By Lindsay Wood, Director, Resilienz Ltd.

Well, it’s probably Thomas Edison’s fault. Or Kate Sanborn’s. Or Albert Einstein’s. Or most likely all of them. It seems they all said something like that – but it doesn’t matter much anyway, does it?

Thomas Edison opened my eyes as to what an “inventor” might be. Like everyone, I knew he was the father figure of the light bulb, but I never knew he ran an inventions business and invented to a plan – and an ambitious plan at that.

Edison set out to lodge for a patent for one small invention every ten days and one big one every six months. Got that? A new, patentable idea every ten days. Incredible! Even more incredible was that he achieved it. When he died, Edison had over 1000 patents to his name.

This also calls the bluff of the notion that creativity only emerges at weird times or in some strange unpredictable flash of a brain explosion. Here was Edison sitting in his office, or laboratory, more or less inventing to order. Maybe the cab of a truck could be like that!

But it also suggests Edison thought perspiration played a big part – that inventing might include hard work. Wouldn’t it be great to sit down and have a coffee with him and pick his brain?

“Did you mean, Mr. Edison,” I’d ask, “that you needed to work hard before inventing? Or were you meaning that once you’d had a flash of brilliance there was a lot of effort needed to turn it into a reality?”

My guess at his answer would have been “Both.”

Certainly I can imagine there was a lot of effort in taking the concept of a light bulb in his head and turning it into the lamp in the picture. But I can also imagine there was a lifetime of keeping his eyes open looking at how things worked, and joining dots in his head, before he got near to having his famous ‘light bulb moment’!

And that’s encouraging for all of us, because we’ve each built up a store of life experiences and observations and chewing the fat with mates, and if just a little bit of Edison’s mindset rubs off on us, we might just be able to come up with even more of our own brainwaves!

At the other end of the spectrum from inventing to order is creative adventuring techno-whizz MacGyver. From my memory of the much-enjoyed MacGyver programmes, he never ‘planned’ to come up with any invention, but was forever landing in situations that demanded them.

If you like, MacGyver was the manifestation of “necessity is the mother of invention”, and forever used his creativity and understanding of science to get himself and his mates out of impossible fixes. In fact, ‘MacGyverisms’ have something in common with our cherished ‘number 8 wire mentality’ – how to get sorted when you don’t have the right gear or right materials.

And somewhere between the extremes of Edison’s planning and MacGyver’s desperate spontaneity sits the Trucking Towards a Better Future competition and its quest to reduce the emissions of the trucking sector.

I can picture MacGyver sitting in a truck with fuel for 580km, and sussing how to drive 643km to make a life-saving delivery – and also saving emissions. And I can picture Thomas Edison coming up with a gadget to keep the cab cool (or maybe just to keep the driver cool) without running the engine – also saving emissions.

And I can picture a 3-axle flatdeck semi winding over the Brynderwyns, and the trucker thinking “If only they had a …”. And suddenly there’s the germ of an idea that might save fuel, or save driving a truck half empty, or free the queue of cars behind … and also save emissions.

Have you got a simple way of making the world better and more efficient, especially from a supply chain and general business perspective? Then enter the 2022 Trucking Toward a Better Future competition. To find out how, read the rules, and check the terms and conditions, click here: https://www.nztrucking.co.nz/trucking-toward-a-better-future-get-your-entries-in-2/