You don’t always need to imitate to innovate

One thought on “You don’t always need to imitate to innovate”

1. The header of this article is a contradiction in itself, I think. Innovation is the exact opposite of imitation. While certainly true for some inventions, I would also strongly argue against the claim that “a lot of our innovations have been inspired from the actions of animals”.
   In my view the true value of this article lies elsewhere, namely in the lesson that hard challenges from one domain can be projected into a different problem space where they become soluble. The act of innovation lies in finding the right projection that preserves the relevant features of the initial problem while disregarding others. In this present case, the projection that did the trick was the conversion of audio signals into spectrograms to which then image-based similarity measures could be applied. In speech science, this approach is far from novel … but it is still refreshing to see how this idea permitted to reduced the complexity of a genuinely hard problem down to a level that could be approached as an engineering challenge. Well done!

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