The Imitation Game, a film currently nominated for several Oscars later this month, portrays the life of gifted scientist Alan Turing. Turing was the inventor of a machine that successfully cracked the encryption code used by the Nazi army and thereby contributed to the Allied victory. He is also generally recognized as the inventor of the modern computer.
Turing’s scientific contributions are in line with many of history’s great scientists such as Einstein, Newton and Tesla. It’s also easy to recognize many of Turing’s personality traits in a number of modern tech entrepreneurs who succeeded him, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. All were great dreamers, certainly, but they also possessed a tenacious and sometimes intransigent character with regards the realization of their vision.
The film is a parable of radical innovation, a type of innovation that goes beyond incremental advances in search of great opportunities that have the potential to upset the status quo and open up a nexus of possibilities for society.
A 10x solution
In his most recent book Zero to One, investor Peter Thiel describes this type of innovation as “10x”, meaning that it provides a solution at least 10 times better than the solution currently on the market. Thiel points as examples the Google algorithm, which was at least 10x more powerful than the others search engines that preceded it, as well as the Amazon website, which offered at least 10x more books than any bookseller in the world. It is this kind of innovation, he notes, the world goes from 0 to 1, or from an state of impossibility to a market reality.
In the film, Turing attempts to build a huge, expensive and incredibly complex mechanical machine to decrypt enemy messages, rather than following a more manual decryption approach like his colleagues. The young Turing soon finds himself isolated when his colleagues and superiors begin to question the relevance of his explorations, especially in a wartime context.
Many entrepreneurs today are working on 10x projects.
2014 was particularly marked by the more mainstream arrival of some radical innovations, such as lightweight aerial drones that offer a multitude of potential uses, as well as of Bitcoin, a currency that has the potential to replace current cash systems.
American entrepreneur Elon Musk is well-known for his 10x-type futuristic visions. In 2014, his company SpaceX began to develop the Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT), which would allow humans to be transported to Mars by 2020. In 2013, he put forth plans to build the Hyperloop, a type of train that would be able to carry passengers in capsules on air cushions from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes at an average speed of 950km/h (ca. 590 mph), an order of magnitude greater than the other transport options on the market. Not to mention the development and commercialization of the Tesla electric car, which he has been working on since 2003. In the latter case, for example, Musk attempted not to incrementally improve the gas mileage of traditional cars, but rather to completely rethink mobility with electricity.
Since 2013, Google co-founder Sergey Brin has sponsored the ambitious Loon project, which launches high-altitude balloons into the stratosphere to create a wireless Internet network that will be accessible to “the two-thirds of the global population who still do not have access to a fast and cheap internet connection”. Also, in a recent speech in Montreal, Google CFO Patrick Pichette reported on the progress of the autonomous driverless car that the company has been developing since 2010, attracting surprise reactions and spontaneous applause from the audience.
External pressures
For various reasons, however, many of these “10x innovations” never see the light of day.
In the case of Turing, his efforts to create an intelligent machine “with a brain and a memory” were almost terminated by an impatient military commander. The latter tried repeatedly to cancel his initiative, deemed too “risky” and esoteric. Often, short-term urgency forces the use of more traditional methods to solve a problem.
In the modern era, entrepreneurs often face this reality, whether through investors, competitors or even legislators.
On the one hand, the venture capital industry finances the entrepreneur’s ambitious initial vision, but some financiers can grow impatient when results take time to materialize. In some cases, namely in the search for a cure for such a complex disease as cancer, progress can take decades.
On the other hand, competitors already in place in the industry can proactively block the appearance of 10x innovations. In the documentary film Who Killed the Electric Car?, car manufacturers bury electric cars in the desert to delay their appearance on the market. More recently, taxi unions are currently banding together to defend themselves against the “threat” posed by the 10x innovation of Uber.
Beyond this, radical innovation particularly concerns legislators when it involves significant risks to society. This was apparent in past years with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) mega project, the largest particle accelerator in the world and “the largest experimental facility ever built to validate physics theories”. At its launch in 2008, several scientists and legislators became concerned about its potential instability, in particular its risk of creating “micro-black holes”. DNA sequencing, another 10x innovation, brings great benefits to humanity, but also important ethical, legal and privacy issues with regards to the large-scale commercialization of diagnostic tests.
Therefore, 10x innovation can sometimes be scary. In particular, we remember the classic episode of modern cinema’s introduction in 1895 by the Lumière brothers, where spectators fled the room when they started to believe that the train shown in the movie would come out of the screen!
The possibility of failure
The great gamble of 10x innovation for entrepreneurs is to be caught with a score of 0 rather than 1.
If our society is to celebrate scientific success stories such as Turing’s, we must also tolerate failure. For every Alan Turing who cracked a code that won a war and helped to save 14 million lives, there are 99 other inventors who live in the shadows. Many of them will never know glory and some of them even suffer the rejection and apathy of their loved ones and of the public (as did Turing in his day).
Obviously, it takes character and courage to go through these ups and downs, the serial disappointments and the ever-present possibility of total failure.
Yes, Alan Turing was a unique genius who made history. That said, there are thousands of researchers and entrepreneurs of Turing’s caliber around us today who seek to push back the barriers of knowledge. Very few of them will have a film made in their honor. However, the continued improvement of our society and our quality of life depend on their courage.
In Québec, a number of innovators are working on 10x projects. In 2014, entrepreneur Austin Hill (who, like Turing, even worked in cryptography) raised $21 million with BlockStream to develop technology that could improve the revolutionary Bitcoin protocol. Also, through my involvement in the Campus Montréal fundraising campaign, I have recently been exposed to the incredible work being done by many university researchers. For example, Dr. Guy Sauvageau, principal researcher at the Université de Montréal’s IRIC and La Presse 2014 scientific personality of the year, and his team have discovered a molecule capable of multiplying stem cells which allows new cures for blood diseases to be found.
These researchers and entrepreneurs deserve our continued support.
So, I salute and take my hat off to you, inventors, researchers and innovators in 10x mode. You inspire us. On behalf of all of us who enjoy better lives due to your inventions, thank you for your perseverance.
[Note: This article was originally published in Les Affaires.]
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