Book Looks at Media Lab's "Digital Magicians"

Still in the market for summer reads? Consider checking out former Media Lab director Frank Moss's recent book, "The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Our Lives."

In the excerpt below, Moss discusses the difficulty of turning an idea in a lab into a market-changing product.

In the dead of night about a week before Christmas 2009, members of the Smart Cities group quietly pushed a car out of their second-floor workshop of the brand-new Media Lab building, into the freight elevator, and down to the lower-level atrium for its first test drive. This was the first demo of the working prototype of the CityCar, the project that had consumed the past three years of their lives. PhD student Will Lark had the first crack at the remote control, and when he first commanded the car to move forward, it lurched so quickly that it would have crashed through one of those glass walls had one of the students not grabbed and braked it from behind. The second attempt went more smoothly, though, and soon Lark and fellow PhD student Raul-David "Retro" Poblano were passing the remote back and forth as they took turns moving the car through its paces--forward, backward, and sideways. Meanwhile undergraduates Tom Brown, Charles Guan, and Nicholas Pennycooke were helping PhD student Ryan Chin make repairs on the fly. Screws needed to be tightened; a few wires needed to be cut. The power level on the wheels needed to be adjusted so that they would have enough torque to move easily along the smooth marble floors. When a wheel started to fall apart, Chin hastily patched it together. He didn't have a choice; there were no spares.

The Smart Cities group will keep refining and test driving as many versions as it takes to get the design just right. As Chin puts it, "If a cell phone dies, no one is going to die. But there is a degree of complexity in building a car that doesn't exist with most other lab projects. There are many moving parts that have to go together. We have to make sure that the controls work, and we have to make sure that the safety systems work. Think about it. The car as we know it is the product of a hundred years of evolution, and it's a very difficult task to reinvent it with just a small team of MIT students, no matter how smart they are."

People often use the terms invention and innovation interchangeably, but they are actually quite different. Invention is the art of coming up with and creating revolutionary new ideas and technologies, whereas innovation involves figuring out how to actually execute and implement them. In other words, the wheel robot and the CityCar are brilliant inventions, but true innovation would mean taking those inventions out of the lab, and putting them to use in the real world. Moreover, while inventions can be born from the imagination and hand of a single individual, and many are, true innovation on the scale needed to solve today's complex, interconnected, and global problems requires a larger collaborative effort among people and organizations alike. In his book Reinventing the Automobile, Professor William Mitchell referred to these kinds of problems as "wicked problems." According to Mitchell, these are problems that "don't seem to have a clear answer, that will require consensus building, with solutions that may be in conflict with one or two key constituent groups, and will require the cooperation of large slow moving organizations."