Archimedes, Leonardo Da Vinci and Galileo, now almost make the unanimity as being three geniuses of our past. But during their lifetime, they were misunderstood, maligned, ridiculed and condemned.
They did their job by conviction with creativity and invention against adversity. All three have changed our world with nothing except a conventional human brain with an unconventional imagination. Their five senses were quite common, their memories were quite standard, but they had an unusual desire to understand and learn things.
Being a genius hinges on a few things: a refusal of accepted wisdom, and the desire to offer better. They want to put the present on the way to a better future.
Does this type of character still exist today?
Of course, nowadays it is the same, our geniuses are misunderstood, maligned, ridiculed and condemned.
The Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo—able to change our current negative environment—can easily be identified. They are there, and they just want to work.
So tell me why does this not work?
No need to go very far to analyse the situation, this is a trivial issue of power allocation. Politicians, financials, and regulators are the only ones who arbitrarily decide what priorities are. Their guiding principle is rationality. And consequently they lack ideas and imagination.
To rational minds, imagination does not exist. Or they do not take it seriously. Geniuses do not ask for money or recognition, nor for any advantages. The geniuses of yesterday and today require only one thing: to be left alone to work with their brain. With their brains full of imagination, fed by sensory intelligence, they only need some paper and a pencil and they will change the world again.
It is urgent to offer to our current geniuses the freedom to dream and think. It is urgent for our society to learn to listen. The future will be better if we give voice to the inventors. In our democratic decision-making, we need to have the audacity to focus our attention on sensory intelligence. On gut feelings.
And for a moment that would ensure our survival, no longer be academic or cartesian.
Pierpaolo Pugnale, Pécub, Corporate philosopher, Switzerland
Featured image credit: Pécub
EuroScientist journal 
My god I believed well that the world had fallen to the shift and that it went on the head. I am precisely this kind of inventor that everyone takes for one illuminated. the Swiss person in charge of the cleansing of the waste waters (which understands nothing out of waste waters there biological) made me this answer when I presented my process to him: you will return to see me when 15 European countries will have granted credit to your process. then you will deposit a comprehensive directory with an examination over 10 years carried out by the French CEMAGREF stipulating well that it will have followed and studied your process lasting about ten year and we will wait 15 more years before if required granting the authorization to you to install it on the Confederation.
another told me: you will make a bacteriological war one should lock up you.
it is not so much the “wisdom” of their reflection which roughcasts me the hairs but especially that they did not even read documentation that I provided them. (detailed documentation of 50 pages with an answer the following day)
I am reassured that there exist still people well thinking on our planet.
the innovation is always found it where it less is expected because it appears all alone with the spirit attentive and opened at one unforeseeable time. I would even say that the every many day is those which come very close to “discovery” but lets it pass because they did not know to feel it to palpate it to see it guessing it to extract it from the context or it appeared. I speak to you with full knowledge of the facts. I felt one which deleted also quickly my thought. but my brain had recorded it to him. not being more in the action, well to the calm, my brain went to search it and obliged me with the reflection. I did not know anything in cleansing and even less in micro organization and biology. it is my brain which went sought words of the gestures of the actions and which gave all that places from there so that I can say: it is that. but even after having said that it was that, as I knew nothing there it obliged me to go to seek information to answer “interrogations”. I wish with everyone to be one day under this condition because it is an extraordinary adventure.
Today they are well administrative the interventionists who want “to innovate”. Like you say, an innovation must be free, and it is the first obstacle. the second blocks it is that these administrative regulated the civil society and by the same one, they closed the door to the innovation which they very extremely call while howling to come to their helps.
an inventor nowadays must learn before very protecting himself from these administrative. In the content nothing changed today as an inventor we are confronted with two things either it is a real invention like mine and as there does not exist any scientific correspondence on the market one does not believe you.
either you call into question a theory, a thesis, an application and there it is quite simply inadmissible unimaginable.
I had the honor to meet the high commissioner of the EU. he recognized that the EU under had estimated the capacities of the civil society, that the EU had had twists to oust it of the EU decision-maker and that henceforth the civil society had returned of RIGHT in the European executive.
I have owes to him: Mister you speak like everyone about innovation, innovation OK but you know Mister that the innovation is prohibited in Europe and practically in the whole world.
One deals with incredulous leaders who either understand and admit or do not understand and reject. All that because they set up regulations of the standards of the laws which are based on exceeded and completed assets. they do not go from there count.
Foreseeing innovation is a great and often underestimated challenge. Indeed, innovation can be found at the most surprising places and take unexpected forms. This is quite well exemplified by the discovery of penicillin. Nobody looked into fungi of find antibiotics before Alexander Fleming made the fortuitous discovery of penicillin.
This of course should be kept in mind in innovation funding and is at the basis of the fundamental question on how to set priorities and choose the themes that will be supported. I would to stress the importance of avoiding locking ourselves in paradigms, thus neglecting the research that change the way we look at something, the “paradigm-shifting research”, as described by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Indeed, this research has great importance for innovation as it can open doors whose existence could not be conceived before.
I personally hope that there will be an emphasis on “bold” ideas in Horizon 2020 as this could benefit an innovative Europe. I have seen too many funding programs in biology that tend to snub proposals that involve a part of risk even if it is realistic. Of course, a lot of less risky research is also needed, but as biology of ecosystems can teach us, diversity is often a plus to strive in changing environments.