Innovation is a funny business.

Colin Austin 27 March 2025. Published under the Creative Commons System, This may be reproduced without further permission, just acknowledgement of source.

Food and health

Let us look at the story of food and health.

In the past, and that means going back a million years to the first humanoids there was no epidemic of chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart attack and dementia.

These are all caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place and we had evolved a very effective system in which our gut would sense if there were any deficiencies in our diet and send out a hormone complex so we craved the needed food. When satisfied it would send out other hormones saying stop eating you are full.

For convenience, let us call this our gut-brain.

Evolution at work

Our gut-brain is an incredibly sophisticated system that has evolved over millions of years. But evolution is never after perfection just survival, so there are millions of creatures, from cockroaches to crocodiles, which have survived for millennia but are far from perfect – like us.

So although there were isolated cases of chronic disease, there was no epidemic.

Then, about fifty years ago, we changed our food system and the epidemic of chronic disease has been growing steadily ever since.

The great human intelligence

So what did we humans, with our great intelligence and innovation skills, do to reverse this epidemic? If ever there was a $64,000 question, this is it.

We understood the cause of the epidemic. Our gut-brain stopped working in the way it has done for the last million years.

Our gut-brain is in a state of dynamic equilibrium with individual microbes breeding and dying rapidly but with the system staying in equilibrium.

This depends on feeding and replenishing them from the food we eat.

Increased population and food demand

As our population increased, we changed the way we grew our food so instead of eating fresh plants grown in living soil teeming with beneficial microbes, we changed it to growing plants with synthetic fertiliser, which is debatable, but far worse is we changed the food distribution system with extensive delays from harvest to eating.

Net result – poor gut health and poor control over our appetite – we got fat and sick, and the epidemic grew and grew.

Ask a seven-year-old kid for the solution, and they would say we need to invent a box so people can grow plants, full of beneficial microbes, on their windowsill.

This would have been a great solution as our subconscious brain would have continued to control our appetite as it had done for the last million years.

Eat less exercise more

But being highly intelligent and sometimes overly logical creatures, we ignored the advice of the seven-year-old and decided we had the technology to manage our diet.

So we developed sophisticated diets and pills measuring calories and nutrients down to the last microgram.

People thought this would solve all the problems and we had catchy advertising programs like eat less, exercise more which sounded great but were a total failure – we just got fatter and sicker.

Subconscious and conscious intelligence

To understand why these catchy advertising jingles fail, we need to understand the differences between conscious and sub-conscious intelligence.

The fact is that subconscious intelligence eventually wins.

To make the point, let me refer you to one of my favourite characters – the kid on the bike.

A three-year-old will soon learn how to ride a bike and will be outpacing mum or dad. That is because the kid is using her subconscious brain which is highly perfected.

If dad had never seen a bike before and I tried to explain how it stays upright by talking about self-balancing gyroscopic couples he is likely to have no idea what I am talking about and certainly no better idea how to ride a bike than when I started.

It is the same with food. We may know, in our conscious brain, what we should eat but what we want to eat (our subconscious brain) will win in the end.

 

Back to the boxes

OK, our seven year old has the idea of breeding the beneficial microbes, and their food, in a box. She will probably love playing with all the worms and creepy crawlies but will need a bit of adult assistance to get everything working properly.

That is where we are now, but that is just the start. There is this conception that all you need to be an innovator is to have this great idea.

I have been having so-called great ideas all my life. 80% fail because they don’t work.

Another 15% fail because they don’t do anything useful that people want.

To turn the remaining 5% into a useful product or service requires a lot of grunt work.

The marketing myth

There are internet advertising gurus who will try and convince you that they can run an internet campaign and you will be an overnight success – and nothing is further from the truth.

Let us get back to the box which does have the potential to combat the chronic disease epidemic – but there is a long way to go.

Growers

It is fine to have all these wonderful concepts but they are useless without a product. A very old-fashioned idea I know but innovations need products that work and do the job and people have confidence that the product works.

That means setting up what is a new industry which requires on one hand growers who can produce the boxes but also the marketing, legal and commercial infrastructure which requires a spectrum of skills.

We may know how to do that but is still has to be done.

Changing the way we eat

Now comes the difficult bit. Persuading the bulk of the population they should have a box on the balcony growing plants which they cut and chop up to make a garnish for their main meal.

The Internet marketing gurus will tell you how they can run this brilliant marketing campaign on the web with flashy web pages, social media, video clips etc the whole shebang.

The net result will be they will end up richer, you poorer with no advance to the cause.

How innovations happen

I have spent my life in the innovation business, with my fair share of ideas that did not work, ideas that worked but no one wanted, two that worked and now the last one which is by far and away the most important. Broadly food that makes us healthy but more specifically breeding gut microbes that will create the hormones to tell us to stop eating when we have had sufficient.

There are three steps in this process.

Step 1 assembling the skill set

No one person has all the skills to generate the social change that a major innovation involves.

This requires the formation of an inner circle with a range of skills, technical, marketing, communications and understanding of how societies work and change.

This is where we are now, forming this inner circle – are you interested in changing the world for the better – let me know, we need you.

Step 2 the pioneers

There are eight billion people on Earth and we are all different. We are a social animal and being part of a group is incredibly important to us.

But there is a small minority of people who are prepared to go against the conventional wisdom and replace it with a better wisdom – the paradigm shift.

But they won’t do this based on logical augments alone, they have to test it first for themselves.

I know this very well. Fifty years ago I was travelling the world telling people about my innovation in the area of Computer Aided Engineering which challenged the conventional wisdom.

Not a nutter

Most people wrote me off as a nutter, but a few thought I may have a point. In no way were they convinced by my logic but they thought it worth their while to test for themselves.

Fortunately for me, it worked, an essential requirement for any innovation, and then they became convinced. It was not my logical or miserable marketing skills that convinced them – they had to try it and prove to themselves that it worked.

This group then became the disciples, they were often people of influence and when other people saw that people were using this technology they became the message bearers and we entered the third stage.

 

Step 3 Acceptance

When it became clear that there was a group, even if it was a small group, people felt more comfortable about making the change. Again they had to go through the process of trying it for themselves before they made the change but eventually, the change became the norm and the paradigm shift occurred.

Back to the box

This is the process we need to follow to get the box accepted.

We need this small group with the spectrum of skills needed.

Recruit the growers to produce the boxes so people can try it for themselves.

Make contact with the pioneers who will become the first wave of acceptance

Finally, be able to satisfy the demand as this becomes the accepted norm.

Interested

Interested in becoming part of a global change for the better – contact me