4 Unexpected Innovation Lessons from the Film 'Interstellar'

The new film 'Interstellar' is being hailed for helping to bring theoretical physics into the mainstream. But, it also communicates unexpected lessons about innovation that are vitally important to executives, entrepreneurs, scientists and others.

The Film

This weekend, I took time to watch the new film Interstellar, which was directed by Christopher Nolan and executive produced by the well-regarded theoretical physicistKip Thorne. The film tells the tale of a group of astronauts tasked with finding a new home for humanity after a series of disasters renders the Earth uninhabitable. The explorers travel through a wormhole that allows them to examine a series of planets located in another galaxy, and in the vicinity of a Black Hole (featured in the image above).

I don't want to spoil the film too much for those who haven't seen it. But, I will say that Interstellar is a challenging and though-provoking movie. And, for a science nerd like me, an intellectual feast. While the movie's plot could have been improved, its visual exploration of established and speculative physics such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity and quantum gravity were first-rate and highly engaging.

4 Unexpected Innovation Lessons from Interstellar

I've thought a lot about the science presented in the film, with the help of Kip Thorne's excellent new book, The Science of Interstellar. But, as I turned the movie over in my mind, I came to realize that it unexpectedly communicates a number of essential lessons about what it takes to innovate successfully. I've described four of them below. Warning: I'll reveal a few plot details from the movie, but nothing you wouldn't learn from watching trailers or reading (spoiler-lite) reviews.

Innovation Requires Diversity

The world inhabited by physicists, computer scientists, researchers and technology innovators is very homogenous. It's tough for women, African Americans, Native Americans and people from other non-white male groups to break in and succeed in these arenas. But, it's been proven that diversity is an innovation booster. Bringing diverse (and highly-qualified) teams together to tackle tough problems has many benefits.

Interstellar is refreshing in that it highlights the accomplishments and brain power of a diverse group of engineers, mathematicians and others, as noted by the famed scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. A female physicist does the hard work of solving an essential equation. An African American scientist is an essential member of the crew and provides much-needed insights that play a big role in the film.

If you want to innovate, it's essential seek out and incorporate diverse perspectives.

Innovation Requires Passion

The scientists and engineers in Interstellar are passionate because they know the results of their work will determine the fate of humanity. And, the film displays the fruits of their passion. Craft that can reach space without the aid of rockets, super smart, adaptive computers that can aid humans and save lives and many more innovations.

Passion. If you don't have it, innovation is almost impossible.

Innovation Requires Imagination

In the Interstellar trailer, Matthew McConaughey's character complains that humankind has lost its spark, it's willingness to imagine life beyond the planet's surface. And, in a scene I found shocking and disturbing, it was revealed that the government had published textbooks filled with lies and half truths about major scientific accomplishments. (Unfortunately, this really happens. Ugh.)

Yet, although most people in the film had long given up on imagining a better world and future, a few at a secretive and underfunded NASA never stopped looking out at the stars.

Without imagination (and hope), innovation is much harder to achieve.

Innovation Requires Luck

One can look at Interstellar in two ways:

• The events of the movie were always going to happen (hint: the film's plot is a giant time loop)
• Humanity got really, really lucky

I'm going to go with the second option because without a whole lot of luck (and skill), the wormhole that allows for interstellar travel would have never been discovered, for example.*

Anyone who has successfully built anything will tell you that without a little luck, they would have never made it. We can't control everything. Whether it's fair or not, good fortune plays a role in whether we're able to achieve what we set out to do.

If you're interested in innovation, science, the relationship between humans and technology and more, I highly recommend that you watch (and re-watch) this film. I'm sure you'll learn as much as I did.

The Fault in Our Stars film review

Director: Josh Boone
Cast: Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Nat Wolff, Laura Dern

“The world is not a wish-granting factory” doesn’t have quite the resonance of “What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?”. However, that’s not for the lack of trying. Forty-four years after that opening of Love Story and the ailing woman at the centre of it surged the book and movie to a monster success, here’s another film trying to make the best of a bestseller that was saved from being mawkishly exploitative only because of the spunky, raw and brutally honest notes it managed to strike at regular intervals.

But even John Greene’s book The Fault in Our Stars was transparent in its almost obsessive philosophising, realising that in the well-endowed market of young adult fiction, cancer isn’t enough to get romance love. However, where Greene brought in ethical theories, Venn Diagram, maths, metaphors and a very unlikable author with an equally verbose bent of thought, he also let his teens be teens in a world where few saw beyond her cannula plus oxygen tank and his prosthetic leg, including overindulging in video games.

Despite a readymade audience that comes with such gigantic bestseller, translating all of the above from the romance and the loving to the disease and the dying was never going to be easy. If Boone even gets halfway there, it is on account of Woodley (last seen in Divergent), who truly gets the unlikely Hazel Grace Lancaster that’s at the centre of this story.

Diagnosed with cancer when she was 13 and a death experience later, Hazel is now 17, breathing with the help of a nose cannula, quiet, more tired than cynical about her circumstances, and quite adult in her reactions. That’s clear from even the book she swears by, An Imperial Affliction, about a girl dying from cancer, which ended mid-sentence. The only subject that gets Hazel animated is a reflection on what happens later, after the girl, Anna’s, death.

When an impossibly charming 18-year-old Augustus Waters appears to take a liking to her, at a mutual cancer support group, and equally to the book – which is way out of his normal zombie reading – their fates are but sealed together. Augustus lost his leg to osteosarcoma but now appears on the bend.

To anyone familiar with the book, the film is faithful to a fault from the dialogues to the clothes, the setting and the food, even while skipping over some of the unpleasant details including what would have been an awkward sex scene. It also throws in a limousine for apparently no reason at all.

However, while these dilute the film of some of its essence, the more unpardonable flaw is how insipid all the other characters are, particularly Augustus who exists merely to fulfill Hazel’s dreams unlike the contrast-ridden dreamboat he was in the book.

The film also labours to underline the connection between Hazel’s search for an afterlife for Anna’s story and her concern for her own parents after her death – unlike how it flowed quite naturally in the book. And that’s nothing compared to how it uses Anne Frank’s story to illustrate Hazel’s struggle.

That Woodley even walks away from that last scene — struggling for breath and hauling her oxygen tank up impossible flights of stairs in the Amsterdam house Anne Frank took refuge in, ending it with her first kiss with Augustus and an applause – unharmed, is to her credit. She makes it all seem plausible, pulling along a mostly overwhelmed Elgort with her.

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities” is another favourite line of The Fault in Our Stars – the point being about time being what you make of it. The film may not stand that test of time but, something tells us, the line will. That may be infinite enough.

Apple iPhone 6 Review

Apple iPhone 6 Review Scoring Summary

Style & Handling
User Friendliness
Feature Set
Performance
Battery Power
Overall Score	Pros: Cons: + Beautiful build - Relatively low-res screen + Good size camera - Expensive + Great camera - Lacks innovation

Full Review and Specification for the Apple iPhone 6

The iPhone 6 is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated phone of the year and in just a few short days you’ll be able to buy one, but should you? There’s no doubt that it’s a great handset but for better or worse it’s also a big change over the iPhone 5s and on paper it doesn’t really offer anything that you can’t get elsewhere. So is it worth your hard earned money? Read on to find out.

Screen

After all the leaks and rumours in the run up to its announcement the iPhone 6 is a phone of few surprises and one of the biggest changes- its screen size, has been long expected. It’s gone from 4.0 inches as found on the iPhone 5s to 4.7 inches, which is the same size as the Samsung Galaxy Alpha or the original HTC One for example.

For our money that’s a good thing. 4.0 inches was starting to look distinctly on the small side and it’s about time Apple caught up, but we’d wager that a lot of people liked the compact design of iPhone’s past so for them it may not be such a welcome change.

But 4.7 inches is still far from the phablet territory of the iPhone 6 Plus. It’s a size which means the iPhone 6 is still easily pocketable and can just about be used with one hand, while at the same time it makes it far better for typing, web browsing and watching videos than the iPhone 5S ever could be.

Whether you’re a fan of the screen size or not the actual quality is pretty impressive. At 750 x 1334 it’s higher resolution than the iPhone 5S but with the extra size it still has exactly the same pixel density, so if you were happy with how sharp the iPhone 5S’s screen is you’ll be happy with this too.

That said Apple could have done more, because that’s a pixel density which falls some way short of most Android rivals and the difference in sharpness is noticeable if you put them side by side.

Thankfully while Apple may have slightly dropped the ball on the resolution, its Retina HD display is about more than just packing in the pixels. It also delivers superior contrast and viewing angles to any previous iPhone and even has better colour reproduction and an improved polariser so that it’s easier to see when wearing sunglasses.

All of which leads to by far the best viewing experience we’ve yet seen on an iPhone and means the iPhone 6 has one of the best phone displays around, despite the slightly disappointing resolution.

Design

If there’s one thing Apple always gets right it’s design and the iPhone 6 is one of the company’s best looking products yet. With a metal and glass build it was always going to look premium but Apple hasn’t simply used expensive materials, it’s also thought about the construction.

You can see that in the way the curved edges glide almost seamlessly into the screen and in the fact that despite being bigger than before it’s also slimmer at just 6.9mm thin. It looks and feels great and while you won’t mistake this for an iPhone 5s you also won’t think it’s anything other than an Apple handset.

Being bigger at 138.1 x 67mm it’s naturally harder to use one-handed but Apple has thought of that too, by moving the power button to the side and elongating some buttons as well as working in clever features on the screen to ensure that whatever you’re interacting with can always be aligned with your thumb.

It should be a little more durable than past iPhone’s too, thanks to a supposedly stronger display. This isn’t sapphire but it is supposedly strong enough to survive drops and scratches. It’s a little disappointing that Apple didn’t go one step further and make its phone dust and water resistant like other companies are starting to do though.

Power

It’s never easy to directly compare the power of an iPhone to anything else because on paper its specs just don’t match up. But to make things even harder we don’t even know for sure what the specs of the iPhone 6 are, as Apple has simply said that it has a 64-bit A8 chip, though many sites claim that it’s a 1.4GHz dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM.

Whatever the case though, in use the iPhone 6 feels as slick and smooth as you’d expect. Of course there’s nothing out there to really tax it yet, with all currently available apps and games designed to work smoothly on the iPhone 5s, so it’s hard to say how it will fare down the line but Apple promises that it’s substantially more powerful than last year’s phone.

Gamers can rest easy too, as the Cupertino company has included a new technology called ‘Metal’, which allows the CPU and GPU to work together to deliver console-style games.

Camera

We couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed when we heard that Apple once again put an 8 megapixel camera in its phone, but this isn’t the same 8 megapixel camera as we got in the iPhone 5S.

Focus Pixels allow it to autofocus faster than ever, there’s improved face detection, exposure control, digital image stabilisation to counter motion blur and shaky hands and improved photo apps to let you quickly edit images.

The video camera has seen even more improvements. It can film in 1080p at 60fps or 720p in slow-motion at 240fps. There’s video stabilisation to keep shots steady, continuous autofocus and you can even shoot time-lapse videos.

Meanwhile the FaceTime HD camera can capture up to 81% more light than previously and features a new burst mode which can take 10 photos per second, making it better than ever for both selfies and video calls.

Features

The iPhone 6 is light on new features which don’t directly tie into something else such as the camera or the screen, all of which have been discussed above. The main new feature is Apple Pay which uses NFC to allow you to make contactless payments. It’s got the potential to be a hugely useful feature and with Apple backing it contactless payments might become a lot more common than they are now.

On the other hand Android phones have included NFC and contactless payment solutions for a long time, so while it’s a useful feature it seems more like Apple is playing catch-up here than truly innovating.

The two big features from the iPhone 5S have made a return too, specifically the motion co-processor which tracks your activity without killing your battery and Touch ID, which lets you unlock your phone and approve purchases with your fingerprint.

These features are just as good as ever and in combination with iOS 8 Touch ID is getting even better, as developers can now use it with third-party apps. While the M8 motion co-processor can now measure steps, distance and elevation changes.

Battery life, memory and connectivity

As usual Apple hasn't confirmed the size of the iPhone 6’s battery, so we’ll have to wait for someone to take it apart. But the company has said that it can last for up to 14 hours of talk time, 10 days of standby time, 11 hours of internet use or 11 hours of video.

All of which is pretty good and is down to a combination of the battery itself and a more efficient processor. It still doesn’t sound like quite a match for the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S5 for example though.

The iPhone 6 comes with a choice of 16, 64 or 128GB of storage, with 32GB MIA for some reason, so there’s the potential for a lot, but there’s no microSD card slot and with the 128GB model costing £699 Apple hasn’t made higher storage capacities all that affordable.

For connectivity you get Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth 4.0, 4G and NFC. It’s worth noting that the iPhone 6 also supports 4G LTE-A speeds of up to 150Mbps.

Early verdict

The iPhone 6 is a phone which has almost everything you could want all delivered in a stunning new design and with flagship power. It’s as expensive as always, the screen could be higher resolution and we can’t help but feel that it’s one of Apple’s less innovative offerings but the whole package has been put together so well that it hardly matters.

Apple iPhone 6 Specification

	iPhone 6
Colours	Available in silver, gold, and space gray,
Dimensions	138.1 mm x 67.0 mm x 6.9 mm
Weight	129 grams
Screen	4.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit widescreen Multi‑Touch display with IPS technology
Resolution	1334-by-750-pixel resolution at 326 ppi
Chips	A8 chip with 64-bit architecture
	M8 motion coprocessor
Memory	16GB,64GB and 128GB
iSight Camera	New 8-megapixel iSight camera with 1.5µ pixels
	Autofocus with Focus Pixels
Facetime Camera	1.2-megapixel photos (1280 by 960)
Video recording	1080p HD video recording (30 fps or 60 fps)
Touch ID	Fingerprint identity sensor built into the Home button
Battery	Talk time: Up to 14 hours on 3G
	Standby time: Up to 10 days (250 hours)
	Video playback: Up to 11 hours
Connectivity	NFC, VoLTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, 4G LTE
SIM Card	Nano-SIM