Innovation: The Greatest Show on Earth
Perspectives for uniting the best of culture and commerce for the future of American innovation.
I’ve always loved the razzle-dazzle of the circus. The ethos of a circus is rooted in wonder, collaboration, and the pursuit of extraordinary feats that captivate the imagination. A circus thrives on blending a phenomenal variety of talents, where performers, technicians, and visionaries work together to create an awe-inducing experience. At its core, the circus embodies resilience and adaptability as performers continually push their limits, embracing risk and failure to redefine what’s possible. Above all, the circus is about connection—drawing audiences into a world where the impossible starts to feel inevitable.
I recently went down a rabbit hole exploring the Whitney Museum’s restoration of Alexander Calder’s Circus. Calder was an American artist renowned for inventing the mobile, a form of kinetic sculpture, and for his playful, gravity-defying works that blend art, engineering, and imagination.
Calder’s miniature circus blurs the line between art and physics. For the audience, the wire performers seem to move effortlessly through a continuous spectacle. Still, from Calder’s vantage point behind the scenes, each movement deliberately manipulates individual elements.
Similar to how Calder’s Circus invites viewers to imagine possibilities beyond what they see, quantum science makes scientific breakthroughs to help us identify where these new possibilities may exist. For instance, imagine a clown juggling while riding a bike across the circus ring. From the clown’s perspective, each ball goes straight up and down, rising and falling in a predictable pattern relative to their bike. But from your seat in the audience, the balls appear to trace curved arcs influenced by the bike's forward motion.
Both views are correct, yet fundamentally different because they depend on the observer’s frame of reference—yours anchored to the stationary ground and the clown’s moving with the bike.
A shift in perspective can change how you interpret an event, even though the mechanics remain the same. In classical and quantum physics, these shifts in perspective—known as “reference frames”—are essential to understanding complex systems.
The same principle applies to innovation and problem-solving in business. When facing a challenge, how you frame the problem—your “reference frame”—shapes the solutions you can see. Think of a movie director and editor working on the same film. The director envisions the story as a continuous narrative, while the editor breaks it down into individual frames, focusing on pacing, transitions, and emotional impact. Both perspectives are essential yet distinct, and the interplay between their viewpoints brings the story to life. Similarly, in an orchestra, the conductor interprets the music as a whole, guiding the emotional arc of the performance. At the same time, individual composers focus on how each instrument’s part contributes to the overall harmony. These shifts in perspective illustrate how reframing problems and leveraging diverse expertise lead to breakthroughs—whether in art, science, or business.
Culture Jamming
During World War II, the United States faced a critical problem: enemy forces were jamming radio signals that guided torpedoes, rendering them unreliable in battle. The problem seemed intractable until a solution emerged from an unlikely pair whose creative backgrounds gave them a fresh perspective on the challenge.
Hedy Lamarr was best known as a glamorous actress, hailed as one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. Beneath her star-studded public image, however, Lamarr had a restless, brilliant mind. Born in Austria, she had fled an unhappy marriage to an arms dealer who often hosted Nazi officials. Those conversations left her with a unique understanding of wartime technologies, particularly communication systems, and the vulnerabilities they faced.
Lamarr’s collaborator, George Antheil was a composer celebrated for his avant-garde experiments. Known as the “bad boy of music,” he once orchestrated a piece involving synchronized player pianos, a technical feat that demonstrated his knack for mechanical innovation.
Lamarr and Antheil’s partnership might seem improbable, but their shared ability to view problems creatively made them an extraordinary team. When Lamarr learned of the U.S. Navy’s struggles with jamming, her unique perspective as a thinker and an artist led her to envision the problem differently. What if, she wondered, a torpedo’s signal could “jump” across multiple radio frequencies, preventing an enemy from locking onto it?
Antheil contributed additional artistic and technical expertise to make it happen. Drawing inspiration from his experience synchronizing piano rolls, he devised a system allowing a transmitter and receiver to change frequencies in perfect sync. This “frequency-hopping” approach turned communication into a moving target that was impossible to intercept.
Together, they patented their invention in 1942, calling it a “Secret Communication System.” It was a bold application of artistic insight to a life-or-death problem. But the Navy dismissed the idea, thinking it was too complex to implement. Lamarr was pigeonholed as an actress, and Antheil, an unconventional artist, was overlooked in favor of more traditional voices.
Rediscovery and the Path to Wi-Fi
Their invention might have languished in obscurity had it not been rediscovered decades later. After the patent expired in 1959, engineers working on secure military communications in the early 1960s revisited their frequency-hopping concept. Technological advancements—particularly the transistor—had made Lamarr and Antheil’s vision more feasible by then.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the U.S. military adopted the technology to create secure ship-to-ship and ship-to-submarine communication systems. Its resilience against jamming and interception proved invaluable.
In the following decades, frequency-hopping transitioned from military use to civilian applications. By the 1980s and 1990s, the principles behind their invention became a cornerstone of modern wireless communication, forming the backbone of technologies like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.
Lamarr’s role in this technological revolution remained largely unknown until the 1990s when researchers and historians revealed her contributions. In 1997, she and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award for their groundbreaking work. Lamarr’s response to being called the “mother of Wi-Fi” was characteristically direct: “It’s about time.”
Stories Told at the Edge of Time & Culture
Lamar was right again. Innovation is about time. Researchers have documented that creativity is not a one-time event but an evolving process that unfolds over time through stages like problem definition, idea generation, and implementation. It thrives on iterative cycles of feedback and reflection, often within collaborative settings, making it impossible to capture its full potential through single-point assessments. Taking breaks or allowing incubation periods can further enhance creativity by reducing mental blocks and fostering fresh perspectives. These insights highlight the critical role of time in developing innovative solutions, as creativity emerges gradually rather than appearing fully formed.
Transformational innovation always starts as a story told at the edge of culture, where curiosity and imagination challenge the boundaries of what is known. Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil’s frequency-hopping technology began as just such a story—an idea dismissed in its time but later recognized as revolutionary. Time catalyzes these processes, gradually revealing the potential of ideas born on the cultural periphery. What initially seems impractical or out of place eventually becomes the foundation for breakthroughs that transform entire industries.
BUT HERE’S THE RUB: Today, the pace of business innovation moves too quickly to wait decades for creative insights to find their value. The companies most likely to produce the next wave of transformational products and services will be those that harness organizational creativity to build shared mental models for leadership, future-proof talent with creative brain skills, foster co-creative ecosystems across disciplines and technologies, and connect product strategies with cultural foresight through new frames of reference.
Lamarr and Antheil’s invention reminds us that the interplay between culture and commerce is essential to innovation. But their story is more than history—it’s a blueprint for the principles behind Creativity America.
Creativity as a Currency
Their journey highlights how creative insights, born from the merger of cultural context, artistic disciplines, and technological capabilities, can solve complex challenges in unexpected ways. Creativity America champions this same idea. Thanks to contemporary cognitive neuroscience and organizational psychology, a company's creativity, or Creative Brain Capital, is a measurable, actionable resource that can be utilized as a key performance indicator for companies seeking transformational innovation.
The Power of Wonder
Lamarr and Antheil’s breakthrough began with wonder—the epistemic emotion that fuels exploration and discovery. Wonder is a fundamental driving force behind our ability to perceive a familiar problem from a fresh perspective. Creativity America recognizes wonder as the catalyst that ignites innovation, and Lamarr/Antheil’s story is a powerful testament to the immense potential of this catalyst when paired with technical expertise and a meaningful question.
Overcoming Systemic Bias Against Creativity
The dismissal of Lamarr and Antheil’s invention mirrors the barriers still faced by unconventional thinkers today. Generative AI and over-reliance on Large Language Models are unlikely to alleviate this. For instance, LLMs like GPT-3 and GPT-4 act as “psycho-social mirrors,” reflecting societal values, including implicit biases about creativity. While these models have shown proficiency in analytical tasks—such as coding and problem-solving—concerns have emerged that they may perpetuate a bias against creative thinking (Mitchell & Krakauer, 2023). This bias is rooted in educational and cultural systems prioritizing disciplines like math and engineering over abstract, creative fields like the arts. Such a divide reinforces the undervaluation of creative intelligence (Hagendorff, 2023).
Creativity America aims to challenge these biases by uniting the best of culture, commerce, and brain science to develop real-world case studies that prove that innovation ROI can be improved when combining various perspectives in America’s most promising entrepreneurial teams and companies.
Technology Meets Imagination
Lamarr and Antheil’s frequency-hopping technology has reshaped the modern world, powering everything from smartphones to GPS systems. Their story reminds us that creativity—especially when it’s informed by wonder and different ways of thinking—isn’t just about art. It’s a force that can solve some of the most complex problems we face, driving innovation and building a better future. Creativity America seeks to replicate this dynamic in modern entrepreneurial teams, companies, and economies, preparing them for the unique cultural and technological challenges 2025 and beyond.
The Greatest Show on Earth
For over a century, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus have continually reimagined the circus to change with the times. Billed as the “Greatest Show on Earth," their endurance — and others like Cirque du Soleil’s “O” 26+ year run in Las Vegas— is a testament to our ever-green interest in exploring the combinatory power of human imagination, collaborative storytelling, and technical expertise.
Human creativity shares this legacy—an extraordinary performance of interconnected ideas, skills, and perspectives that redefine what’s possible and deliver something far greater than the sum of its parts. In the future of work and AI, thriving businesses will develop the CREATIVE KNOW-HOW to move beyond ideation and toward creative integration.
Steve Jobs, one of the most celebrated innovators of our time, understood this. In a reflective email to himself, he wrote:
"I grow little of the food I eat... I am moved by music I did not create myself... I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object-oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being."
Jobs knew that innovation wasn’t a solo act. It’s a high-wire performance in which breakthroughs depend on integrating the contributions of many across disciplines, cultures, and generations. Building on this interdependence will strengthen the foundation for transformational innovation, uniting the best of culture and commerce for America’s future.
Theo Edmonds, Culture Futurist® & Founder, Creativity America | Bridging Creative Industries and Brain Science with Future of Work & Wondervation®
© 2024 Theo Edmonds | All Rights Reserved. This article contains proprietary intellectual property. Any reproduction, distribution, or adaptation, in whole or in part, is prohibited without explicit written permission from the author. Please attribute content accurately when referenced or shared. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of any affiliated organization or institution.