创造一种有思想的文化外文翻译.docVIP

外文翻译 Creating a Culture of Ideas Material Source:Technology Review, Feb2003, Vol. 106 Issue 1, p34, 2p, 1 Color Photograph Author:Nicholas Negroponte What sparks the ideas that beget new technologies?The cofounder of MIT’s Media Lab says celebrating wrong answers and listening to youth make a good start. Innovation is inefficient.More often than not, it is undisciplined, contrarian, and iconoclastic; and it nourishes itself with confusion and contradiction.In short, being innovative flies in the face of what almost all parents want for their children, most CEOs want for their companies, and heads of states want for their countries.And innovative people are a pain in the ass. Yet without innovation we are doomed—by boredom and monotony—to decline. So what makes innovation happen,and just where do new ideas come from? The basic answers—providing a good educational system, encouraging different viewpoints, and fostering collaboration may not be surprising.Moreover,the ability to fulfill these criteria has served the United States well. But some things—the nature of higher education among them—will have to change in order to ensure a perpetual source of new ideas. One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional,generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking.Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas.Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking.Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of people’s walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo. A very heterogeneous culture, by contrast,breeds innovation by virtue of its people, who look at everything from different viewpoints. America, the so-called melting pot, is seen by many as having noculture (w