Professor Highlights Strategic Intuition of Apple, Google Thinkers at Defrag

The keynote stage for Defrag awaits the first speaker, Professor William Duggan.

Duggan prepares to discuss the concepts behind his theory of “strategic intuition.”

Where do we get our best ideas? That’s right: the shower. Duggan notes that most great ideas happen in the shower, not in meetings and boardrooms. The idea is that the creative sparks that eventually become household practices or products ignite within individuals during their alone time.

Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, right? Technically, no, Duggan points out. Several inventors before Edison created electric light bulbs. Edison invented the first commercially practical incandescent light. That is a key distinction; Edison had the creative spark to launch a multibillion-dollar industry.

Carl von Clausewitz discussed how Napoleon Bonaparte used great flashes of insight, or, as the French say, “coup d’oeil,” to win many battles against seemingly insurmountable odds.

In 1979, Steve Jobs visited the labs of Xerox PARC and what he saw there was transformative: a GUI concept that he would mold for Apple to the tune of billions of dollars over the next 30 years.

What Jobs saw as the future of computing for Apple was a mouse-enabled GUI for easy consumer use.

Jobs took the GUI concepts from the clunky Xerox PC and shaped them for the early, more desktop-friendly Macintosh machines.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin took Stanford University Professor Rajeev Motwani’s data mining ideas and extended them to search engines.

Google’s Page and Brin leveraged their strategic intuition to create an algorithm that borrows AltaVista’s Web crawler concept to rank pages by popularity. To make money, they adopted Overture’s concept of unobtrusive advertising in lists along the sides of Web pages.