Ideas make the world go round

150,000 ideas were sent in from people living in 172 countries, speaking 25 different languages. There were eight different categories that ideas: community, energy, environment through to health, education, shelter and opportunity, and not to forget the “everything else” basket. The same people who submitted ideas were then invited to vote on the best ones that should receive the $10 million that Google are going to invest and which should be announced soon.

You can see the full range of ideas here. Some of the finalist ideas were:

• support efforts to increase young Africans' access to quality education by creating "cyber schools";
• create a fund to support social entrepreneurship by providing targeted capital and business training to help young entrepreneurs build viable businesses and sustained community change;
• coordinate a rapid-response tool for natural disasters; introduce an ecological VAT instead of income tax;
• create an advanced health monitoring system;
• encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists; and
• create a transportation system that enables electric cars to run on a rail-type system.

When so many ideas struggle just to see the light of day, it’s wonderful how the project has given people the opportunity to spread their ideas. The project has just finished voting and winners should be announced shortly, when the ideas go to work they will surely help transform the way people live.

Wrong is OK

This week in assembly I was talking about the importance of getting things wrong. John Zogby is a successful pollster in the US. He was completely, utterly wrong about Al Gore in Florida, wrong about John Kerry, wrong about predicting the New Hampshire primary in 2008. Notice I said ‘successful’ pollster, not disgraced pollster. If he wasn’t willing to be wrong, he wouldn’t usually be right. Isaac Newton was totally, fantastically wrong about alchemy, the branch of science he spent most of his career on. He was as wrong as a scientist could be, and yet he is widely regarded as the most successful scientist and mathematician ever. Steve Jobs, who started Apple, was wrong about the Apple 111 computer, wrong about the NEXT computer, wrong about the Newton Operating System. Insanely wrong. But you know the rest...Wrong isn’t usually fatal. In fact, it’s usually how we learn best. In skiing, if you’re not falling down you’re not trying hard enough. In Maths, you should be getting some things wrong because that’s how you improve. So don’t worry about getting things wrong – having a go is more important, as is learning from what you got wrong.