The wind is rising!
We must try to live (Paul Valery )
Gianni Caproni was an Italian aviation pioneer who was obsessed with passenger flights even before the WWI. He mentions this post’s title when Jirô Horikoshi, the designer of WWII Japanese aircraft, dreams of building beautiful airplanes. Jiro is concerned about designing planes in a country as poor as Japan, where the costs for a wing of aircraft could feed a family for a month. Italy is also poor; Caproni says … He adds that a creative person is called to give his/her all in ten years, since after THAT the genius will turn off. For Caproni our own bulk of creativity can be squeezed for a while, but we should not aim higher.
Dreaming of inspiration, but travelling to technology
I doubt that Caproni and Horikoshi met each other. These episodes happen 
during Hayao Miyazaki’s The wind rises movie, when young Horikoshi dreams of his idol Caproni and gets on his dream airplanes, walks on their wings, and talks to the famous Italian designer. Horikoshi was a myopic child who knew very young that he could never pilot one of those so fascinating planes, so he decided to be as close as possible to them by learning how to design them.
After his dreamed travels into Italy, Horikoshi is back to Europe as an adult. He is a Mitsubishi worker travelling to Germany to learn German engineering represented by Junkers aircraft company. In this actual travel, Horikoshi is aware of Japanese inexperienced engineering, estimated at about twenty years, in addition to its negative reputation already in the thirties of copying foreign designs. Horikoshi certainly wonders why it is necessary to copy the hawk instead of being a hawk yourself.
The fuel for the hawk
Horikoshi succeeds and designs the best aircraft at the time. He applies his own knowledge, imagination, generosity with peers and team, motivation 
and many hours of work stolen from an eventful personal life. All of them (except perhaps generosity) are concepts to be highlighted regarding the needs of the two mantras of the last five years in corporate life, innovation and entrepreneurship. However, the film talks about investment, which is a subtle remorse for the main character: the money needed to capture inspiration. Which in this case was removed from a country where poverty was usual, as, on the other, happened in all other countries preparing for war.
The perverse influence of war on technological development is complete; the Spanish professor José Manuel Sánchez Ron explains it well. The bloody wars of the twentieth century, its preparation and its consequences, have greatly boosted science and technology, and great technical advances that we enjoy today are the result of an intensive research whose objectives were to win a war (including the Cold one) and, eventually, kill people; you can also take a less aggressive perspective and say that it also defended and recovered lives, as the impulse to antibiotics shows. But the final two years of WWII, beyond the battles we all know, were also a technological pike in search of the nuke that would destroy the enemy. The misfortune of Horikoshi, who bitterly checked that his own dream meant pilots not returning from his work, is more complete in an ethical context that bias
innovation. Innovation is a human activity that depends on how it is used. Today, a researcher may be able to choose more options. Or not, because he can perfectly see cuts in research budgets, but not in military research …
