Today is April 26 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you come up with a really crazy idea – and then figure out how to make it work?”
Jimmy Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama and earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in finance from Auburn University and the University of Alabama, respectively.
While in graduate school, he taught at two universities, but left before completing a PhD to take a job in finance and later worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm.
During his college years, he first learned of the potential of large-scale online collaboration when he became familiar with a type of virtual role playing game called Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs).
In 1996, he founded the web portal Bomis, a male-oriented web portal featuring entertainment and adult content, with two partners.
Although Bomis struggled to make money, it did provide him with the funding he needed to pursue his idea for an online encyclopedia.
In March 2000, along with Larry Sanger, Wales launched a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia called Nupedia. Nupedia was to have expert-written entries on a variety of topics and attract enough viewers that would allow advertising to be placed alongside the entries.
Due to an arduous peer-review process, however, Nupedia failed to achieve any level of growth and published just 24 articles.
To help facilitate its growth and simplify the submission process, Wales and Sanger implemented a new tool called a wiki that programmer Ben Kovitz introduced to them in January 2001.
This new tool would revolutionize the level of collaboration possible for anyone with Internet access around the globe.
When Nupedia’s experts rejected the wiki for fear that mixing amateur content with professionally researched material would compromise the integrity of Nupedia’s information and damage the credibility, Wales and Sanger labeled the new project “Wikipedia” and went live on its own domain five days after its creation.
In a 2006 TED talk Wales said that Wikipedia began with a very radical idea and that was for “all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”
Since Wikipedia allowed anyone with Internet access to edit the site, the sum of all human knowledge could now be recorded on a more detailed level than previously thought possible.
As an innovative global collaboration platform Wikipedia now has over 290 editions with the English Wikipedia having the largest collection of articles reaching 5 million in November 2015. There is a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of over 37 million articles in over 250 different languages.
As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month. The collaborative effort building the sum of all human knowledge is just one example of a successful venture born out of modern day collaboration efforts.
English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead noted “every really new idea looks crazy at first.” Wikipedia was a really crazy idea that Wales made happen.
A pair of Swedish inventors, Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin designed the invisible bicycle helmet known as the Hövding over the course of eight years and can relate to making a crazy idea work like Wales.
The Hövding is also known as the world's first airbag bicycle helmet as it is stored in a decorative pouch worn around a rider’s neck. When a rider crashes, a helium canister inflates the nylon hood within milliseconds.
Hövding started out in 2005 as a master’s thesis by the two founders who were studying Industrial Design at the University of Lund. Haupt and Alstin had the idea of developing a new type of cycle helmet in response to the introduction of a law on mandatory helmet use for children up to the age of 15 in Sweden.
To design their invisible helmet, Haupt and Alstin collaborated with a variety of experts in various fields to create an innovative set of sensors that trigger the helmet to inflate out of its pouch upon a bicycle’s impact.
They added sensors to the Hövding that analyzed movement patterns 200 times a second to know when the rider is in a real crash. MLXLNormal movements made by riders won’t trigger the Hövding.
In 2006, Hövding won the Venture Cup, after which Hövding Sweden AB was founded. Haupt said, “We don’t like, as designers, to have this attitude that it’s people who need to change, instead of the product that needs to change. And that’s why we decided to see if we could improve them.”
By creating a whole new mind, they succeeded in creating a solution to the vanity aspect of wearing bicycle helmets. People want a product that leaves their hair intact.
Their understanding of this vanity aspect helped the two innovators realize they “needed to really think new if we wanted to solve the problem.”
As President Abraham Lincoln said in his second Annual Address to Congress in April 1862 “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”
Haupt and Alstin thought and acted anew. Do you?