Abstract
Case studies of well documented, great innovations were performed with focus on their underlying, basic ideas. In retrospect, these ideas may seem obvious, but at the time of conception, they were considered utopian, here defined as imaginative, unexpected, counterintuitive, or unrealistic by most people, including experts. The build-up of the utopian ideas in each of the case studies is shortly described along with a critical analysis about their roles, importance, and risk exposure in the individual cases. The ideas were ranked according to defined criteria of importance, risk, and utopian potential, and this ranking was compared to the ranking of the overall impact of the analyzed innovations. The results suggest that the utopian idea potential correlates with the overall impact. The World Wide Web and the smartphones are prominent examples of great innovations driven by utopian ideas. The significance of these findings is discussed in view of current innovation models and in recognition of the heuristic character of the reported investigation.
Highlights
This paper is based on case studies of great innovations, and attempts at observing common patterns between them as well as significant peculiarities
The second and third subsections deal with the utopian potential of the ideas and how it relates to the total innovation impact
The results of analysis will be summarized concerning the roles of the basic ideas
Summary
This paper is based on case studies of great innovations, and attempts at observing common patterns between them as well as significant peculiarities. The focus is motivated by the observation that great innovations are associated with basic ideas highlighting the progress compared to the state of the art. These ideas may look obvious in retrospect, but when conceived by the innovators, they were more relevantly described as utopian Ideas and problems are mutually complimentary, and so are, in a sense, truths and values, and discoveries and inventions The coverage of these aspects was believed to be important in the selection of cases to visualize the many-faceted conditions under which great innovations evolve. The resulting rules of thumb may shed some light on hidden relationships and may even become useful, even if they do not completely meet the criteria of a scientific theory
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