners, there's a little hole over here. This is a kind of a blowing
straw. I just put this inside this. There's a hole here, and I shut this. And this costs very little money to make great
fun for children to do.

8:25 What we do is make a very simple electric motor. Now this is the simplest motor on Earth. The most expensive
thing is the battery inside this. If you have a battery, it costs five cents to make it. This is an old bicycle tube, which
gives you a broad rubber band, two safety pins. This is a permanent magnet. Whenever current flows through the
coil, this becomes an electromagnet. It's the interaction of both these magnets which makes this motor spin. We
made 30,000.

8:54 Teachers who have been teaching science for donkey years, they just muck up the definition and they spit it
out. When teachers make it, children make it. You can see a gleam in their eye. They get a thrill of what science is
all about. And this science is not a rich man's game. In a democratic country, science must reach to our most
oppressed, to the most marginalized children. This program started with 16 schools and spread to 1,500 government
schools. Over 100,000 children learn science this way. And we're just trying to see possibilities.

9:30 Look, this is the tetrapack awful materials from the point of view of the environment. There are six layers
three layers of plastic, aluminium which are sealed together. They are fused together, so you can't separate
them. Now you can just make a little network like this and fold them and stick them together and make an
icosahedron. So something which is trash, which is choking all the seabirds, you could just recycle this into a very,
very joyous all the platonic solids can be made with things like this.

9:59 This is a little straw, and what you do is you just nip two corners here, and this becomes like a baby crocodile's
mouth. You put this in your mouth, and you blow. (Honk) It's children's delight, a teacher's envy, as they
say. You're not able to see how the sound is produced, because the thing which is vibrating goes inside my
mouth. I'm going to keep this outside, to blow out. I'm going to suck in air.(Honk) So no one actually needs to
muck up the production of sound with wire vibrations. The other is that you keep blowing at it, keep making the
sound, and you keep cutting it. And something very, very nice happens. (Honk) (Applause) And when you get a
very small one (Honk) This is what the kids teach you. You can also do this.

11:04 Well before I go any further, this is something worth sharing. This is a touching slate meant for blind
children. This is strips of Velcro, this is my drawing slate, and this is my drawing pen, which is basically a film
box. It's basically like a fisherman's line, a fishing line. And this is wool over here. If I crank the handle, all the
wool goes inside. And what a blind child can do is to just draw this. Wool sticks on Velcro. There are 12 million
blind children in our country (Applause) who live in a world of darkness. And this has come as a great boon to
them. There's a factory out there making our children blind, not able to provide them with food, not able to provide
them with vitamin A. But this has come as a great boon for them. There are no patents. Anyone can make it.

11:59 This is very, very simple. You can see, this is the generator. It's a crank generator. These are two magnets. This
is a large pulley made by sandwiching rubber between two old CDs. Small pulley and two strong magnets. And this
fibre turns a wire attached to an LED. If I spin this pulley, the small one's going to spin much faster. There will be
a spinning magnetic field. Lines, of course, would be cut, the force will be generated. And you can see, this LED is
going to glow. So this is a small crank generator.

12:27 Well, this is, again, it's just a ring, a steel ring with steel nuts. And what you can do is just, if you give it a
twirl, well they just keep going on. And imagine a bunch of kids standing in a circle and just waiting for the steel
ring to be passed on. And they'd be absolutely joyous playing with this.

12:55 Well in the end, what we can also do: we use a lot of old newspapers to make caps. This is worthy of Sachin
Tendulkar. It's a great cricket cap. (Laughter) (Applause) When first you see Nehru and Gandhi, this is the Nehru
cap just half a newspaper. We make lots of toys with newspapers, and this is one of them. And this is you can
see this is a flapping bird. All of our old newspapers, we cut them into little squares. And if you have one of
these birds children in Japan have been making this bird for many, many years. And you can see, this is a little
fantail bird.

13:37 Well in the end, I'll just end with a story. This is called "The Captain's Hat Story." The captain was a captain
of a sea-going ship. It goes very slowly. And there were lots of passengers on the ship, and they were getting bored,
so the captain invited them on the deck. "Wear all your colourful clothes and sing and dance, and I'll provide you
with good food and drinks." And the captain would wear a cap every day and join in the regalia. The first day, it
was a huge umbrella cap, like a captain's cap. That night, when the passengers would be sleeping, he would give it
one more fold, and the second day, he would be wearing a fireman's cap with a little shoot just like a designer
cap, because it protects the spinal cord. And the second night, he would take the same cap and give it another
fold. And the third day, it would be a Shikari cap just like an adventurer's cap. And the third night, he would
give it two more folds and this is a very, very famous cap. If you've seen any of our Bollywood films, this is what
the policeman wears, it's called a Pandu cap. It's been catapulted to international glory.

14:37 And we must not forget that he was the captain of the ship. So that's a ship. And now the end: everyone was
enjoying the journey very much. They were singing and dancing. Suddenly there was a storm and huge waves. And
all the ship can do is to dance and pitch along with the waves. A huge wave comes and slaps the front and knocks
it down. And another one comes and slaps the aft and knocks it down. And there's a third one over here. This
swallows the bridge and knocks it down. And the ship sinks, and the captain has lost everything, but for a life
jacket.

15:12 Thank you so much.

15:14 (Applause)

2. Anil Gupta: India's hidden

hotbeds of invention

0:12 I bring to you a message from tens of thousands of

people in the villages, in the slums, in the hinterland of
the country who have solved problems through their own
genius, without any outside help. When our home minister
announces a few weeks ago a war on one third of India,
about 200 districts that he mentioned were ungovernable, he
missed the point. The point that we have been stressing for the last 21 years, the point that people may be
economically poor, but they're not poor in the mind. In other words, the minds on the margin are not the marginal
minds. That is the message, which we started 31 years ago. And what did it start?

1:15 Let me just tell you, briefly, my personal journey, which led me to come to this point. In '85, '86, I was in
Bangladesh advising the government and the research council there how to help scientists work on the lands, on
the fields of the poor people, and how to develop research technologies, which are based on the knowledge of the
people. I came back in '86. I had been tremendously invigorated by the knowledge and creativity that I found in
that country, which had 60 percent landlessness but amazing creativity. I started looking at my own work: The
work that I had done for the previous 10 years, almost every time, had instances of knowledge that people had
shared.

1:59 Now, I was paid in dollars as a consultant, and I looked at my income tax return and tried to ask myself: "Is
there a line in my return, which shows how much of this income has gone to the people whose knowledge has
made it possible? Was it because I'm brilliant that I'm getting this reward, or because of the revolution? Is it that I
write very well? Is it that I articulate very well? Is it that I analyze the data very well? Is it because I'm a professor,
and, therefore, I must be entitled to this reward from society?" I tried to convince myself that, "No, no, I have
worked for the policy changes. You know, the public policy will become more responsive to the needs of the poor,
and, therefore I think it's okay." But it appeared to me that all these years that I'd been working on exploitation
exploitation by landlords, by moneylenders, by traders gave me an insight that probably I was also an exploiter,
because there was no line in my income tax return which showed this income accrued because of the brilliance of
the people those people who have shared their knowledge and good faith and trust with me and nothing ever
went back to them. So much so, that much of my work till that time was in the English language.

3:08 The majority of the people from whom I learned didn't know English. So what kind of a contributor was I? I
was talking about social justice, and here I was, a professional who was pursuing the most unjust act of taking
knowledge from the people, making them anonymous, getting rent from that knowledge by sharing it and doing
consultancy, writing papers and publishing them in the papers, getting invited to the conferences, getting
consultancies and whatever have you. So then, a dilemma rose in the mind that, if I'm also an exploiter, then this
is not right; life cannot go on like that. And this was a moment of great pain and trauma because I couldn't live
with it any longer. So I did a review of ethical dilemma and value conflicts and management research, wrote, read
about 100 papers. And I came to the conclusion that while dilemma is unique, dilemma is not unique; the solution
had to be unique.

4:02 And one day I don't know what happened while coming back from the office towards home, maybe I
saw a honey bee or it occurred to my mind that if I only could be like the honey bee, life would be wonderful.
What the honey bee does: it pollinates, takes nectar from the flower, pollinates another flower, cross-pollinates.
And when it takes the nectar, the flowers don't feel shortchanged. In fact, they invite the honey bees through their
colors, and the bees don't keep all the honey for themselves. These are the three guiding principles of the Honey
Bee Network: that whenever we learn something from people it must be shared with them in their language. They
must not remain anonymous.

4:45 And I must tell you that after 20 years, I have not made one percent of change in the professional practice of
this art. That is a great tragedy which I'm carrying still with me and I hope that all of you will carry this with
you that the profession still legitimizes publication of knowledge of people without attributing them by making
them anonymous. The research guidelines of U.S. National Academy of Sciences or Research Councils of the U.K.
or of Indian Councils of Science Research do not require that whatever you learn from people, you must share back
with them. We are talking about an accountable society, a society that is fair and just, and we don't even do justice
in the knowledge market. And India wants to be a knowledge society. How will it be a knowledge society? So,
obviously, you cannot have two principles of justice, one for yourself and one for others. It must be the same. You
cannot discriminate. You cannot be in favor of your own values, which are at a distance from the values that you
espouse. So, fairness to one and to the other is not divisible.

5:45 Look at this picture. Can you tell me where has it been taken from, and what is it meant for? Anybody? I'm a
professor; I must quiz you. (Laughter) Anybody? Any guess at all? Pardon? (Audience Member: Rajasthan.) Anil
Gupta: But what has it been used for? What has it been used for? (Murmuring) Pardon? You know, you're so right.
We must give him a hand, because this man knows how insensitive our government is. Look at this. This is the site
of the government of India. It invites tourists to see the shame of our country. I'm so sorry to say that. Is this a
beautiful picture or is it a terrible picture? It depends upon how you look at the life of the people. If this woman
has to carry water on her head for miles and miles and miles, you cannot be celebrating that. We should be doing
something about it. And let me tell you, with all the science and technology at our command, millions of women
still carry water on their heads. And we do not ask this question.

6:45 You must have taken tea in the morning. Think for a minute. The leaves of the tea, plucked from the bushes;
you know what the action is? The action is: The lady picks up a few leaves, puts them in the basket on the backside.
Just do it 10 times; you will realize the pain in this shoulder. And she does it a few thousand times every day. The
rice that you ate in the lunch, and you will eat today, is transplanted by women bending in a very awkward posture,
millions of them, every season, in the paddy season, when they transplant paddy with their feet in the water. And
feet in the water will develop fungus, infections, and that infection pains because then other insects bite that point.
And every year, 99.9 percent of the paddy is transplanted manually. No machines have been developed.

7:39 So the silence of scientists, of technologists, of public policy makers, of the change agent, drew our attention
that this is not on, this is not on; this is not the way society will work. This is not what our parliament would do.
You know, we have a program for employment: One hundred, 250 million people have to be given jobs for 100
days by this great country. Doing what? Breaking stones, digging earth. So we asked a question to the parliament:
Do poor have heads? Do poor have legs, mouth and hands, but no head?

8:11 So Honey Bee Network builds upon the resource in which poor people are rich. And what has happened? An
anonymous, faceless, nameless person gets in contact with the network, and then gets an identity. This is what
Honey Bee Network is about. And this network grew voluntarily, continues to be voluntary, and has tried to map
the minds of millions of people of our country and other parts of the world who are creative. They could be creative
in terms of education, they may be creative in terms of culture, they may be creative in terms of institutions; but a
lot of our work is in the field of technological creativity, the innovations, either in terms of contemporary
innovations, or in terms of traditional knowledge. And it all begins with curiosity. It all begins with curiosity.

8:56

This person, whom we met and you will see it on the website, www.sristi.org this tribal person, he had a
wish. And he said, "If my wish gets fulfilled" somebody was sick and he had to monitor "God, please cure
him. And if you cure him, I will get my wall painted." And this is what he got painted. Somebody was talking
yesterday about Maslowian hierarchy. There could be nothing more wrong than the Maslowian model of hierarchy
of needs because the poorest people in this country can get enlightenment. Kabir, Rahim, all the great Sufi saints,
they were all poor people, and they had a great reason. (Applause) Please do not ever think that only after meeting
your physiological needs and other needs can you be thinking about your spiritual needs or your enlightenment.
Any person anywhere is capable of rising to that highest point of attainment, only by the resolve that they have in
their mind that they must achieve something.

9:47 Look at this. We saw it in Shodh Yatra. Every six months we walk in different parts of the country. I've walked
about 4,000 kilometers in the last 12 years. So on the wayside we found these dung cakes, which are used as a fuel.
Now, this lady, on the wall of the dung cake heap, has made a painting. That's the only space she could express her
creativity. And she's so marvelous. Look at this lady, Ram Timari Devi, on a grain bin. In Champaran, we had a
Shodh Yatra and we were walking in the land where Gandhiji went to hear about the tragedy, pain of indigo
growers. Bhabi Mahato in Purulia and Bankura. Look at what she has done. The whole wall is her canvas. She's
sitting there with a broom. Is she an artisan or an artist? Obviously she's an artist; she's a creative person. If we can
create markets for these artists, we will not have to employ them for digging earth and breaking stones. They will
be paid for what they are good at, not what they're bad at. (Applause)

10:47 Look at what Rojadeen has done. In Motihari in Champaran, there are a lot of people who sell tea on the
shack and, obviously, there's a limited market for tea. Every morning you have tea, as well as coffee. So he thought,
why don't I convert a pressure cooker into a coffee machine? So this is a coffee machine. Just takes a few hundred
rupees. People bring their own cooker, he attaches a valve and a steam pipe, and now he gives you espresso coffee.
(Laughter) Now, this is a real, affordable coffee percolator that works on gas. (Applause) Look at what Sheikh
Jahangir has done. A lot of poor people do not have enough grains to get ground. So this fellow is bringing a flour-
grinding machine on a two-wheeler. If you have 500 grams, 1000, one kilogram, he will grind it for it for you; the
flourmill will not grind such a small quantity.

11:35 Please understand the problem of poor people. They have needs which have to be met efficiently in terms of
energy, in terms of cost, in terms of quality. They don't want second-standard, second-quality outputs. But to be
able to give them high-quality output you need to adapt technology to their needs. And that is what Sheikh Jahangir
did. But that's not enough, what he did. Look at what he did here. If you have clothes, and you don't have enough
time to wash them, he brought a washing machine to your doorstep, mounted on a two-wheeler. So here's a model
where a two-wheeler washing machine ... He is washing your clothes and drying them at your doorstep. (Applause)
You bring your water, you bring your soap, I wash the clothes for you. Charge 50 paisa, one rupee for you per lot,
and a new business model can emerge. Now, what we need is, we need people who will be able to scale them up.

12:27 Look at this. It looks like a beautiful photograph. But you know what it is? Can anybody guess what it is?
Somebody from India would know, of course. It's a tawa. It's a hot plate made of clay. Now, what is the beauty in
it? When you have a non-stick pan, it costs about, maybe, 250 rupees, five dollars, six dollars. This is less than a
dollar and this is non-stick; it is coated with one of these food-grade materials. And the best part is that, while you
use a costly non-stick pan, you eat the so-called Teflon or Teflon-like material because after some time the stuff
disappears. Where has it gone? It has gone in your stomach. It was not meant for that. (Laughter) You know? But
here in this clay hot plate, it will never go into your stomach. So it is better, it is safer; it is affordable, it is energy-
efficient. In other words, solutions by the poor people need not be cheaper, need not be, so-called, jugaad, need not
be some kind of makeshift arrangement.

13:32 They have to be better, they have to be more efficient, they have to be affordable. And that is what Mansukh
Bhai Prajapati has done. He has designed this plate with a handle. And now with one dollar, you can afford a better
alternative than the people market is offering you. This lady, she developed a herbal pesticide formulation. We
filed the patent for her, the National Innovation Foundation. And who knows? Somebody will license this
technology and develop marketable products, and she would get revenue. Now, let me mention one thing: I think
we need a polycentric model of development, where a large number of initiatives in different parts of the country,
in different parts of the world, would solve the needs of locality in a very efficient and adaptive manner. Higher
the local fit, greater is the chance of scaling up.

14:20 In the scaling up, there's an inherent inadequacy to match the needs of the local people, point by point, with
the supply that you're making. So why are people willing to adjust with that mismatch? Things can scale up, and
they have scaled up. For example, cell phones: We have 400 million cellphones in this country. Now, it is possible
that I use only two buttons on the cellphone, only three options on the cellphone. It has 300 options, I'm paying
for 300; I'm using only three but I'm willing to live with it, therefore it is scaling up. But if I had to get a match to
match, obviously, I would need a different design of a cellphone. So what we're saying is that scalability should not
become an enemy of sustainability. There must be a place in the world for solutions that are only relevant for a
locality, and yet, one can be able to fund them.

15:07 One of the greatest studies that we've been finding is that many times investors would ask this question
"What is a scalable model?" as if the need of a community, which is only located in a space and time and has
those needs only located in those places, has no legitimate right to get them for free because it's not part of a larger
scale. So either you sub-optimize your needs to a larger scale or else you remain out. Now, the eminent model, the
long-tail model tells you that small sales of a large number of books, for example, having only a few copies sold can
still be a viable model. And we must find a mechanism where people will pool in the portfolio, will invest in the
portfolio, where different innovations will go to a small number of people in their localities, and yet, the overall
platform of the model will become viable.

15:50 Look at what he is doing. Saidullah Sahib is an amazing man. At the age of 70, he is linking up something
very creative.

16:00 (Music)
16:06 Saidullah Sahib: I couldn't wait for the boat. I had to meet my love. My desperation made me an innovator.
Even love needs help from technology. Innovation is the light of my wife, Noor. New inventions are the passion of
my life. My technology.

16:56 (Applause)

17:02 AG: Saidulluh Sahib is in Motihari, again in Champaran. Wonderful human being, but he stills sells, at this
age, honey on a cycle to earn his livelihood, because we haven't been able to convince the water park people, the
lake people, in [unclear] operations. And we have not been able to convince the fire brigade people in Mumbai
where there was a flood a few years ago and people had to walk 20 kilometers, wading in the water that, look,
you should have this cycle in your fire brigade office because you can then go to those lanes where your buses will
not go, where your transport will not go. So we have not yet cracked the problem of making it available as a rescue
device, as a vending device during the floods in eastern India, when you have to deliver things to people in different
islands where they're marooned. But the idea has a merit. The idea has a merit.

17:50 What has Appachan done? Appachan, unfortunately, is no more, but he has left behind a message. A very
powerful message

18:00 Appachan: I watch the world wake up every day.

18:03 (Music)

18:18 It's not that a coconut fell on my head, and I came upon this idea. With no money to fund my studies, I scaled
new heights. Now, they call me the local Spiderman. My technology.

18:48 (Applause)

18:51 AG: Many of you might not realize and believe that we have sold this product internationally what I call
a G2G model, grassroots to global. And a professor in the University of Massachusetts, in the zoology department,
bought this climber because she wanted to study the insect diversity of the top of the tree canopy. And this device
makes it possible for her to take samples from a larger number of palms, rather than only a few, because otherwise
she had to make a big platform and then climb her [unclear] would climb on that. So, you know, we are advancing
the frontiers of science.

19:26 Remya Jose has developed ... you can go to the YouTube and find India Innovates and then you will find
these videos. Innovation by her when she was in class 10th: a washing machine-cum-exercising machine. Mr.
Kharai who is a physically challenged person, one and a half foot height, only. But he has modified a two-wheeler
so that he can get autonomy and freedom and flexibility. This innovation is from the slums of Rio. And this person,
Mr. Ubirajara. We were talking about, my friends in Brazil, how we scale up this model in China and Brazil. And
we have a very vibrant network in China, particularly, but also emerging in Brazil and other parts of the world.
This stand on the front wheel, you will not find on any cycle. India and China have the largest number of cycles.
But this innovation emerged in Brazil.

20:10 The point is, none of us should be parochial, none of us should be so nationalistic to believe that all good
ideas will come only from our country. No, we have to have the humility to learn from knowledge of economically
poor people, wherever they are. And look at this whole range of cycle-based innovations: cycle that's a sprayer,
cycle that generates energy from the shocks on the road. I can't change the condition of the road, but I can make
the cycle run faster. That is what Kanak Das has done. And in South Africa, we had taken our innovators, and many
of us had gone there share with the colleagues in South Africa as to how innovation can become a means of
liberation from the drudgery that people have. And this is a donkey cart which they modified. There's an axle here,
of 30, 40 kg, serving no purpose. Remove it, the cart needs one donkey less.

20:57 This is in China. This girl needed a breathing apparatus. These three people in the village sat down and
decided to think, "How do we elongate the life of this girl of our village?" They were not related to her, but they
tried to find out, "How can we use ... " They used a cycle, they put together a breathing apparatus. And this
breathing apparatus now saved the life, and she's very welcome.

21:18 There's a whole range of innovations that we have. A car, which runs on compressed air with six paisa per
kilometer. Assam, Kanak Gogoi. And you would not find this car in U.S. or Europe, but this is available in India.
Now, this lady, she used to do the winding of the yarn for Pochampally Saree. In one day, 18,000 times, she had to
do this winding to generate two sarees. This is what her son has done after seven years of struggle. She said, "Change
your profession." He said, "I can't. This is the only thing I know, but I'll invent a machine, which will solve your
problem." And this is what he did, a sewing machine in Uttar Pradesh. So, this is what SRISTI is saying: "Give me
a place to stand, and I will move the world."

21:58 I will just tell you that we are also doing a competition among children for creativity, a whole range of things.
We have sold things all over the world, from Ethiopia to Turkey to U.S. to wherever. Products have gone to the
market, a few. These are the people whose knowledge made this Herbavate cream for eczema possible. And here,
a company which licensed this herbal pesticide put a photograph of the innovator on the packing so that every
time a user uses it, it asks the user, "You can also be an innovator. If you have an idea, send it back to us." So,
creativity counts, knowledge matters, innovations transform, incentives inspire. And incentives: not just material,
but also non-material incentives.

22:35 Thank you.

22:37 (Applause)

3. Anupam Mishra
The ancient ingenuity of water
harvesting

0:11 For emotions, we should not move quickly to the

desert. So, first, a small housekeeping announcement: please
switch off your proper English check programs installed in
your brain. (Applause)

0:35 So, welcome to the Golden Desert, Indian desert. It receives the least rainfall in the country, lowest rainfall. If
you are well-versed with inches, nine inches, centimetres, 16 [centimetres]. The groundwater is 300 feet deep, 100
meters. And in most parts it is saline, not fit for drinking. So, you can't install hand pumps or dig wells, though
there is no electricity in most of the villages. But suppose you use the green technology, solar pumps they are of
no use in this area.
1:15 So, welcome to the Golden Desert. Clouds seldom visit this area. But we find 40 different names of clouds in
this dialect used here. There are a number of techniques to harvest rain. This is a new work, it's a new program. But
for the desert society this is no program; this is their life. And they harvest rain in many ways. So, this is the first
device they use in harvesting rain. It's called kunds; somewhere it is called [unclear].

1:54 And you can notice they have created a kind of false catchment. The desert is there, sand dunes, some small
field. And this is all big raised platform. You can notice the small holes the water will fall on this catchment, and
there is a slope. Sometimes our engineers and architects do not care about slopes in bathrooms, but here they will
care properly. And the water will go where it should go. And then it is 40 feet deep. The waterproofing is done
perfectly, better than our city contractors, because not a single drop should go waste in this.

2:43 They collect 100 thousand litres in one season. And this is pure drinking water. Below the surface there is hard
saline water. But now you can have this for year round. It's two houses. We often use a term called bylaws. Because
we are used to get written things. But here it is unwritten by law. And people made their house, and the water
storage tanks. These raised up platforms just like this stage. In fact they go 15 feet deep, and collect rain water from
roof, there is a small pipe, and from their courtyard. It can also harvest something like 25,000 in a good monsoon.

3:39 Another big one, this is of course out of the hardcore desert area. This is near Jaipur. This is called the Jaigarh
Fort. And it can collect six million gallons of rainwater in one season. The age is 400 years. So, since 400 years it
has been giving you almost six million gallons of water per season. You can calculate the price of that water. It
draws water from 15 kilometers of canals.

4:17 You can see a modern road, hardly 50 years old. It can break sometimes. But this 400 year old canal, which
draws water, it is maintained for so many generations. Of course if you want to go inside, the two doors are
locked. But they can be opened for TED people. (Laughter) And we request them. You can see person coming up
with two canisters of water. And the water level these are not empty canisters water level is right up to this. It
can envy many municipalities, the color, the taste, the purity of this water.And this is what they call Zero B type
of water, because it comes from the clouds, pure distilled water.

5:09 We stop for a quick commercial break, and then we come back to the traditional systems. The government
thought that this is a very backward area and we should bring a multi-million dollar project to bring water from
the Himalayas. That's why I said that this is a commercial break. (Laughter) But we will come back, once again, to
the traditional thing. So, water from 300, 400 kilometers away, soon it become like this. In many portions, water
hyacinth covered these big canals like anything.

5:47 Of course there are some areas where water is reaching, I'm not saying that it is not reaching at all. But the
tail end, the Jaisalmer area, you will notice in Bikaner things like this: where the water hyacinth couldn't grow, the
sand is flowing in these canals. The bonus is that you can find wildlife around it.(Laughter)

6:13 We had full-page advertisements, some 30 years, 25 years ago when this canal came. They said that throw
away your traditional systems, these new cement tanks will supply you piped water. It's a dream. And it became a
dream also. Because soon the water was not able to reach these areas. And people started renovating their own
structures.
6:44 These are all traditional water structures, which we won't be able to explain in such a short time. But you can
see that no woman is standing on those. (Laughter) And they are plaiting hair. (Applause) Jaisalmer. This is heart
of desert. This town was established 800 years ago. I'm not sure by that time Bombay was there, or Delhi was
there, or Chennai was there, or Bangalore was there.

7:17 So, this was the terminal point for silk route. Well connected, 800 years ago, through Europe. None of us were
able to go to Europe, but Jaisalmer was well connected to it. And this is the 16 centimetre area. Such a limited
rainfall, and highest colourful life flourished in these areas. You won't find water in this slide. But it is
invisible. Somewhere a stream or a rivulet is running through here. Or, if you want to paint, you can paint it blue
throughout because every roof which you see in this picture collects rainwater drops and deposit in the rooms.

8:12 But apart from this system, they designed 52 beautiful water bodies around this town. And what we call private
public partnership you can add estate also. So, estate, public and private entrepreneurs work together to build this
beautiful water body. And it's a kind of water body for all seasons. You will admire it. Just behold the beauty
throughout the year. Whether water level goes up or down, the beauty is there throughout.

8:49 Another water body, dried up, of course, during the summer period, but you can see how the traditional
society combines engineering with aesthetics, with the heart. These statues, marvellous statues, gives you an idea
of water table. When this rain comes and the water starts filling this tank, it will submerge these beautiful statues in
what we call in English today "mass communication." This was for mass communication. Everybody in the town
will know that this elephant has drowned, so water will be there for seven months or nine months, or 12
months. And then they will come and worship this pond, pay respect, their gratitude.

9:39 Another small water body, called the [unclear]. It is difficult to translate in English, especially in my
English. But the nearest would be "glory," a reputation. The reputation in desert of this small water body is that it
never dries up. In severe drought periods nobody has seen this water body getting dried up. And perhaps they knew
the future also. It was designed some 150 years ago. But perhaps they knew that on sixth, November, 2009, there
will be a TED green and blue session, so they painted it like this. (Laughter)(Applause)

10:29 Dry water body. Children are standing on a very difficult device to explain. This is called kuin. We have, in
English, surface water and ground water. But this is not ground water. You can draw ground water from any
well. But this is no ordinary well. It squeeze the moisture hidden in the sand. And they have dubbed this water as
the third one called [unclear]. And there is a gypsum belt running below it. And it was deposited by the great
mother Earth, some three million years ago. And where we have this gypsum strip they can harvest this water.

11:14 This is the same dry water body. Now, you don't find any kuin they are all submerged. But when the water
goes down they will be able to draw water from those structures throughout the year. This year they have received
only six centimetres. Six centimetre of rainfall, and they can telephone you that if you find any water problem in
your city, Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Mysore, please come to our area of six centimetres, we can give you
water. (Laughter)

11:46 How do they maintain them? There are three things: concept, planning, making the actual thing, and also
maintaining them. It is a structure for maintain, for centuries, by generations, without any department, without
any funding, So the secret is shraddha, respect. Your own thing, not personal property, my property, every time.
12:15 So, these stone pillars will remind you that you are entering into a water body area. Don't spit, don't do
anything wrong, so that the clean water can be collected. Another pillar, stone pillar on your right side. If you
climb these three, six steps you will find something very nice. This was done in 11th century. And you have to go
further down. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so we can say a thousand words right now, an
another thousand words. If the water table goes down, you will find new stairs. If it comes up, some of them will
be submerged. So, throughout the year this beautiful system will give you some pleasure. Three sides, such steps,
on the fourth side there is a four-story building where you can organize such TED conferences anytime. (Applause)

13:19 Excuse me, who built these structures? They are in front of you. The best civil engineers we had, the best
planners, the best architects. We can say that because of them, because of their forefathers, India could get the first
engineering college in 1847. There were no English medium schools at that time, even no Hindi schools, [unclear]
schools. But such people, compelled to the East India Company, which came here for business, a very dirty kind of
business ... (Laughter) but not to create the engineering colleges. But because of them, first engineering college was
created in a small village, not in the town.

14:06 The last point, we all know in our primary schools that that camel is a ship of desert. So, you can find through
your Jeep, a camel, and a cart. This tire comes from the airplane. So, look at the beauty from the desert society who
can harvest rainwater, and also create something through a tire from a jet plane, and used in a camel cart.

14:38 Last picture, it's a tattoo, 2,000-years-old tattoo. They were using it on their body. Tattoo was, at one time, a
kind of a blacklisted or con thing, but now it is in thing. (Laughter) (Applause) You can copy this tattoo. I have
some posters of this. (Laughter) The centre of life is water. These are the beautiful waves. These are the beautiful
stairs which we just saw in one of the slides. These are the trees. And these are the flowers which add fragrance to
our lives. So, this is the message of desert. Thank you very much.(Applause)

15:56 Chris Anderson: So, first of all, I wish I had your eloquence, truly, in any language. (Applause) These artefacts
and designs are inspiring. Do you believe that they can be used elsewhere, that the world can learn from this? Or
is this just right for this place?

16:20 Anupam Mishra: No, the basic idea is to utilize water that falls on our area. So, the ponds, the open bodies,
are everywhere, right from Sri Lanka to Kashmir, and in other parts also. And these [unclear], which stored
water, there are two type of things. One recharge, and one stores. So, it depends on the terrain. But kuin, which
uses the gypsum belt, for that you have to go back to your calendar, three million years ago. If it is there it can be
done right now. Otherwise, it can't be done. (Laughter) (Applause)

17:01CA: Thank you so much. (Applause)

4. Sugata Mitra: Build a School in

the Cloud
0:12 What is going to be the future of learning?
0:17 I do have a plan, but in order for me to tell you what that plan is, I need to tell you a little story, which kind
of sets the stage.

0:28 I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? And you can look
far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is, it's quite easy to figure out where it
came from. It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this
planet. ["The British Empire"] Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers,
without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships. But the Victorians actually
did it. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It's still with us today. It's
called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of
people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people
who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical to each other.
They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be
able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must
be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly
functional. The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a system that was so robust that it's still with us
today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. The empire is gone, so what are
we doing with that design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we ever are
going to do anything else with it?

2:55 ["Schools as we know them are obsolete"]

2:56 So that's a pretty strong comment there. I said schools as we know them now, they're obsolete. I'm not saying
they're broken. It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully
constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated. What are the kind of jobs that we have today?
Well, the clerks are the computers. They're there in thousands in every office. And you have people who guide
those computers to do their clerical jobs. Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully by hand. They
don't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads. They do need to be able to read. In fact, they need to be
able to read discerningly.

3:42 Well, that's today, but we don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like. We know that
people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want. How is present-day
schooling going to prepare them for that world?

4:00 Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. I used to teach people how to write computer
programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. And I used to
think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs? Or should they not? At the
same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me, "You know, my
son, I think he's gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter oh, surely she is
extra-intelligent." And so on. So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these
extraordinarily gifted children? (Laughter) What did the poor do wrong? I made a hole in the boundary wall of the
slum next to my office, and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children
who never would have one, didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was.

5:05 The children came running in. It was three feet off the ground, and they said, "What is this?"

5:08 And I said, "Yeah, it's, I don't know." (Laughter)

5:13 They said, "Why have you put it there?"

5:15 I said, "Just like that."

5:17 And they said, "Can we touch it?" I said, "If you wish to."

5:20 And I went away. About eight hours later, we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse.
So I said, "Well that's impossible, because How is it possible? They don't know anything."

5:33 My colleagues said, "No, it's a simple solution. One of your students must have been passing by, showed them
how to use the mouse."

5:41 So I said, "Yeah, that's possible."

5:42 So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of
a passing software development engineer was very little. (Laughter) I repeated the experiment there. There was no
place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games
on it.

6:04 When they saw me, they said, "We want a faster processor and a better mouse."

6:08 (Laughter)

6:12 So I said, "How on Earth do you know all this?"

6:15 And they said something very interesting to me. In an irritated voice, they said, "You've given us a
machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it." (Laughter) That's the
first time, as a teacher, that I had heard the word "teach ourselves" said so casually.

6:35 Here's a short glimpse from those years. That's the first day at the Hole in the Wall. On your right is
an eight-year-old. To his left is his student. She's six. And he's teaching her how to browse. Then onto other parts
of the country, I repeated this over and over again, getting exactly the same results that we were. ["Hole in the wall
film - 1999"] An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do. And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it
is, and said, "There's a processor inside."

7:25 So I started publishing. I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything, and I said, in
nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an
office secretary in the West. I'd seen it happen over and over and over again.

7:44 But I was curious to know, what else would they do if they could do this much? I started experimenting
with other subjects, among them, for example, pronunciation. There's one community of children in southern India
whose English pronunciation is really bad, and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their
jobs. I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer, and I said, "Keep talking into it until it types what you
say." (Laughter) They did that, and watch a little bit of this.

8:20 Computer: Nice to meet you.Child: Nice to meet you.

 8:26 Sugata Mitra: The reason I ended with the face of this young lady over there is because I suspect many
of you know her. She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad and may have tortured you about your credit card
bills in a very clear English accent.

8:45 So then people said, well, how far will it go? Where does it stop? I decided I would destroy my own
argument by creating an absurd proposition. I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis. Tamil is a south Indian
language, and I said, can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village learn the biotechnology of DNA
replication in English from a streetside computer? And I said, I'll measure them. They'll get a zero. I'll spend a
couple of months, I'll leave it for a couple of months, I'll go back, they'll get another zero. I'll go back to the lab and
say, we need teachers. I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India. I put in Hole in the Wall
computers there, downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication, most of which I didn't
understand.

9:36 The children came rushing, said, "What's all this?"

9:39 So I said, "It's very topical, very important. But it's all in English."

9:44 So they said, "How can we understand such big English words and diagrams and chemistry?"

9:50 So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method, so I applied that. I said, "I haven't the foggiest
idea." (Laughter) "And anyway, I am going away." (Laughter)

10:06 So I left them for a couple of months. They'd got a zero. I gave them a test. I came back after two
months and the children trooped in and said, "We've understood nothing."

10:17 So I said, "Well, what did I expect?" So I said, "Okay, but how long did it take you before you decided
that you can't understand anything?"

10:26 So they said, "We haven't given up. We look at it every single day."

10:30 So I said, "What? You don't understand these screens and you keep staring at it for two months? What
for?"

10:35 So a little girl who you see just now, she raised her hand, and she says to me in broken Tamil and
English, she said, "Well, apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease, we
haven't understood anything else."

10:48 (Laughter) (Applause)

10:54 So I tested them. I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent in two months in the tropical
heat with a computer under the tree in a language they didn't know doing something that's a decade ahead of their
time. Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm. Thirty percent is a fail. How do I get them to pass? I have to
get them 20 more marks. I couldn't find a teacher. What I did find was a friend that they had, a 22-year-old girl
who was an accountant and she played with them all the time.

11:31 So I asked this girl, "Can you help them?"

 11:33 So she says, "Absolutely not. I didn't have science in school. I have no idea what they're doing under
that tree all day long. I can't help you."

11:43 I said, "I'll tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother."

11:48

So she says, "What's that?"

11:49 I said, "Stand behind them. Whenever they do anything, you just say, 'Well, wow, I mean, how did
you do that? What's the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that.' You know what
grannies do."

12:01 So she did that for two more months. The scores jumped to 50 percent. Kallikuppam had caught up
with my control school in New Delhi, a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher. When I saw that
graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field.

12:19 Here's Kallikuppam.

12:21 (Children speaking) Neurons ... communication.

12:29 I got the camera angle wrong. That one is just amateur stuff, but what she was saying, as you could
make out, was about neurons, with her hands were like that, and she was saying neurons communicate. At 12.

12:44 So what are jobs going to be like? Well, we know what they're like today. What's learning going to
be like? We know what it's like today, children pouring over with their mobile phones on the one hand and then
reluctantly going to school to pick up their books with their other hand.

12:59 What will it be tomorrow? Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all? Could it be that, at
the point in time when you need to know something, you can find out in two minutes? Could it be a devastating
question, a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte could it be that we are heading towards or
maybe in a future where knowing is obsolete? But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens. Knowing, that's what
distinguishes us from the apes. But look at it this way. It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up
and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete. What an achievement that is. But we
have to integrate that into our own future.

13:53 Encouragement seems to be the key. If you look at Kuppam, if you look at all of the experiments that
I did, it was simply saying, "Wow," saluting learning.

14:07 There is evidence from neuroscience. The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our
brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which
learn, it shuts all of that down. Punishment and examinations are seen as threats. We take our children, we make
them shut their brains down, and then we say, "Perform." Why did they create a system like that? Because it was
needed. There was an age in the Age of Empires when you needed those people who can survive under threat.
When you're standing in a trench all alone, if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed. If you didn't,
you failed. But the Age of Empires is gone. What happens to creativity in our age? We need to shift that balance
back from threat to pleasure.
 15:07 I came back to England looking for British grandmothers. I put out notices in papers saying, if you
are a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera, can you give me one hour of your time per
week for free? I got 200 in the first two weeks. I know more British grandmothers than anyone in the universe.
(Laughter) They're called the Granny Cloud. The Granny Cloud sits on the Internet. If there's a child in trouble,
we beam a Gran. She goes on over Skype and she sorts things out. I've seen them do it from a village called Diggles
in northwestern England, deep inside a village in Tamil Nadu, India, 6,000 miles away. She does it with only one
age-old gesture. "Shhh." Okay?

16:01 Watch this.

16:02 Grandmother: You can't catch me. You say it. You can't catch me.

16:10 Children: You can't catch me.

16:13 Grandmother: I'm the Gingerbread Man.Children: I'm the Gingerbread Man.

16:19 Grandmother: Well done! Very good.

16:23 SM: So what's happening here? I think what we need to look at is we need to look at learning as the
product of educational self-organization. If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning
emerges. It's not about making learning happen. It's about letting it happen. The teacher sets the process in motion
and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens. I think that's what all this is pointing at.

16:56 But how will we know? How will we come to know? Well, I intend to build these Self-Organized
Learning Environments. They are basically broadband, collaboration and encouragement put together. I've tried
this in many, many schools.

17:12 It's been tried all over the world, and teachers sort of stand back and say, "It just happens by itself?"

17:18 And I said, "Yeah, it happens by itself.""How did you know that?"

17:21 I said, "You won't believe the children who told me and where they're from."

17:27 Here's a SOLE in action.

17:30 (Children talking)

17:36 This one is in England. He maintains law and order, because remember, there's no teacher around.

17:57 Girl: The total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons SM: Australia Girl:
giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge. The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons
in the ion minus the number of electrons.

18:14 SM: A decade ahead of her time.

18:17 So SOLEs, I think we need a curriculum of big questions. You already heard about that. You know
what that means. There was a time when Stone Age men and women used to sit and look up at the sky and say,
"What are those twinkling lights?" They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions.
We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle. But that's not sexy enough. The way you would put it to a nine-
year-old is to say, "If a meteorite was coming to hit the Earth, how would you figure out if it was going to or not?"
And if he says, "Well, what? how?" you say, "There's a magic word. It's called the tangent of an angle," and leave
him alone. He'll figure it out.

19:02 So here are a couple of images from SOLEs. I've tried incredible, incredible questions "When did
the world begin? How will it end?" to nine-year-olds. This one is about what happens to the air we breathe. This
is done by children without the help of any teacher. The teacher only raises the question, and then stands back and
admires the answer.

19:32 So what's my wish? My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don't want to be spare parts
for a great human computer, do we? So we need to design a future for learning. And I've got to hang on, I've got
to get this wording exactly right, because, you know, it's very important. My wish is to help design a future of
learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together. Help
me build this school. It will be called the School in the Cloud. It will be a school where children go on these
intellectual adventures driven by the big questions which their mediators put in. The way I want to do this is to
build a facility where I can study this. It's a facility which is practically unmanned. There's only one granny who
manages health and safety. The rest of it's from the cloud. The lights are turned on and off by the cloud, etc., etc.,
everything's done from the cloud.

20:38 But I want you for another purpose. You can do Self-Organized Learning Environments at home, in
the school, outside of school, in clubs. It's very easy to do. There's a great document produced by TED which tells
you how to do it. If you would please, please do it across all five continents and send me the data, then I'll put it all
together, move it into the School of Clouds, and create the future of learning. That's my wish.

21:10 And just one last thing. I'll take you to the top of the Himalayas. At 12,000 feet, where the air is thin,
I once built two Hole in the Wall computers, and the children flocked there. And there was this little girl who was
following me around.

21:24 And I said to her, "You know, I want to give a computer to everybody, every child. I don't know,
what should I do?" And I was trying to take a picture of her quietly.

21:35 She suddenly raised her hand like this, and said to me, "Get on with it."

21:41 (Laughter) (Applause)

21:53 I think it was good advice. I'll follow her advice. I'll stop talking. Thank you. Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very
much. Wow. (Applause)

5. Bunker Roy: Learning from a

barefoot movement
0:11 I'd like to take you to another world. And I'd like to
share a 45 year-old love story with the poor, living on less than
one dollar a day. I went to a very elitist, snobbish, expensive
education in India, and that almost destroyed me. I was all set to be a diplomat, teacher, doctor all laid out. Then,
I don't look it, but I was the Indian national squash champion for three years. (Laughter) The whole world was laid
out for me. Everything was at my feet. I could do nothing wrong. And then I thought out of curiosity I'd like to go
and live and work and just see what a village is like.

1:12 So in 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people
dying of hunger, for the first time. It changed my life. I came back home, told my mother, "I'd like to live and work
in a village." Mother went into a coma. (Laughter) "What is this? The whole world is laid out for you, the best jobs
are laid out for you, and you want to go and work in a village? I mean, is there something wrong with you?" I said,
"No, I've got the best education. It made me think. And I wanted to give something back in my own way." "What
do you want to do in a village? No job, no money, no security, no prospect." I said, "I want to live and dig wells for
five years." "Dig wells for five years? You went to the most expensive school and college in India, and you want to
dig wells for five years?" She didn't speak to me for a very long time, because she thought I'd let my family down.

2:24 But then, I was exposed to the most extraordinary knowledge and skills that very poor people have, which are
never brought into the mainstream which is never identified, respected, applied on a large scale. And I thought
I'd start a Barefoot College college only for the poor. What the poor thought was important would be reflected
in the college. I went to this village for the first time. Elders came to me and said, "Are you running from the
police?" I said, "No." (Laughter) "You failed in your exam?" I said, "No." "You didn't get a government job?" I said,
"No." "What are you doing here? Why are you here? The education system in India makes you look at Paris and
New Delhi and Zurich; what are you doing in this village? Is there something wrong with you you're not telling
us?" I said, "No, I want to actually start a college only for the poor. What the poor thought was important would be
reflected in the college."

3:29 So the elders gave me some very sound and profound advice. They said, "Please, don't bring anyone with a
degree and qualification into your college." So it's the only college in India where, if you should have a Ph.D. or a
Master's, you are disqualified to come. You have to be a cop-out or a wash-out or a dropout to come to our
college. You have to work with your hands. You have to have a dignity of labor. You have to show that you have
a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community. So we started the Barefoot
College, and we redefined professionalism.

4:11 Who is a professional? A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and
belief. A water diviner is a professional. A traditional midwife is a professional. A traditional bone setter is a
professional. These are professionals all over the world. You find them in any inaccessible village around the
world. And we thought that these people should come into the mainstream and show that the knowledge and skills
that they have is universal. It needs to be used, needs to be applied, and needs to be shown to the world
outside that these knowledge and skills are relevant even today.

4:54 So the college works following the lifestyle and work style of Mahatma Gandhi. You eat on the floor, you sleep
on the floor, you work on the floor. There are no contracts, no written contracts. You can stay with me for 20 years,
go tomorrow. And no one can get more than $100 a month. You come for the money, you don't come to Barefoot
College. You come for the work and the challenge, you'll come to the Barefoot College. That is where we want you
to try crazy ideas. Whatever idea you have, come and try it. It doesn't matter if you fail. Battered, bruised, you start
again. It's the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher. And it's the only college
where we don't give a certificate. You are certified by the community you serve. You don't need a paper to hang
on the wall to show that you are an engineer.

5:48 So when I said that, they said, "Well show us what is possible. What are you doing? This is all mumbo-jumbo
if you can't show it on the ground." So we built the first Barefoot College in 1986. It was built by 12 Barefoot
architects who can't read and write, built on $1.50 a sq. ft. 150 people lived there, worked there. They got the Aga
Khan Award for Architecture in 2002. But then they suspected, they thought there was an architect behind it. I
said, "Yes, they made the blueprints, but the Barefoot architects actually constructed the college." We are the only
ones who actually returned the award for $50,000, because they didn't believe us, and we thought that they were
actually casting aspersions on the Barefoot architects of Tilonia.

6:39 I asked a forester high-powered, paper-qualified expert I said, "What can you build in this place?" He
had one look at the soil and said, "Forget it. No way. Not even worth it. No water, rocky soil." I was in a bit of a
spot. And I said, "Okay, I'll go to the old man in village and say, 'What should I grow in this spot?'" He looked
quietly at me and said, "You build this, you build this, you put this, and it'll work." This is what it looks like today.

7:08 Went to the roof, and all the women said, "Clear out. The men should clear out because we don't want to share
this technology with the men. This is waterproofing the roof." (Laughter) It is a bit of jaggery, a bit of urine and a
bit of other things I don't know. But it actually doesn't leak. Since 1986, it hasn't leaked. This technology, the
women will not share with the men.

7:32(Laughter)

7:35 It's the only college which is fully solar-electrified. All the power comes from the sun. 45 kilowatts of panels
on the roof. And everything works off the sun for the next 25 years. So long as the sun shines, we'll have no problem
with power. But the beauty is that is was installed by a priest, a Hindu priest, who's only done eight years of primary
schooling never been to school, never been to college. He knows more about solar than anyone I know
anywhere in the world guaranteed.

8:13 Food, if you come to the Barefoot College, is solar cooked. But the people who fabricated that solar cooker are
women, illiterate women, who actually fabricate the most sophisticated solar cooker. It's a parabolic Scheffler solar
cooker. Unfortunately, they're almost half German, they're so precise. (Laughter)You'll never find Indian women
so precise. Absolutely to the last inch, they can make that cooker. And we have 60 meals twice a day of solar
cooking.

8:56 We have a dentist she's a grandmother, illiterate, who's a dentist. She actually looks after the teeth of 7,000
children. Barefoot technology: this was 1986 no engineer, no architect thought of it but we are collecting
rainwater from the roofs. Very little water is wasted. All the roofs are connected underground to a 400,000 litre
tank, and no water is wasted. If we have four years of drought, we still have water on the campus, because we
collect rainwater.

9:28 60 percent of children don't go to school, because they have to look after animals sheep, goats domestic
chores. So we thought of starting a school at night for the children. Because the night schools of Tilonia, over
75,000 children have gone through these night schools. Because it's for the convenience of the child; it's not for
the convenience of the teacher. And what do we teach in these schools? Democracy, citizenship, how you should
measure your land, what you should do if you're arrested, what you should do if your animal is sick. This is what
we teach in the night schools. But all the schools are solar-lit.

10:09 Every five years we have an election. Between six to 14 year-old children participate in a democratic
process, and they elect a prime minister. The prime minister is 12 years old. She looks after 20 goats in the
morning, but she's prime minister in the evening. She has a cabinet, a minister of education, a minister for energy,
a minister for health. And they actually monitor and supervise 150 schools for 7,000 children. She got the World's
Children's Prize five years ago, and she went to Sweden. First time ever going out of her village. Never seen
Sweden. Wasn't dazzled at all by what was happening. And the Queen of Sweden, who's there, turned to me and
said, "Can you ask this child where she got her confidence from? She's only 12 years old, and she's not dazzled by
anything." And the girl, who's on her left, turned to me and looked at the queen straight in the eye and said, "Please
tell her I'm the prime minister."

11:15(Laughter)

11:17(Applause)

11:25 Where the percentage of illiteracy is very high, we use puppetry. Puppets is the way we communicate. You
have Jokhim Chacha who is 300 years old. He is my psychoanalyst. He is my teacher. He's my doctor. He's my
lawyer. He's my donor. He actually raises money, solves my disputes. He solves my problems in the village. If
there's tension in the village, if attendance at the schools goes down and there's a friction between the teacher and
the parent, the puppet calls the teacher and the parent in front of the whole village and says, "Shake hands. The
attendance must not drop." These puppets are made out of recycled World Bank reports.

12:22(Laughter)

12:24(Applause)

12:31 So this decentralized, demystified approach of solar-electrifying villages, we've covered all over India from
Ladakh up to Bhutan all solar-electrified villages by people who have been trained. And we went to Ladakh, and
we asked this woman this, at minus 40, you have to come out of the roof, because there's no place, it was all
snowed up on both sides and we asked this woman, "What was the benefit you had from solar electricity?" And
she thought for a minute and said, "It's the first time I can see my husband's face in winter."

13:12(Laughter)

13:15 Went to Afghanistan. One lesson we learned in India was men are untrainable. (Laughter) Men are
restless, men are ambitious, men are compulsively mobile, and they all want a certificate. (Laughter) All across the
globe, you have this tendency of men wanting a certificate. Why? Because they want to leave the village and go to
a city, looking for a job. So we came up with a great solution: train grandmothers. What's the best way of
communicating in the world today? Television? No. Telegraph? No. Telephone? No. Tell a woman.

14:11(Laughter)

14:14(Applause)
14:18 So we went to Afghanistan for the first time, and we picked three women and said, "We want to take them
to India." They said, "Impossible. They don't even go out of their rooms, and you want to take them to India." I
said, "I'll make a concession. I'll take the husbands along as well." So I took the husbands along. Of course, the
women were much more intelligent than the men. In six months, how do we train these women? Sign
language. You don't choose the written word. You don't choose the spoken word. You use sign language. And in
six months they can become solar engineers. They go back and solar-electrify their own village.

14:59 This woman went back and solar-electrified the first village, set up a workshop the first village ever to be
solar-electrified in Afghanistan [was] by the three women. This woman is an extraordinary grandmother. 55 years
old, and she's solar-electrified 200 houses for me in Afghanistan. And they haven't collapsed. She actually went
and spoke to an engineering department in Afghanistan and told the head of the department the difference between
AC and DC. He didn't know. Those three women have trained 27 more women and solar-electrified 100 villages
in Afghanistan.

15:39 We went to Africa, and we did the same thing. All these women sitting at one table from eight, nine
countries, all chatting to each other, not understanding a word, because they're all speaking a different
language. But their body language is great. They're speaking to each other and actually becoming solar engineers. I
went to Sierra Leone, and there was this minister driving down in the dead of night comes across this
village. Comes back, goes into the village, says, "Well what's the story?" They said, "These two grandmothers ...
" "Grandmothers?" The minister couldn't believe what was happening. "Where did they go?" "Went to India and
back." Went straight to the president. He said, "Do you know there's a solar-electrified village in Sierra Leone?" He
said, "No." Half the cabinet went to see the grandmothers the next day. "What's the story." So he summoned me
and said, "Can you train me 150 grandmothers?" I said, "I can't, Mr. President. But they will. The grandmothers
will." So he built me the first Barefoot training center in Sierra Leone. And 150 grandmothers have been trained in
Sierra Leone.

16:41 Gambia: we went to select a grandmother in Gambia. Went to this village. I knew which woman I would
like to take. The community got together and said, "Take these two women." I said, "No, I want to take this
woman." They said, "Why? She doesn't know the language. You don't know her." I said, "I like the body language.
I like the way she speaks." "Difficult husband; not possible." Called the husband, the husband came, swaggering,
politician, mobile in his hand. "Not possible." "Why not?" "The woman, look how beautiful she is." I said, "Yeah,
she is very beautiful." "What happens if she runs off with an Indian man?" That was his biggest fear. I said, "She'll
be happy. She'll ring you up on the mobile." She went like a grandmother and came back like a tiger. She walked
out of the plane and spoke to the whole press as if she was a veteran. She handled the national press, and she was a
star. And when I went back six months later, I said, "Where's your husband?" "Oh, somewhere. It doesn't
matter." (Laughter) Success story.

17:43(Laughter)

17:45(Applause)

17:48 I'll just wind up by saying that I think you don't have to look for solutions outside. Look for solutions
within. And listen to people. They have the solutions in front of you. They're all over the world. Don't even
worry. Don't listen to the World Bank, listen to the people on the ground. They have all the solutions in the world.
18:13I'll end with a quotation by Mahatma Gandhi. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight
you, and then you win."

18:24Thank you.

18:26(Applause)

6. Steven Johnson: Where

good ideas come from

0:11 Just a few minutes ago, I took this picture about

10 blocks from here. This is the Grand Cafe here in
Oxford. I took this picture because this turns out to
be the first coffeehouse to open in England in
1650.That's its great claim to fame, and I wanted to
show it to you, not because I want to give you the
kind of Starbucks tour of historic England, but
rather because the English coffeehouse was
crucial to the development and spread of one of the
great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment.

0:47 And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment, in part, because of what people
were drinking there. Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank
both elite and mass folks drank day-in and day-out, from dawn until dusk was alcohol. Alcohol was the daytime
beverage of choice. You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin
particularly around 1650 and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. That was the healthy
choice right because the water wasn't safe to drink. And so, effectively until the rise of the coffeehouse, you
had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day. And you can imagine what that would be like, right,
in your own life and I know this is true of some of you if you were drinking all day, and then you switched
from a depressant to a stimulant in your life, you would have better ideas. You would be sharper and more
alert. And so it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and
coffee.

1:48 But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space. It was a space where
people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. It was a space, as
Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. This was their conjugal bed, in a sense ideas would get
together there. And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their
story.

2:12 I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years, because I've been kind of
on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. What are the environments that lead to
unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? What's the kind of environmental what is the space
of creativity? And what I've done is I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse; I've looked at media
environments, like the world wide web, that have been extraordinarily innovative; I've gone back to the history of
the first cities; I've even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rainforests, that involve unusual levels
of biological innovation; and what I've been looking for is shared patterns, kind of signature behavior that shows
up again and again in all of these environments. Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can
take and kind of apply to our own lives, or our own organizations, or our own environments to make them more
creative and innovative? And I think I've found a few.

3:12 But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do
away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts
of idea-creation. We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. We have the kind of the
flash of insight, the stroke of insight, we have epiphanies, we have "eureka!" moments, we have the lightbulb
moments, right? All of these concepts, as kind of rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which
is that an idea is a single thing, it's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment.

3:55 But in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with is this idea that an idea is a
network on the most elemental level. I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. An idea a new idea
is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It's a new configuration that has
never formed before. And the question is: how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks
are going to be more likely to form? And it turns out that, in fact, the kind of network patterns of the outside
world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain.

4:28 So the metaphor I'd like the use I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent a lot more recent
than the 1650s. A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero, who has a company called ... an organization called
Design That Matters. They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of, you know, the terrible problems we
have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that
we know, by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically
it's very simple we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments. So, the technology is there. These
are standard in all the industrialized worlds. The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to
a mid-sized village in Africa, it will work great for a year or two years, and then something will go wrong and it
will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don't have a whole system of spare parts, and you don't
have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment. And so you end up having this problem
where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries, and then it ends
up being useless.

5:40 So what Prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see: what are the abundant resources in
these developing world contexts? And what they noticed was they don't have a lot of DVRs, they don't have a lot
of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. There's a Toyota
Forerunner on the street in all these places. They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. So they started
to think, "Could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts?" And this is what they
ended up coming with. It's called a "neonatal device." From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you'd find
in a modern, Western hospital. In the inside, it's all car parts. It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got
door chimes for alarm it runs off a car battery. And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the
ability to fix a headlight, and you can repair this thing. Now, that's a great idea, but what I'd like to say is that, in
fact, this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen. We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are
like that $40,000, brand new incubator, state-of-the-art technology, but more often than not, they're cobbled
together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby.
6:46 We take ideas from other people, from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee
shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That's really where innovation
happens. And that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really
looks like, right. I mean, this is one vision of it. Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at
Cambridge. This is a statue from Oxford. You know, you're sitting there thinking a deep thought, and the apple
falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity. In fact, the spaces that have historically led to
innovation tend to look like this, right. This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a
tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then. This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas
were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions people
from different backgrounds. So, if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build
spaces that strangely enough look a little bit more like this. This is what your office should look like, is part
of my message here.

7:43 And one of the problems with this is that people are actually when you research this field people are
notoriously unreliable, when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their
history of their best ideas. And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go
around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. He went to a bunch
of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job. So when
they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler, and all
these things. And he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important
ideas, where they happened. And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this
image you know, they're pouring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue sample. And "oh,
eureka," they've got the idea.

8:33 What happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that, in fact, almost all of the important
breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope. They happened at the conference
table at the weekly lab meeting, when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and
findings, oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise in the signal they were
discovering. And something about that environment and I've started calling it the "liquid network," where you
have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other,
bouncing off each other that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation.

9:10 The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter
time frames. So they want to tell the story of the "eureka!" moment. They want to say, "There I was, I was standing
there and I had it all suddenly clear in my head." But in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it
turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods I call this the "slow hunch." We've
heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great
ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting
problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them. They spend all this time working on certain
problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in, but they can't quite solve.

9:59 Darwin is a great example of this. Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the
idea for natural selection as a classic "eureka!" moment. He's in his study, it's October of 1838, and he's reading
Malthus, actually, on population. And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his
head and he says, "Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work." That's in his autobiography. About a decade or
two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from this
period. And Darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little
hunch. And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months
and months before he had his alleged epiphany, reading Malthus in October of 1838. There are passages where you
can read it, and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has this epiphany. And
so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he had the concept, but was unable of fully thinking it
yet. And that is actually how great ideas often happen; they fade into view over long periods of time.

11:09 Now the challenge for all of us is: how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind
of long half-life, right? It's hard to go to your boss and say, "I have an excellent idea for our organization. It will be
useful in 2020. Could you just give me some time to do that?" Now a couple of companies like Google they
have innovation time off, 20 percent time, where, in a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an
organization. But that's a key thing. And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's
hunches; that's what often happens. You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you're in the
right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So, in a sense, we often talk about
the value of protecting intellectual property, you know, building barricades, having secretive R&D labs, patenting
everything that we have, so that those ideas will remain valuable, and people will be incentivized to come up with
more ideas, and the culture will be more innovative. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at
least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them.

12:13 And I'll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot of these values, and it's just wonderful kind of
tale of innovation and how it happens in unlikely ways. It's October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched, and
we're in Laurel Maryland, at the applied physics lab associated with Johns Hopkins University. And it's Monday
morning, and the news has just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet. And of course, this is nerd
heaven, right? There are all these physics geeks who are there thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is incredible. I can't
believe this has happened." And two of them, two 20-something researchers at the APL are there at the cafeteria
table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. And these two guys are named Guier and
Weiffenbach. And they start talking, and one of them says, "Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? There's
this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. We
could probably hear it, if we tune in." And so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues, and everybody's like,
"No, I hadn't thought of doing that. That's an interesting idea."

13:18 And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he's got a little antennae set
up with an amplifier in his office. And so Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbachs office, and they start
kind of noodling around hacking, as we might call it now. And after a couple of hours, they actually start picking
up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track. It was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up
really easily, because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax, basically. So they made it really easy
to find it.

13:46 So these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal, and people start kind of coming into the office and
saying, "Wow, that's pretty cool. Can I hear? Wow, that's great." And before long, they think, "Well jeez, this is
kind of historic. We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this. We should record it." And
so they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder and they start recording these little bleep, bleeps. And they
start writing the kind of date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. And they start thinking,
"Well gosh, you know, we're noticing small little frequency variations here. We could probably calculate the
speed that the satellite is traveling, if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler Effect." And then they played
around with it a little bit more, and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of
specialties. And they said, "Jeez, you know, we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the Doppler
Effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it's farthest
away. That's pretty cool."

14:44 And eventually, they get permission this is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their
job description. They get permission to use the new, you know, UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room
that they'd just gotten at the APL. They run some more of the numbers, and at the end of about three or four
weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this
one little signal, going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do over lunch one morning.

15:11 A couple weeks later their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them into the room and says, "Hey, you guys, I have
to ask you something about that project you were working on. You've figured out an unknown location of a satellite
orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. Could you go the other way? Could you figure out an
unknown location on the ground, if you knew the location of the satellite?" And they thought about it and they
said, "Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here." So they went back, and they thought about
it. And they came back and said, "Actually, it'll be easier." And he said, "Oh, that's great. Because see, I have these
new nuclear submarines that I'm building. And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will
land right on top of Moscow, if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So we're
thinking, we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location
in the middle of the ocean. Could you work on that problem?"

16:08 And that's how GPS was born. 30 years later, Ronald Reagan actually opened it up and made it an open
platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that
would create and innovate on top of this open platform, left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they
wanted with it. And now, I guarantee you certainly half of this room, if not more, has a device sitting in their
pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space. And I bet you one of you, if not more, has
used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last (Laughter) in the
last day or last week, right?

16:52(Applause)

16:55 And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson in the power, the marvellous, kind of unplanned
emergent, unpredictable power of open innovative systems. When you build them right, they will be led to
completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of. I mean, here you have these guys who basically
thought they were just following this hunch, this little passion that had developed, then they thought they were
fighting the Cold War, and then it turns out they're just helping somebody find a soy latte.

17:23 (Laughter)

17:25 That is how innovation happens. Chance favours the connected mind.

17:29Thank you very much.

17:31(Applause)
 7. Simon Sinek:
How great
leaders inspire
action
0:12 How do you explain
when things don't go as
we assume? Or better,
how do you explain when
others are able to achieve
things that seem to defy
all of the
assumptions? For
example: Why is Apple so innovative? Year after year, after year, they're more innovative than all their
competition. And yet, they're just a computer company. They're just like everyone else. They have the same access
to the same talent, the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media. Then why is it that they seem to have
something different? Why it is that Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement? He wasn't the only man
who suffered in pre-civil rights America, and he certainly wasn't the only great orator of the day. Why him? And
why is it that the Wright brothers were able to figure out controlled, powered man flight when there were certainly
other teams who were better qualified, better funded and they didn't achieve powered man flight, and the
Wright brothers beat them to it. There's something else at play here.

1:17 About three and a half years ago, I made a discovery. And this discovery profoundly changed my view on how
I thought the world worked, and it even profoundly changed the way in which I operate in it. As it turns out,
there's a pattern. As it turns out, all the great inspiring leaders and organizations in the world,whether it's Apple
or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all think, act and communicate the exact same way. And it's
the complete opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it, and it's probably the world's simplest idea. I call it
the golden circle.

2:07 Why? How? What? This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where
others aren't. Let me define the terms really quickly. Every single person, every single organization on the
planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value
proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they
do what they do. And by "why" I don't mean "to make a profit." That's a result. It's always a result. By "why," I
mean: What's your purpose? What's your cause? What's your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do
you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care? As a result, the way we think, we act, the way
we communicate is from the outside in, it's obvious. We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. But the
inspired leaders and the inspired organizations regardless of their size, regardless of their industry all think,
act and communicate from the inside out.

3:13 Let me give you an example. I use Apple because they're easy to understand and everybody gets it. If Apple
were like everyone else, a marketing message from them might sound like this: "We make great computers. They're
beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?" "Meh." That's how most of us
communicate. That's how most marketing and sales are done, that's how we communicate interpersonally. We say
what we do, we say how we're different or better and we expect some sort of a behaviour, a purchase, a vote,
something like that. Here's our new law firm: We have the best lawyers with the biggest clients, we always perform
for our clients. Here's our new car: It gets great gas mileage, it has leather seats. Buy our car. But it's uninspiring.

4:00 Here's how Apple actually communicates. "Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We
believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully
designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?" Totally
different, right? You're ready to buy a computer from me. I just reversed the order of the information. What it
proves to us is that people don't buy what you do; people buy why you do it.

4:35 This explains why every single person in this room is perfectly comfortable buying a computer from Apple. But
we're also perfectly comfortable buying an MP3 player from Apple, or a phone from Apple, or a DVR from
Apple. As I said before, Apple's just a computer company. Nothing distinguishes them structurally from any of their
competitors. Their competitors are equally qualified to make all of these products. In fact, they tried. A few years
ago, Gateway came out with flat-screen TVs. They're eminently qualified to make flat-screen TVs. They've been
making flat-screen monitors for years. Nobody bought one. Dell came out with MP3 players and PDAs, and they
make great quality products, and they can make perfectly well-designed products and nobody bought one. In
fact, talking about it now, we can't even imagine buying an MP3 player from Dell. Why would you buy one from
a computer company? But we do it every day. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is
not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe
what you believe.

5:47 Here's the best part: None of what I'm telling you is my opinion. It's all grounded in the tenets of biology. Not
psychology, biology. If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, from the top down, the human brain is
actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the golden circle. Our newest brain, our
Homo sapiens brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the "what" level. The neocortex is responsible for all of our
rational and analytical thought and language. The middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic
brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It's also responsible for all human behaviour, all
decision-making, and it has no capacity for language.

6:35 In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of
complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn't drive behaviour. When we
can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behaviour, and
then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come
from. Sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures, and they say, "I know what all the facts and details
say, but it just doesn't feel right." Why would we use that verb, it doesn't "feel" right? Because the part of the brain
that controls decision-making doesn't control language. The best we can muster up is, "I don't know. It just doesn't
feel right." Or sometimes you say you're leading with your heart or soul. I hate to break it to you, those aren't other
body parts controlling your behaviour. It's all happening here in your limbic brain, the part of the brain that
controls decision-making and not language.

7:29 But if you don't know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how
will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be
a part of what it is that you do. The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to
people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it's to hire people who
believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they'll
work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they'll work for you with blood and sweat and
tears. Nowhere else is there a better example than with the Wright brothers.

8:14 Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley. And back in the early 20th century, the pursuit of
powered man flight was like the dot com of the day. Everybody was trying it. And Samuel Pierpont Langley had,
what we assume, to be the recipe for success. Even now, you ask people, "Why did your product or why did your
company fail?" and people always give you the same permutation of the same three things: under-capitalized, the
wrong people, bad market conditions. It's always the same three things, so let's explore that. Samuel Pierpont
Langley was given 50,000 dollars by the War Department to figure out this flying machine. Money was no
problem. He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-connected; he knew
all the big minds of the day. He hired the best minds money could find and the market conditions were
fantastic. The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and everyone was rooting for Langley. Then
how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley?

9:15 A few hundred miles away in Dayton Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, they had none of what we consider
to be the recipe for success. They had no money; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle
shop; not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college education, not even Orville or Wilbur; and
The New York Times followed them around nowhere.

9:38 The difference was, Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief. They believed that
if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll change the course of the world. Samuel Pierpont Langley was
different. He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous. He was in pursuit of the result. He was in pursuit of
the riches. And lo and behold, look what happened. The people who believed in the Wright brothers'
dream worked with them with blood and sweat and tears. The others just worked for the pay check. They tell
stories of how every time the Wright brothers went out, they would have to take five sets of parts, because that's
how many times they would crash before supper.

10:19 And, eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight, and no one was there to even
experience it. We found out about it a few days later. And further proof that Langley was motivated by the wrong
thing: The day the Wright brothers took flight, he quit. He could have said, "That's an amazing discovery, guys, and
I will improve upon your technology," but he didn't. He wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous, so he
quit.

10:50 People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. If you talk about what you believe, you will attract
those who believe what you believe.

10:58 But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe? Something called the law of diffusion
of innovation, if you don't know the law, you know the terminology. The first 2.5% of our population are our
innovators. The next 13.5% of our population are our early adopters. The next 34% are your early majority, your
late majority and your laggards. The only reason these people buy touch-tone phones is because you can't buy
rotary phones anymore.

11:28(Laughter)
11:30 We all sit at various places at various times on this scale, but what the law of diffusion of innovation tells us is
that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve
this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, and then the system tips. I love asking businesses,
"What's your conversion on new business?" They love to tell you, "It's about 10 percent," proudly. Well, you can
trip over 10% of the customers. We all have about 10% who just "get it." That's how we describe them, right? That's
like that gut feeling, "Oh, they just get it."

12:05 The problem is: How do you find the ones that get it before doing business versus the ones who don't get
it? So it's this here, this little gap that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, "Crossing the Chasm" because,
you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. And these guys, the
innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable making those gut decisions. They're more comfortable
making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is
available. These are the people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out, when
you could have bought one off the shelf the next week. These are the people who spent 40,000 dollars on flat-
screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology was substandard. And, by the way, they didn't
do it because the technology was so great; they did it for themselves. It's because they wanted to be first. People
don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe. In fact, people
will do the things that prove what they believe. The reason that person bought the iPhone in the first six
hours, stood in line for six hours, was because of what they believed about the world, and how they wanted
everybody to see them: They were first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it.

13:27 So let me give you a famous example, a famous failure and a famous success of the law of diffusion of
innovation. First, the famous failure. It's a commercial example. As we said before, the recipe for success is money
and the right people and the right market conditions. You should have success then. Look at TiVo. From the time
TiVo came out about eight or nine years ago to this current day, they are the single highest-quality product on the
market, hands down, there is no dispute. They were extremely well-funded. Market conditions were fantastic. I
mean, we use TiVo as verb. I TiVo stuff on my piece-of-junk Time Warner DVR all the time.

14:05(Laughter)

14:07 But TiVo's a commercial failure. They've never made money. And when they went IPO, their stock was at
about 30 or 40 dollars and then plummeted, and it's never traded above 10. In fact, I don't think it's even traded
above six, except for a couple of little spikes.

14:23 Because you see, when TiVo launched their product, they told us all what they had. They said, "We have a
product that pauses live TV, skips commercials, rewinds live TV and memorizes your viewing habits without you
even asking." And the cynical majority said, "We don't believe you. We don't need it. We don't like it. You're
scaring us."

14:47 What if they had said, "If you're the kind of person who likes to have total control over every aspect of your
life, boy, do we have a product for you. It pauses live TV, skips commercials, memorizes your viewing habits, etc.,
etc." People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it, and what you do simply serves as the proof of what
you believe.
15:11 Now let me give you a successful example of the law of diffusion of innovation. In the summer of
1963,250,000 people showed up on the mall in Washington to hear Dr. King speak. They sent out no
invitations, and there was no website to check the date. How do you do that? Well, Dr. King wasn't the only man
in America who was a great orator. He wasn't the only man in America who suffered in a pre-civil rights
America. In fact, some of his ideas were bad. But he had a gift. He didn't go around telling people what needed to
change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. "I believe, I believe, I believe," he told
people. And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told
people. And some of those people created structures to get the word out to even more people. And lo and behold,
250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak.

16:16 How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. It's what they believed about
America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of
August. It's what they believed, and it wasn't about black versus white: 25% of the audience was white.

16:38 Dr. King believed that there are two types of laws in this world: those that are made by a higher authority
and those that are made by men. And not until all the laws that are made by men are consistent with the laws made
by the higher authority will we live in a just world. It just so happened that the Civil Rights Movement was the
perfect thing to help him bring his cause to life. We followed, not for him, but for ourselves. By the way, he gave
the "I have a dream" speech, not the "I have a plan" speech.

17:07(Laughter)

17:11 Listen to politicians now, with their comprehensive 12-point plans. They're not inspiring anybody.Because
there are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead
inspire us. Whether they're individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead, not because we have to, but
because we want to. We follow those who lead, not for them, but for ourselves. And it's those who start with
"why" that have the ability to inspire those around them or find others who inspire them.

17:52 Thank you very much.

17:53(Applause)