The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

HarnessingTrends

While Early Renaissance poet and scholar Petrarch looked back at the Middle Ages as a period of “darkness and dense gloom”⁷—a time of cultural and economic backwardness—he saw his own epoch as a time of “varied and confusing storms” at the dawn of a “better age.”⁸ Like a few of his contemporaries and many of his successors, Petrarch was intuitively aware of the revolutionary portent in these “storms” of change, and he grasped that they would herald a new era. The man they call the “Father of Humanism”⁹ and the “Father of the Renaissance”¹⁰ was obviously a man who had a deep sense for nascent discontinuities. Instead of adapting himself to the way the medieval world had worked for centuries, he focused his attention on the way the world would be, or should be, in the future. Indeed, he himself ignited the intellectual fuse that set off an explosion of change over the next three hundred years, laying the foundation for the modern age.

No doubt Petrarch’s ability to recognize and catalyze the next “tide of history” was fed by his wide travels across Europe and within his native Italy, at a time when the longest trip most people made in a lifetime was to the local market. Petrarch has been called “the first tourist”¹¹ because his foreign travels were not just for diplomatic business (he served as an ambassador), but often simply for the sake of pleasure and curiosity. ...